The fire, the wind. How do you know the difference? He said, Amma put down her pencil, looked at him. Hope makes you want to build something, she said. Hunger just wants to be fed.
a pause. "You want to build something? I've been watching you. You've been building things since the first day we were here. " He looked at the cabin, at the reorganized tool shelf, at Norah's quilt on the chair being used.
At the map Amma had drawn, pinned to the wall now, the spring location marked. At the two chairs at the table, both in use. "What does she want to build? " he said. Amma picked up her pencil, looked at her drawing.
Ask her, " she said. "She might actually answer. " "She's been practicing, " he asked her. The next morning, she was at the east window where she always started the day. He came to stand beside her, the way he did sometimes.
Not every morning, but sometimes the small ritual they had built without naming it. I want to ask you something, he said. Yes. When the roads clear, he said, "When you can reach your people, what do you want to do? " Desa looked at the ridge.
At the pale February sky, at the thin line of smoke from the cabin's own chimney, visible from this angle, if you knew where to look. I want to go south, she said, "And see that our people are alive with my own eyes. A pause, and I want to come back. " He stood with at the cold light of the window, her profile, the two long braids and the one strand at her temple that she had never fixed. Both, she said.
Not one or the other, she looked at him. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yes, he said. Both, she said again like she was deciding it by saying it. I go, I come back and we whatever this is, we find out what it is.
Without a crisis underneath it, he looked out the window at the fence line. he still needed to repair. At the north 40, apprentice still had claims on at all the ordinary unresolved difficulty of 43 acres of Wyoming ground. I should tell you, he said, that I'm not an easy person. I've been alone for 7 years, and I have Gideon.
Yes, I have lived 26 years with the United States government as a neighbor, she said. You are not going to be the most difficult thing in my life. He almost laughed. Almost. Which was closer than he'd been in seven years.
All right, he said. All right, she said. And that was that the most low-key, undramatic, absolutely Wyoming conclusion to an enormously significant conversation that had ever occurred in this territory. He went to make coffee. She stayed at the window another moment.