The north fence needed repair. Two outbuildings needed attention to their roofs. Three cattle that had been separated from the herd during the chaos were located alive but thin in a gully 2 mi east and needed bringing in. The men were working at the edge of their capacity, which Rosalie managed by adjusting the midday meal to compensate hotter, denser, sent out with the extra portions she'd held in reserve exactly for this kind of sustained demand. Decker appeared at the kitchen door on Thursday morning.
She had the beans on already. Cumin, she said without turning around, and she heard him exhale something that was almost a laugh. He came in and stood at the counter and watched her add the spice and then the chili and the smell came up from from the pot and he was quiet in a particular way. Like that? She asked.
Yeah, he said. Like that? She gave him a bowl to taste. He tasted it. He set the bowl down and he looked at the middle distance for a moment in the way people look when a taste has taken them somewhere they didn't expect to go.
Good, she asked. My mother made these on Saturdays, he said. When I was about Jaime's age. She didn't say anything. She stirred the pot.
She died when I was 12. He said it's been a long time since I tasted something like that. Cumin and chili and patience, she said. Same beans anyone has. Just the spice and the time.
He nodded. He picked up the bowl and took it to the bench and ate it in silence, and she let him, because some things don't need narrating. The evening that changed things, not the big change, not yet. But another of the incremental ones that were accumulating in ways she was trying not to track, was a Saturday in the last week of January, about 5 weeks after she'd arrived. The wind had come back, but not the full storm, just the ordinary Wyoming winter wind that meant business without being a catastrophe.
The boys were at the kitchen table. EMTT was doing you doing doing sums from a book she had found his school primer on the second shelf of the study and started giving him problems from it because otherwise he was going to disappear all day doing things she couldn't account. For in his arithmetic was frankly inconsistent. Jaime was drawing something on the back of an old flower sack with a charcoal stick she'd given him from the stove. She was making the week's bread, her hands in the dough, working it the way her mother had taught her heel of the hand.
Fold, quarter turn, repeat until the dough talked back. Gideon came in from the study with a piece of paper and sat at the end of the table and started going over something with the look of a man doing arithmetic that was not going as well as EMTTs. The kitchen held the four of them and the smell of the bread and the sound of the wind and the fire and the charcoal on the flower sack. and it was so ordinary that it frightened her. She had not had ordinary in so long she had forgotten what it felt like from the inside. She worked the dough rosily, Jaime said.
H what does a bakery look like? She glanced at him. He was looking at her drawing on the flower sack she could see. Now it wasn't an abstract thing. It was a building rough and crooked the way 8-year-olds draw buildings, but a building with a big window in the front and something that might have been a sign.
Different sizes, she said. Some are just a room with an oven. Some are some are bigger with counters for display and tables for people to sit at. Could you have one? He asked.
Here in Red Hollow, Jaime Emmett said in the tone of an older sibling who is embarrassed by a question and doesn't want to show why. It's a reasonable question, she said. She looked at the drawing again. The building would need to be stone or good, thick timber. Ovens take heat, and heat means fire risk.
You'd need a chimney that draws properly. She turned the dough. And enough traffic on the road to make it worth the supply cost. There's traffic, Jaime said. The supply road goes to Laramie and Casper both.
Where did you learn that? Mateo told me. He said, "Blackthorns on the old freight road, and in springs and summer there's a wagon a day sometimes. " She looked at the dough in her hands. She was not going to think about this. She thought about it immediately.
Across the table she was aware of Gideon very still over his paper, and she did not look at him, and he did not say anything, and neither of them acknowledged the conversation that had just happened in the room. Later, when she was shaping the loaves, she heard him fold the paper and push his chair back. He stood at the kitchen entry for a moment. The stone building, he said. She looked up.
Beside the ranch road, the one we use for storage. He looked at the wall, not her. It's empty mostly. Good chimney. We put it up 5 years ago, thinking we'd expand the storage, but we never needed it that size.
She waited. It would take work, he said. But the bones are there. She stared at him. He looked at his hands.
If that were something worth considering, I'm not saying it is. I'm saying the building exists. He put his hat on. Good night. He went out.
Jaime looked at her. EMTT looked at his arithmetic. Neither of them said anything, which was how she knew. They had both been paying complete attention to everything. She shaped the last loaf and put it in the pan and covered it to rise overnight.