The Road Opens

Rhys heard the plow at a quarter to ten, a long way down the creek, before Nora lifted her head from the ledger.

She lifted it about four seconds after he did. He watched her do it and kept his face still.

“That’s the county,” she said. “There’s something behind it. Something with a diesel that isn’t a truck.”

“That’ll be our tractor. Maeve wouldn’t wait on me to walk.”

She capped her pen. She had taken his temperature at six, as promised, and said, “Ninety-eight six,” in a voice that gave away nothing. She had cooked oatmeal and looked at his hip. Neither of them had said one word about the kitchen table. He had lain awake on her short couch most of the night, and he suspected she knew that too.

“So you’re going,” she said.

“I have to report. I should have reported Tuesday night.”

“Then listen to me first.” She went to the tote and came back with a paper sack. “That wick comes out Monday, and I take it out, nobody else. There are four doses of the antibiotic in here, drawn up and capped. One a day under the skin, at the same hour. Is there someone down there who can give a shot?”

“My grandmother gave me every shot I ever got that Doc didn’t.”

“Good. No lifting with the right arm. No horses. And you don’t change. I don’t know how to say that medically. You don’t do it until those stitches are out.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

She gave him a look for that, and it was almost a smile.

He had been turning something over since the oatmeal. “Maeve’s going to ask me about you,” he said. “On Thursday I spoke for you without asking, and you told me not to do it again. So I’m asking. What can I say?”

Nora leaned on the counter and thought. He liked that she took the question seriously.

“You can tell her what I did, because that’s in the ledger anyway. You can tell her I haven’t called anyone, and that the phone’s been dead since Wednesday, so she can check. The rest she can ask me herself.”

“She will. She’ll likely come today.”

“Then I’ll put on a clean shirt.”

The plow came into sight at ten, a yellow county truck throwing a white wave off its blade over the top of her fence. It swung in the wide place at the mouth of her lane, where the plowing stopped, and the driver lifted a hand at the house and started back down. The ranch’s green tractor came up behind with the bucket low. Immy cut a lane from the road to Nora’s truck in three passes. Then she climbed down from the cab with a duffel bag.

Nora opened the kitchen door before Immy got to it.

“Dr. Pruett,” Immy said. She was tall and wind-burned, with her fair braid tucked inside her collar, and she was grinning. “I’m Imogen Mulvaney. We’ve met, sort of.”

“You waved back.”

“I couldn’t help it. You looked so polite.” Immy’s eyes went past her to Rhys and ran over him from the too-short coveralls to the rubber boots. “Oh, that’s wonderful. Hold still, I want to remember it.”

“Give me the bag, Immy.”

“Billie sent your own clothes. She says if you bled on Doc’s coveralls you’re to wash them yourself.” She handed the duffel over. Her voice dropped and lost the joke. “You scared us, Rhys. Mom was up on that ridge Wednesday in the storm, herself.”

“I know. I’m sorry for it.”

He dressed in the front room, slowly, in his own jeans and wool shirt and boots that fit. When he came back the two women were standing over the stove with coffee. Immy was telling Nora that the power crew had reached Pettibone’s corner, and that she would have lights by tomorrow if the cottonwoods behaved.

Nora walked him as far as the porch. Immy had the tact to go ahead and climb into the cab.

The yard was blinding. The road ran away down the creek between cut white banks, open all the way to the highway.

“The road’s open,” Nora said.

“I noticed.”

“I thought you would have.” She had her arms folded in her barn coat. Her hazel eyes were steady on him, and there was some heat in them still, and a good deal of pride. “Monday, for the wick. Here or down there, I don’t care which.”

“Thank you, Nora. For all of it.”

“You haven’t seen your bill,” she said, and went back inside.

He climbed up beside Immy on the fender seat. The tractor lurched down the lane and turned west. He had gone perhaps two hundred yards when he felt it, a small steady drag under his breastbone, pulling back the way he had come. He had not known there would be anything like that. He put his good hand on the cab rail and watched the road.

“She’s all right, isn’t she?” Immy said over the engine. “I told Mom in September she was all right.”

“She’s all right.”

“You smell like her whole house.”

“I slept on her couch for three nights. Drive the tractor.”
***
Headquarters looked the way it always did after a big snow, with every roof loaded and every lane already cut. Owen Doyle was forking hay off the flatbed in the calving lot with his red hair sticking out from under his cap. He dropped the fork when he saw the tractor and then picked it up again, embarrassed.

