There was a cot and the bench was long enough, but because the chair was near the door. And the door was the thing that mattered. He sat with the rifle across his knees and the fire was low and the sound of two women sleeping on the other side of the cabin. And he thought about almost nothing. Just listened.
The wind, the settling of the walls. The occasional shift of a blanket. That was all. That was enough. Three days.
That's how long it took the storm to decide it had made its point. Three days of Hadley moving through the same routines he'd moved through for seven years. Except now there were two women watching him do it. Nayeli from the bench, where she'd taken up a position that gave her a clear sightline to the door and most of the room. Tsula from wherever she was.
She moved around more, carefully, favoring her right ankle, but not letting it stop her. Touching the walls and the shelves with a light curious hand, learning the space the way a person learns a language. He left them alone, mostly. He checked the fence he'd never gotten to check. He split firewood.
He fed the livestock. He came back in, hung up his coat, made food, ate, went to sleep in the chair. On the second day, Tsula asked him how many horses he had. "Two," Hadley said. "Rex and a mare named Clara.
Is the mare gentle?" "Gentler than Rex." A pause. "We had horses," Tsula said, "before." She didn't say more than that.
He didn't push. Her English surprised him slightly. "Cleaner than her sister's. More immediate." He didn't comment on it.
Later he would learn from Tsula herself in pieces that she'd spent two years at a mission school as a child before her grandmother brought her home. She'd kept the language, lost most of what the school tried to put in its place. On the third day, Nayeli stood at the window while he was cleaning his rifle and asked without turning around, "Do you always live like this?" "Like what?" "Alone."
The word landed the way she probably intended it, flat and factual and neither kind nor unkind. He set down the cleaning cloth. "I had a wife," he said. "She passed." A long pause.
"When?" "seven years ago." Nayeli turned from the window then, not to look at him with pity. He braced for that. He always braced for that, but with something more considered, more quiet. The look of someone taking in information and updating what they thought they knew. "seven years," she said.
"Yes." She turned back to the window. The conversation was over, but something in the room had shifted just slightly. The way a room does when two people have established a truth between them. It was Tsula who found the graves.