"If he needs help, he knows where to come." Evan thought about this. "What if his pride won't let him?" "Then that's the choice he made," Caleb said. "I can't make it for him."
Evan was quiet for a moment. The distant sound of one of the Kellerman boys working the barn, a rhythmic creak of the water pump, carried across the yard. From inside the house came the sound of voices, several of them overlapping in the particular way of people who are crowded together and have gotten past the first awkwardness of it. My dad would have gone to him anyway, Evan said. Caleb looked at him.
Just to say so, Evan said. He was like that. He paused. I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying.
Caleb looked back at the sky. He thought about what the boy had said. He thought about what it meant to say a thing to someone like Hutchins, what it cost and what it might return and whether the arithmetic of it was worth doing. Get your coat, he said. We'll go tomorrow morning.
Evan looked at him. Yeah? If you're going to say something like that, Caleb said, say it like you mean it. The boy went inside to get his coat and Caleb stayed on the porch a little longer, looking at the clear cold sky over the valley that had just survived something that had come very close to breaking it and thinking about the difference between the kind of man who waits for people to come to him and the kind of man who goes. He was not entirely sure standing there which kind of man he was becoming, but he was beginning to think the question was worth asking.
They went to Hutchins the next morning, Caleb and Evan, on horseback because the road was passable now if you stayed to the center where the wind had scoured the snow down to something a horse could manage. The Hutchins spread was the largest in the valley or had been before the storm. What Caleb saw when they rode through the gate was not what the largest spread in the valley was supposed to look like. The main barn had lost a section of its east wall, the timber split under the snow load and collapsed inward. Two of the near paddocks were empty in a way that said the animals that had been in them were gone, not moved.
The yard had the look of a place where work had stopped and not yet restarted. The particular frozen stillness of a property that had taken a blow and hadn't figured out how to respond. Hutchins was at the wood pile when they rode up. He was splitting wood with the mechanical quality of a man who is doing a physical thing because standing still would be worse, and he didn't stop when he heard the horses. He drove the maul down twice more before he looked up.
He looked older, not in any dramatic way, just in the way that a bad week and a bad storm and a bad accounting of losses could add years to a face in the time it took the snow to fall. He looked at Caleb. He looked at Evan. He didn't say anything. Caleb got down off his horse.
"Dale," he said. "Caleb." Hutchins set the maul against the wood pile. He looked at the boy and something moved briefly in his face. "That the Ellison boy?"