Jesse, who had been practically vibrating beside them, said, "Grandma looked like she was going to throw something at him." "Jesse," Ruth called from the doorway. "I'm just saying what I saw," Jesse said. Clara almost laughed.
She caught it and turned it into a breath instead, but Cole saw it. She could tell by the way his eyes changed just slightly, going from serious to something that was thinking about becoming a smile. They went back to checking the water trough. Eli came in at midday, and Clara told him about Briggs's visit plainly and without editorializing.
She told him what Briggs said, what she said, and what the visit was actually about. She watched Eli's face while she talked. His expression didn't change much, but something in his jaw tightened on the part about how it looked. When she finished, he said, "You should have called me."
"You were in the north pasture. The cattle needed you more than I needed rescuing from Harold Briggs." Eli looked at her steadily. "You're on my property."
"What happens here is my responsibility." "What happens to me is my responsibility," Clara said. "I handled it." They looked at each other across the kitchen table with the particular tension of two people who had the same argument from opposite sides of the same principle.
Ruth put a bowl of soup in front of Eli. "She handled it better than you would have," Ruth said. "You would have told Harold to mind his own business in a way that would have given him two more things to talk about. She told him the same thing with less ammunition."
She sat down. "Eat your soup." Eli ate his soup. After a moment, he said without looking up, "Did Cole go outside this morning?"
"He helped with the water trough," Clara said. Eli was quiet. Cole had not voluntarily gone outside since November. Clara didn't know that yet, but Ruth did.
Ruth looked at her son with the expression of a woman filing information away. The soup was almost finished when the real crisis of the day arrived. It arrived not from outside, but from inside the house, from the back bedroom where Eli had been sleeping alone for two years. It came in the form of a sound Clara recognized immediately.
A child coughing. Not Jesse's bright, performative cough that he occasionally deployed for attention. Something different. The wet, labored cough that starts in the chest and doesn't stop.
Eli was up before the sound finished. Clara was right behind him. Cole was in his bed, which was unusual because Cole had been up and dressed two hours ago. He was lying on his side under both blankets, with his eyes half open and his face carrying that particular color children get when something has been wrong for a while and they haven't told anyone.
"Hey." Eli sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on Cole's forehead. His expression went tight. "How long have you been feeling bad?"
Cole's voice came out smaller than usual. "Since this morning." "Why didn't you say something?" Cole didn't answer. Clara stepped closer, and Eli looked at her.