Billie was on her porch. She had no coat on. She was eighty-one years old and five feet tall on a good day, with her white hair in a bun as tight as a walnut. She stood at the top of her steps with a dish towel in her hands and watched him climb down from the cab as if she were counting his legs.

“You’re thin,” she said.

“I’ve been four days, Gran.”

“You look like you’ve been a month. Come here.”

He went up the steps and bent down, and she put both arms around his neck, careful of his right side without having to be told which side it was. She held on hard. She smelled of flour and sage and turkey stock, and of the plain cold iron that was in all of them.

He felt her take a breath against his collar.

She went still. Then she let go of him and stepped back, and looked up into his face for a long moment. Her eyes were the same grey-green as his, and they had been reading him since he was a baby.

“So that’s how it is,” she said quietly. “Does she know?”

There was no use pretending he didn’t follow. Billie had been mated for forty-six years. She knew what it did to a wolf’s own scent when it took hold.

“No.”

“Do you mean to tell her?”

“When she’s had time to know me. She found out there were wolves on Wednesday morning. I’m not putting that on her in the same week.”

Billie considered him. “That’s sense, as far as it goes. Don’t let it go too far. A thing like that gets heavier the longer you carry it by yourself.” She folded the dish towel in half. “It’ll stay in my kitchen. It’s not law business until the two of you make it so.”

“Thank you.”

“A human woman,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Well. Your grandfather would have had something to say. He’d have been wrong, too.”

He said nothing. The other thing sat in his mouth like a stone. Billie kept the law for this pack, and she would be the one who knew what a latent was and wasn’t under it. He did not tell her. It was Nora’s before it was anybody’s, and he had decided that on Wednesday in the straw.

“There’s a plate in the oven,” Billie said. “You’ll eat it after. She’s waiting on you in the office, and she hasn’t slept much.”
***
Maeve Mulvaney kept the ranch office in the old front parlor of the white house, with a map of the creek on one wall and her father’s desk under it. She was standing at the map when he came in. She was fifty-eight, lean as a rail, with her iron-grey hair cropped short, and she had led the pack since he was twelve.

“Sit down before you fall down,” she said. “Then tell it from the start.”

He told it. He gave her the saddle at dusk and the three of them at the boundary larch. He gave her Pascoe’s mark, chest-high, three lines through the peeled wood. He told her he had stood under it and that all three had come at once.

“Three on one,” Maeve said. “On a challenge.”

“Yes.”

“Who saw it?”

“Nobody but the four of us.”

“Then it’s your word and your side against three of theirs, and Tierney will say you slipped on the rocks.” She rubbed her eyes with a thumb and finger. “Owen went up yesterday when it cleared. The mark’s there, as you say. Billie’s seen it by now through his telling, and she agrees. It’s a proper claim-mark, cut on a full moon. He’ll lay the claim at the next one.”

“December twenty-third.”

“Two days before Christmas. That’s Vaughn all over.” She looked at the map and at the long blue line of the creek running through it. “What he’s claiming, we won’t know until he stands up and says it. Billie has her guesses. I’ve got mine. I’ve had them since he bought Hendry’s.”

“What do you want from me before then?”

“I want you healed. A second who can’t lift his arm is no second.” She turned around. “Now the vet.”

He had known that was coming, and he sat up straighter for it.

“She had a wolf dying in her barn and no book to go by. She put me under the way any good vet would, and I came up a man. She found out because Doc sold her that place with the ledger locked in a drawer. I told her the rest because half of it was already lying in her straw. That was my choice, and I made it without your leave.”

“You did.”

“She hasn’t called anyone. Her phone’s been out since Wednesday, but she had a dial tone Tuesday night with a two-hundred-pound wolf in her barn. She told me so. She listened to it and hung up.”

Maeve’s eyebrows moved. “Why?”

“Because a warden would have shot me. She didn’t care for that.”

“Hm.” Maeve sat on the corner of the desk. “Here’s what it costs you. If she talks, to anyone, ever, it’s you who goes and mends it, whatever mending takes. You brought her in, and she’s yours to answer for. Do you take that?”

“I take it.”

“Good. Get your coat. I’d rather look at her myself than hear about her.”

“She said she’d put on a clean shirt.”

Maeve stopped with her hand on the door. For a second she looked almost amused. “Did she?”
***
Nora had put on the clean shirt. It was blue flannel, and she had rebraided her hair. She let them into the kitchen and offered coffee. Then she sat down across the table from Maeve with the green ledger closed under her left hand.

