Fifty-Three Days

Immy came off the road at six on Sunday morning and found him in the shoeing shed. He had the forge lit and nothing in it.

“She walked this down to the truck last night,” Immy said. “She said it was for you, and that I wasn’t to read it. I didn’t.”

It was a sheet off the feed-store notepad, folded once. He knew the square hand before he had it open.

Tierney has it, so it will be said on the Bench whether I’m there or not. They shouldn’t hear it from him. You kept it from them the same as from me, and that is yours to mend. Tell them what I am. You’ll have to tell them how you know. Go ahead. Tell them I have decided nothing. Do not speak for me past that. N.P.

He read it twice. Then he put it in his shirt pocket and went to the white house.

Maeve was in her office with the stock book open. She looked at his face and closed the book.

“I need the pack,” he said. “Everybody old enough to be told a thing. I need them this morning, and I’d as soon say it once.”

“Is it the shoulder?”

“No.”

She studied him a moment longer. “Nine o’clock, in the long shed. I’ll send Owen round.”
***
They came in their chore clothes, with hay on their sleeves. The four youngest were in Billie’s kitchen with a pan of cinnamon rolls. Owen’s father had taken the road for the hour, and his wife would carry it to him. The rest stood or sat on sacks of mineral salt along the wall of the shed. Maeve had the anvil stand to lean on. Billie had been given the one chair, and she sat in it with her mittens in her lap. Immy stood by the door with her arms crossed. Owen’s rubber ball was going.

Rhys stood in front of the forge where they could all see him. His right arm hung straight. Under his shirt the nine stitches itched.

“I’ll say it plain, and then anybody can say what they like to me,” he said. “Dr. Pruett’s father was Calvin Dunmore, of the Wind River pack. He was killed before she was born, and she was raised in Nebraska by a human mother who never knew. Nora is a latent. She’s wolf blood. She held the headgate on the night of the twenty-third, and she holds it this morning.”

Nobody made a sound. The forge ticked behind him.

“I’ve known since the twenty-fifth of November. That’s fifty-three days. I know because she’s my mate, and a mate is the only one who can smell it on a latent. I woke up in her barn with both things in my nose.”

A woman by the wall drew a breath. Billie did not move.

“I told nobody. I stood at Maeve’s right hand on the Bench and heard her say to two packs that she couldn’t show the water. I had the answer, and I kept my mouth shut. I let you all go home and lie awake over it. I hid it from my alpha and from my law-keeper.” He made himself go on at the same pace. “And I hid it from her. She’d wanted to know what she was since she was six years old. I let her go without it for seven weeks. I told myself I was keeping her safe until the fight was done. What I was doing was choosing for her. On Thursday Vaughn Tierney drove up to her clinic and told her himself, with her father’s obituary in his hand and a contract for a million six under it. She found out what she was from him.”

“Lord,” Owen’s mother said.

“She put me out that night. She was right to.”

He looked along the wall. He knew every one of those faces, and he had known most of them all his life.

“Here’s the last of it, and it’s the part I need you to carry out of here. This pack has no claim on her whatsoever. She wasn’t born to us or raised by us. Maeve isn’t her alpha, and she told Maeve so in her own kitchen. The bond is a thing in my body, and it obliges her to nothing. If she signs that contract on Friday noon and drives off this creek, she’ll have done no wrong to anybody in this shed. She sent word down last night that I was to tell you what she is, and that she’s decided nothing. That’s all she said, and I’m adding nothing to it.”

He stopped. He had thought about what came next and settled it on Billie’s porch at four in the morning.

“I’m not asking anybody to forgive it.”

The silence went on for a while. One of the older men spoke first. He was the one with the coughing gelding, who had shoveled lime on the Bench.

“We buried nine cows,” he said slowly. “My wife’s been pricing houses in Dillon. And you had that in your pocket.”

“Yes.”

“Could she end it? If she chose?”

Rhys looked at his grandmother. It was a law-keeper’s question.

“By my reading, she could,” Billie said. Her voice was dry and level. “The law says blood. It has nothing to say about a coat. Leona Stroud will read it for herself, and she’ll want more than my grandson’s nose. The Wind River kin roll is in my cedar chest. I’ll look for a Dunmore when I’m done here.” She turned her eyes on him. “I put my arms around you on my porch in November and asked if she knew. You said no. You let me think I’d had the whole of it. I’m eighty-one years old, Rhys. I don’t care to be managed.”

“No, Gran.”

“I shook that girl’s hand and smelled soap,” she said, mostly to herself. Then she shut her mouth and folded her mittens over.

Owen had stopped squeezing the ball.

“She told me the truth about my leg,” he said. His ears were red, and he looked at the floor. “I was a wolf on her table and couldn’t even answer. She said it was my leg and I ought to hear. It seems like she was owed the same.”

It was the hardest thing anybody said to him that morning, and it came from a boy of twenty-two.

“She was,” Rhys said.

