She was wearing the ochre buckskin dress. The fringe clean now, the ice long gone, the turquoise beads bright in the morning light, the silver at her collar, her braids tight for travel, and the strand at her temple for once. For this particular moment, tucked back, she looked at him. He looked at her. Two months, she said, "Maybe three, depending on the roads coming back.
I'll fix the north fence while you're gone, " he said. "And the barn roof. " There's a section that's been Gideon. Yes, I'm not leaving because of the barn roof. I know.
I'm leaving because my people need me to see that they're alive with my own eyes. A pause. And I'm coming back because this is a place that is becoming something, and I want to see what it becomes. He nodded. She held out her hand.
He looked at it. He took it briefly. Both of his around hers. The warmth of it in the cold morning cabin. She looked at their hands, then at him.
Don't split all the wood in Wyoming. I while on, she said, and there it was, not almost a smile, actual, real, the smile she'd been keeping somewhere underneath everything for 2 months of Wyoming winter, and he had not seen it until this exact second. He held it in his chest like a coal, like something that would keep throwing heat long after the initial spark had done what sparks do. "I'll try, " he said. She let go, walked to the door and out.
He stood in the cabin after they'd gone. Sounds fading. Hoof beats on the thawed road. The silence that comes after departure. Different from the silence before departure.
Different from all other silence. He looked at the room, the tool shelf, the chairs, the map on the wall, the quilt at the foot of the bed, loosely folded, available, the copper kettle, the sewing basket. all of Norah's things in their places. But the space around them had changed. The space had people in it.
The shapes of people who had been here. The reshaping a place undergoes when it has been genuinely occupied, genuinely lived in rather than preserved. He put on his coat, went out to the fence line. The Wyoming March air was cold, but different. Cold in the direction of warm.
Cold that had turned a corner without announcing it. He walked the north pasture. His boots left Prince in snow beginning to granulate at the surface. The sign of melt starting from underneath from the core of things rather than the surface. He stopped at the east fence post, looked at the ground.
No visible sign of what Amma had planted. Too early. Too much snow still patched at the base of the post, but he knew it was there. He crouched, pressed his hand against the ground the way Amma had shown him at the creek, feeling for what was underneath rather than what was visible, he felt it barely, the faint give of ground thawing from within, something below the frozen surface. Not nothing the opposite of nothing, he stood, looked south, the direction they'd gone, then at the cabin.