Belle's nine. Marjory's six. Same age as me, Toby said. More or less. He thought about that.
Is that old for a horse? No, they can live to 30 if they're kept well. 30, Toby repeated, working on the scale of this. Gideon straightened up, rolled his shoulder against a stiffness in it. The cold always got into the old muscle tears by mid-inter.
He'd stopped being bothered by it the way you stop being bothered by any recurring unpleasant thing after enough years. You know anything about horses? No. Toby considered,"we had a mule before."He said before, the same way Gideon had said that's how it worked out as a door that could be opened but wasn't being opened right now. Gideon understood that completely.
Mules different from a horse, he said. And moved on to the next task. And Toby followed. Mara, for her part, was not resting. She was resting in the sense that she was not walking on the ankle, which was about as far as her compliance with the concept extended.
She had gotten herself to the table by the second hour, dragging the stool under her foot, and had borrowed Gideon's mending basket she didn't ask. She found it, which felt more honest than asking somehow. Like she was trying to earn the space she was taking up and she was working through a pile of socks with holes in them that was approximately 3 months old from the look of it. It was something to do with her hands. When her hands were still, her mind went places she couldn't afford.
She had the deed on the table in front of her, unfolded, smooth, flat. She had read it so many times in the past 4 months that she'd nearly memorized it. But she read it again anyway, tracking every detail with the attention of someone checking their inventory before a long journey. The surveyor's mark, the witness signatures, Hal Durning and a woman named Effie Coloulston, who had been present when Thomas first filed. The date, the property description in the territorial recorder's precise cramped handwriting.
Everything was there. Everything that proved Ror's version was fabricated. She reffold it, rewrapped the oil cloth, set it beside her. Gideon came in for midday and stopped when he saw the sock in her hand and the mending basket at her elbow. He looked at it for a second with an expression she couldn't entirely read.
You didn't have to do that, he said. I know. She kept the needle moving. It needed doing. He went to the stove.