Maeve had not spoken. She stood with one hand on the horn of the anvil, and her lean face showed him nothing.

“On the twenty-third I told Vaughn Tierney, in his grandfather’s house, that I’d looked for a way around that law for forty-one years,” she said. “You were close enough to touch.”

“I was.”

“In November I told you she was yours to answer for. It didn’t occur to me that I’d have to tell my own enforcer he answered to me.” She let that stand a moment. “I can’t strip a second five days before a moon. You know I can’t, and I dislike that you know it. When this is finished, you and I will sit in my office with the door shut, and I’ll decide then what an enforcer is worth who keeps things from his alpha.”

“That’s fair.”

“I didn’t ask if it was fair.” She turned to the rest of them. “Now hear me, all of you. Nobody goes up that road. Nobody telephones her. Nobody bakes her anything, Billie.”

“I heard.”

“The watch at her lane stays, because Pascoe knows where she lives. Whoever’s sitting it says good morning and nothing else. She’s the vet. If you’ve a sick animal, you call the vet. If any one of you so much as looks hopeful at her, you’ll answer to me, and it’ll be worse than what he’s getting. We don’t take from that woman what she hasn’t offered. My father took, and I’ve lived on the bill for it. We get ready for Friday as if she’d sold on Thursday. Is that understood?”

It was understood. He could hear that in how they breathed.

“Then that’s all.”

“It isn’t quite,” Rhys said.

Maeve’s eyebrows went up.

His mouth was dry. He had stood under Pascoe’s mark with less trouble than this.

“Immy.” He turned to the door. “You’ve asked me every morning for three weeks to let you stand, and every morning I’ve told you no. The first time, I used a voice on you that I’d no business using on a person. I was wrong, and I’m sorry for it. I’m asking now. Will you stand as second beside me? Maeve can name on the night whichever of us is fit, and I’ll take her word for which. Between now and then I want you to teach me how to fight with somebody at my shoulder. I never learned it. I’ve gone alone since Tate. It put Owen in a wire and me in the snow, and it’ll lose us this creek. I don’t know how to be helped. I’m asking you to show me.”

Immy’s arms came uncrossed. Her face had gone pink under the windburn.

“With nine stitches in,” she said.

“On two legs until they’re out. Then on four.”

“You’ll do what I say? When I say drop back, you’ll drop back?”

“I’ll try. You’ll likely have to say it twice.”

“I’ll say it with my teeth.” Her voice wobbled, and she got hold of it. “I’m still mad about the cow voice. And I’m mad about this other thing, for her. I like her.” She wiped her nose on her glove. “Six tomorrow, on the Bench. Bring Owen. Yes.”

“I’ll name on the night,” Maeve said. She looked at him a second longer, and something in the look had eased by a hair. “Go and feed, the lot of you.”

They went out past him. Most of them did not meet his eye. The man with the gelding stopped and looked him over, and then he nodded once, stiffly, as he would have to a neighbor at a funeral.
***
Billie’s cedar chest stood at the foot of her bed. He lifted the quilts out for her with his left arm. The roll was at the bottom in a pillowcase. It was a narrow book in black oilcloth, typed on onionskin, with later lines added in three different inks.

“The law-keepers trade them,” she said. “It keeps cousins from marrying. This one came up from Wyoming in 1974, and they’ve written me the changes since.”

She turned the thin pages at the kitchen table with her spectacles on. The children had been sent out to the snow. Her finger stopped.

“Dunmore. Harlan and Jean, of Dubois. A daughter, Fay, born 1966. A son, Calvin, born 1970.” She read the rest in the same voice. “‘Died March 9, 1996. No issue known.’”

Rhys looked at those three typed words for a while.

“There’s a post address for the household. It’s a box number.” She laid a ribbon in the page and closed the book. “Take her the roll itself. I’ll not have her handed a copy of a copy. Tell her I don’t want it back unless she wants me to have it.”

“Maeve said nobody was to—”

“Maeve said nobody was to bake. This is the law, and the law’s my kitchen.” She pulled a tablet of lined paper toward her. “Sit. I’m going to write it out whole. She heard it once on a cold night from a stranger, and she ought to have it under her hand.”

She wrote the Water Law word for word, in her upright schoolgirl script. Under it she drew a line. Below the line she set down in plain words what it came to. She put down what the holder could do on the Bench and what that would end. She put down what would follow if the holder sold before the moon. Then she wrote the last part, and she pressed hard on the pen.

If the holder keeps the water and says nothing, the water is not shown, the same as if she had sold. Her silence is all V.T. needs. He has priced it at $1,600,000.

“That goes against us,” Rhys said.

“It’s true, and so it goes in.” She signed it W. Brannock, law-keeper and blotted it. “You’ve had enough of leaving out the parts that don’t suit. Now eat something. You look like a fence rail.”
***
He left his truck at the mouth of the lane, behind Owen’s, and walked up. It was a little after three. The sky was low and white, and the creek was talking under its ice.

