She turned, surprised for a moment. Then she explained that it meant something close to this. The work was finished and the day had been honored. Klay tried to repeat it. He got it wrong.
Nia corrected one vowel. Clay tried again. After that, on most nights, when the fire had burned low, he asked her for another word or a short phrase, and she taught him. He wrote them down on a small piece of stiff paper he kept tucked inside his shirt pocket, and practiced them while he worked. He learned the word for water, then horse, then thank you.
After that came stranger home and eventually a word for that particular kind of silence that settles between two people when trust has begun to grow. Some words Nia told him did not have an exact English translation. When that happened she would think for a moment and explain the feeling behind the word instead of giving him a dry definition. Clay listened and remembered. In return, he began to talk, too.
Not much, but more than he usually did. He told her about Ohio, where he had come from, about the farm the Ror family had worked before the war, and about Dean Ror, his younger brother, who had died at Cold Harbor. Klay had never told anyone in the territory about that. He had not meant to tell Nia either. The words simply came out one afternoon while he drove fence posts into the ground, and she worked the wire about 20 ft away.
Once they were spoken, he let them remain there between them. Nia did not rush to fill the silence with pity. After a while, she told him that her father had also lost a son. Tavi had died of fever three winters earlier, and Toma had carried that grief like a stone buried deep in his chest until the day he died. "Pain that big doesn't go away," Klay said.
"No," Nia answered. "But it changes shape." Klay drove the next fence post into the earth and said nothing more. He did not need to. One afternoon near the end of November, a storm came down suddenly from the Sacramento mountains.
It was not a blizzard. It was hard sleet, the kind that arrived without warning and soaked a man through in less than an hour. Clay Ror was on the eastern side of the property when it caught him. He had been redirecting water through the irrigation ditch, and by the time he finally made it back to the yard, his clothes were soaked clear through, and the cold had settled deep behind his shoulders, the kind of cold that entered a man's bones and refused to leave. Nia was standing on the porch.
She had already brought the saddles undercover. She had stretched canvas over the feed stores. She had fed the dogs. One look at clay was enough. She held out a folded wool blanket that had been warming beside the fire.
Klay stood there in the sleet with the blanket in his hands. "Get inside," she said. He did. Klay sat beside the fire for a long while, letting the heat slowly work its way back into him. He listened to the sleet strike the roof and realized Nia had already taken care of three things he would have needed to handle within the next 20 minutes.