Rhys took the chair by the stove, where he could see them both. He kept his mouth shut. He had asked her that morning what he could say for her, and he had already said all of it.

The cat sat on the couch arm and looked at Maeve with deep suspicion.

“I’ll be plain with you, Dr. Pruett,” Maeve said. “There are twenty-three of us on this creek, and we have been here since 1889. We’ve stayed here by being careful who knows. A human is told when I say so. You weren’t told that way. You found out by accident, and by my enforcer’s mouth. So I’m here to ask what you mean to do with it.”

“Nothing,” Nora said.

“I’d need more than that.”

“You can have more. I don’t talk about my patients. I didn’t in Torrington and I don’t here. If a man’s bull is shooting blanks, his neighbors don’t hear it from me. If a woman’s dog bit her kid, that stays in my truck. What walked into my barn Tuesday night was a patient, and what he turned out to be is his own business.” She turned her mug a quarter turn on the table. “I want to be clear about one thing, Mrs. Mulvaney. I’d keep quiet whether you had driven up here or not. I’m not doing it because you’re the alpha. You’re not mine. I’m doing it because it’s how I practice.”

Rhys looked at the stove door. He did not want either of them to see his face just then.

Maeve was silent for a little while. “That’ll hold longer than a promise to me would,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

“There’s this, too.” Nora’s hand flattened on the ledger. “You’ve been looking at it since you sat down. It’s forty-one years of medical records. It came with the practice, and it stays with the practice. I’ll keep it locked up, and I’ll keep it up to date. I won’t hand it over.”

“Amos never did either.”

“Then we understand each other.”

“We’re beginning to.”

Nora took a breath. Rhys heard her heart pick up, and he knew which question was coming.

“I have one for you. Dr. Teague sold me this place in September. He showed me the books and the drug register and a list of his accounts, and your ranch wasn’t on it. He watched me sign for three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, and he never said a word about any of this. I’ve been angry about it for three days. Why did he do it that way? Why sell to me at all?”

“Ask Amos,” Maeve said. “He told me only that you’d do.”

“That I’d do.”

“Those were his words. I asked him who he was selling to, and he said a young woman from Wyoming, and that she’d do. I asked him what he meant by it. He said I’d see. Amos has kept his own counsel since before you were born, and he’s kept ours along with it. I learned a long time ago not to pull at him.” Maeve lifted one shoulder. “He’s at Sapphire View in Hamilton. He plays cribbage until four.”

Nora’s jaw was tight. Rhys could see she had wanted a better answer, and that she knew she had gotten an honest one.

“I’ll ask him,” she said.

“There’s one more thing, and then I’ll get out of your kitchen.” Maeve set her mug down. “We have four hundred and twenty cows and eleven horses, and twenty-three people who can’t walk into the clinic in Darby with a torn hide. For forty-one years one vet did all of it. I held off calling you because I hadn’t decided. I’ve decided. I’m offering you the pack’s work, the cattle and the rest.”

“On what terms?”

“Come down Monday morning and I’ll put terms on paper. I’ve got forty late cows that want checking, so bring your sleeve. You can see how we work, and we can see how you do.”

Nora glanced at Rhys for the first time since they had sat down. It was a quick look, and he could not read all of it.

“I’ll come and look,” she said. “I’m not saying yes in my own kitchen to something I haven’t read.”

“I’d think less of you if you did.” Maeve stood up and put out her hand. Nora shook it once, firmly.

On the porch Maeve went ahead to the truck. Rhys stopped at the top of the steps. Nora had followed them out, and the ledger was under her arm.

“Monday,” he said.

“For the wick,” Nora said. “Mind that arm.”

He went down the steps. Maeve already had the engine running. He got in on the passenger side and pulled the door shut with his left hand, and the truck backed around in the lane Immy had cut.

The pull started before they reached the road. It was the same drag under his breastbone that he had felt on the tractor, and it was stronger this time. It was like a hook set deep, with the line running out behind him and tightening with every yard. He had caught enough trout in this creek to know how that went for the fish.

He looked in the side mirror. She was standing on the porch in her blue shirt, with no coat, and the green ledger held against her ribs. She was watching the truck. She did not wave.

“She told me I wasn’t her alpha,” Maeve said. “In the first five minutes.”

“She did.”

“I haven’t had that said to me in twenty years.” Maeve shifted gears. “Amos was right, damn him. She’ll do.”

Rhys watched the mirror until the road bent and the timber took the house.
***