He looked at her. She looked at her coffee. The third morning he woke to find the wound was clean and the fever was gone and Tsula was adding something to the far wall of the cabin. A new section of the drawing. Mountains that turned into people that turned back into mountains.
An image he'd have to look at longer to understand. He got up, looked out the window. The burned section of the barn stood in the morning light looking sorry for itself. Rex was in the paddock fully recovered from his night of terror being magnificent and difficult about the water trough. Nayeli was standing at the west tree line reading the snow.
She came back in 10 minutes later and sat down across from him and said, the prints are gone. No fresh ones. They moved further west. "How far?" "Can't say, but not close."
He nodded. "That won't last," he said. "No," she agreed. "It won't." She put both hands around her coffee mug, and he looked at her hands wrapped around the ceramic both hands like keeping it warm.
He looked away, but right now right now there was coffee and a name, William, that had been locked inside him for seven years and was now somewhere in the air of this place, not on the marker yet, but no longer only inside him. Given somewhere to land. He looked at his hands, steady. He set down the cup and sat with that for a while. The branch was still there.
Hadley noticed it on the fifth morning after the fever broke. He'd gone out back to check the rear fence line and he almost walked past the graves the way he usually did because usually he needed to prepare himself before he looked at them directly except something caught his eye, green against the white, a small pine branch laid across the top of the smaller marker, the one with only the year. He stopped, stood very still. His breath made clouds in the cold air, even, steady. He looked at the branch for a long time.
Someone had done this carefully, not thrown, placed with the intentionality of a gesture that's been considered. That means something specific in a language he didn't know but could feel the shape of. He thought about the fever, about the things you say when the guard comes down, about a name said once into the dark of a room where he'd thought no one could hear. William. He stood in front of the small marker with the green branch on it.
And he said it again, out loud, in the cold Wyoming morning with the snow muffling everything and nobody around to hear. Just said it to the air, to the year carved in wood, to the small life that had existed briefly and left a space the exact size and shape of itself behind. William. And then he stood there for another minute, not crying, not falling apart, just there. Present with it in a way he hadn't let himself be for seven years.