Each step eased the drag under his breastbone. He did not let himself take any comfort in that.

She had heard the truck, and she would have known his walk. He knocked anyway and stepped back to the edge of the porch.

The door opened. She wore the grey sweatshirt, and her braid was coming undone. There were shadows under her eyes like thumbprints. The cat came out between her ankles, looked him over and sat down on the mat. Her scent reached him, clover and wood smoke, with the thin cold thread under it that was not a secret any longer.

Past her shoulder he could see the kitchen table. There were sheets of cream paper on it and a capped pen. Beside them stood a cardboard carton with its flaps up. He could see that it was empty.

“I won’t come in,” he said. “I’ve three things to give you and three to say, and then I’m off your porch.”

She folded her arms and leaned on the doorframe. She did not tell him to go.

“I told them this morning. I told them what you are, how I knew, how long I’d had it, and who I’d kept it from. I said you’d decided nothing. I said the pack has no claim on you of any kind, and Maeve said it harder than I did. Nobody’s to come up this road or ring your telephone. If one of them looks at you sideways, tell Maeve.”

“What did Maeve say to you?”

“That she’ll see me in her office with the door shut when it’s over.”

“Good,” Nora said.

He took the oilcloth book out of his coat and held it out flat, as he had once held out her truck keys.

“This is the Wind River kin roll. It’s Billie’s, and it has every family of that pack back to their homesteads. There’s a ribbon at your father’s line. His people were Harlan and Jean. He had a sister, Fay, who’s sixty. Her address is on this slip. It’s a post office box in Dubois.” He had to stop for a breath. “The roll says he left no issue known. They never heard there was a baby. Nobody over there kept you out. They just don’t know to look.”

She took the book. She did not open it. Her thumb moved once along the edge of the ribbon.

“Billie says it’s yours unless you’d like her to have it back.” He brought out the folded tablet sheets. “This is the Water Law, written out whole in her hand and signed. Below the line she’s put what it means for you, all of it. If you give the water on the Bench before both law-keepers, his claim’s done. If you sell before moonrise on Friday, we can’t show water, and we fight or sell. And if you keep your forty and say nothing, it comes to the same for him. He doesn’t need your land. All he needs is for you to keep quiet. That’s what the million six is for. You ought to see that written down by somebody who isn’t trying to buy it.”

Nora took the pages. Her eyes went down to the last lines and stayed there.

“That goes against you,” she said.

“I said that too. Billie told me I’d done enough leaving out.”

Something moved at the corner of her mouth and was gone.

“Here’s the third thing, and it’s only my opinion. In December you asked me what I wanted you to do, and I wouldn’t say. I still won’t. But you check a sum from both ends, so here’s the other end from somebody who knows the ground.” He kept his eyes on hers. “A million six is a fair price. It’s better than fair. Nobody else alive would pay it. His check is good, and he’ll keep that lease as it’s written, because he’s careful about paper. You could own a place outright anywhere you liked. If you take it, I’ll carry your boxes. I said that in your clinic, and nothing since has changed it.”

Her heart had picked up. He heard it, and he did not let himself make anything of it.

“Immy’s going to stand beside me,” he said. “I asked her in front of everybody. Maeve picks between us on the night. You were right in the woodshed, and you were right in the clinic. That’s so whether you ever speak to me again or not.”

“You asked her.”

“I did. It came out about as graceful as a calf on ice.”

She said nothing. The cat washed a paw.

He took his hat off and held it in both hands. There was one thing left.

“I love you,” Rhys said.

Her arms tightened across her chest. She did not look away.

“I haven’t said it before, because I was hiding something from you, and it didn’t seem I had the right to lay that on top. You’ve got the worst of me now. So I can say it and have it be honest. It’s got nothing to do with my nose. It’s the woman who throws her first knot double and told my alpha where she stood. I’d love her if I had a head cold.” He turned the hat a quarter turn. “It isn’t a reason for you to do anything. It doesn’t go on either side of that table in there. I’m telling you because it’s true, and you were owed every true thing I had.”

He put his hat on. He had told himself he would ask for nothing, and he found that it was easy to keep. He could think of nothing he had any business asking.

“That’s all of it,” he said, and went down the steps.

“Rhys.”

He stopped in the trampled snow of the path. He did not turn around until he was sure of his face.

She had not moved from the doorframe. She held the black book and the folded sheets against her ribs, as she had held the green ledger on the day the road opened.

“Who’s looking at those stitches?”

“Billie.”

“Tell her they come out when the edges lie flat and no sooner. If she isn’t sure, she’s to leave them.” Her voice was rough. “And keep that elbow in when Immy puts you down.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

She did not smile. He had not thought she would.

He walked down the lane. The pull took hold before he reached the yard fence, the old hook under his breastbone with the line running back to her porch. He let it drag, and he kept walking. Owen lifted two fingers off the wheel of the ranch truck and had the sense to say nothing.

Rhys was at the mouth of the lane, with his hand on his own door, before he heard hers close.
***