" She said, "And then you remember again. " The light went on doing what it did. I looked at it. It was what it was, just light grass, the far ridge going dark. Not less beautiful for having been hers.
Maybe more. I don't know. I'm not able to explain it very well, but I looked at it. Summer became fall the way it does out here. Suddenly, and without apology, the nights turned sharp, and the days went shorter, and there was a quality to the air, a clarity like everything had been washed.
Say a new things about the land I didn't know, had never known, and living in this country as long as I had, the water quality of the North Spring, which plants the deer would come for and which they'd avoid, the meaning of certain bird behavior that I'd been watching for years and never understood. She taught me things the way she'd first shown me the stove pipe, once plainly, and then left me to do it myself. I think she was surprised sometimes that I learned, not because she thought poorly of me, but because she'd gotten used to people not listening. I'd gotten used to people not seeing me at all, so we were even. One afternoon in October, she came back from a two-day ride.
She still did that, took the gray, and went out and came back. I had long since stopped reading anything particular into her leaving or her returning, except that she always did come back, and she came in and put a folded piece of cloth on the table. I looked at it, she sat down. "Go ahead, " she said. I unfolded it.
It was a shirt worked in the Apache way, collarless with a pattern along the chest and sleeves. "It fit me when I put it on. " She had measured by eye. Apparently, it felt right in a way that things you don't expect sometimes feel right, like the space had been prepared for it. I said, "This is fine work.
" She said, "I had time. " I kept wearing it. I wear it still. The elbows have been patched twice now. There came a night in November that I want to tell right.
Not because it was dramatic. It wasn't. It was the opposite of dramatic. We'd eaten. We'd cleaned up.
The fire was good. I was at the table with some papers, the ranch accounts, nothing urgent, and she was on the other side of it doing some handwork. Something with sinew and bone that I didn't know the purpose of and didn't ask. The lamp put out a warm circle, and outside the wind was going, but not badly. She looked up from her work and looked at me for a moment.
I said, "What? " She said nothing. I just wanted to look. I said, "All right. " She looked for a moment more and went back to her work.