She walked behind the small stone forge and the blacksmith shed. The chopping block was a section of an alligator juniper trunk, two feet across and split down the center with years of hammer blows and weather. Driven deep into the heartwood was an old double-bitted axe with a hickory handle rubbed dark with sweat. Beside it lay a pile of crooked, weathered mesquite limbs, grey as horn on the outside but showing deep reddish-brown where the bark had peeled away.
Tala did not take the double-bitted axe. It was too long in the haft, balanced for a six-foot man who used his shoulders to split firewood with a heavy downswing. Instead, she found a broad-bladed hand hatchet leaning against the stone foot of the shed wall. The edge was clean, ground sharp on an oilstone and wiped with lard to keep off the rust.
She took a four-foot branch of cured mesquite, laid it across the juniper block, and brought the hatchet down with a short, precise blow from the forearm. The dry wood split with a sound like a pistol shot in the cold quiet of the morning.
For an hour, Tala worked. She chopped with an economical, measured rhythm that did not waste her breath. She cut the mesquite into sixteen-inch lengths, split the thicker segments down the center so they would catch quickly in the firebox, and shaved a handful of pitch-pine kindling from an old cedar post that lay half-rotted by the wall.
Her calico sleeves grew damp with sweat at the armpits, and the scent of the split mesquite—spicy, dry, smelling like leather and sun-scorched earth—filled her nostrils. With every blow, the soreness in her neck and shoulders from the ropes at Black Mesa seemed to loosen, worked out through the muscles by the clean bite of the iron into wood.
When the pile beside the block was large enough to fill two woodboxes, she gathered an armload against her chest, carrying the sticks to the kitchen door. The door was still closed. She laid the wood neatly along the outer wall of the porch, building a square tier where the wind would not knock it down.
As she stacked the last piece, the latch lifted from the inside, and Jonah stepped out onto the porch. He had removed the farrier’s apron and put on a clean, faded chambray shirt, though his forearms were still marked with dark smudges of hoof oil.
He looked at the woodpile, then at the full buckets of water by the bench. His face was unchanged, the same weathered, impassive slate it had been on the platform in Black Mesa.
“The pump leathers leak if they sit too dry in the midday heat,” he remarked, looking toward the windmill. “You’ll need to prime it with half a gourd if the breeze dies down after noon.”
He did not thank her for the wood. He did not praise the neatness of her stack. He reached to the side of the door, lifted the heavy iron skillet from its peg, and set it on the rough bench outside the kitchen window.
“There is lard in the crock on the table,” he said, looking at the distant line of the mountains where the sun was now beginning to throw a yellow, glaring rim over the peaks. “Flour in the tin bin under the meal chest. If you want salt meat, there is salt pork in the brine barrel by the root cellar. Take what you need for yourself. Whatever you leave, I will eat when I come in from the north pasture at noon.”
He turned and walked toward the corral, taking a coil of rawhide rope and a pair of leather chaps from the rail.
Tala stood by the woodpile, watching his broad back as he crossed the yard. He had left the kitchen door completely open behind him. From within came the smell of coffee beans in a tin and the cool, shadowy quiet of an adobe room that had known no women for a very long time.
She walked to the doorway and peered inside.
The kitchen was clean, though stark in the way of solitary men. A long trestle table of hand-adzed pine stood against the center wall, its top scrubbed white with sand and lye. On a shelf above the stove sat a row of spice tins, an earthenware salt cellar with a chipped lid, and a black cast-iron coffee grinder screwed to the cedar post that supported the main ceiling beam. There was no trash in the corners, no dirty tin plates left unwashed from the night before; everything had its place, scrubbed, dried, and stowed away with a soldier’s exactness.
Tala stepped across the threshold. The floor was made of wide square pavers of red Mexican tile, cold against her feet. She did not touch the flour bin or the lard crock immediately. She walked to the window that looked out toward the corral.