June set the table for supper without being asked, and Mara laid the pallet out again without a word, and Elias, watching them, understood that four days had remade him more thoroughly than ten years of riding had. He had come to this valley a man who left before dawn, and he was staying, night after night, on a floor between two sisters and a door, because that was where he was needed, and because being needed, for the first time since the river, did not feel like a sentence. It felt like a beginning.
The fence stood half-built at the mouth of the valley, and in the mornings Elias walked it the way another man might walk a prayer. He went out before the sun had cleared the eastern hill, when the air was still cold enough to make his breath show, and he ran his hand along the new cedar rails and the old ones, feeling for looseness, for give, for any place where the work had settled wrong in the night. Behind him the cabin smoke rose thin and straight, and the smell of bread baking found him before the sound of the sisters moving about the house did. It was the fifth morning, or the sixth — he had stopped counting the way a drifter counts, which is to say he had stopped counting at all — and the valley had begun to keep a rhythm that included him, though he did not yet trust it enough to say so aloud.
Mara was already in the garden when he came back up from the fence line, her sleeves rolled above her elbows, her dark hair tied at the back of her neck, a basket at her feet half full of late beans. She did not look up when he approached. She never did, at first. She let him arrive, and then she spoke, as if conversation were a thing you did only once a person had properly entered the place where you were working.
The lower rail on the third post is sitting proud, she said.
I saw it, Elias said. "I'll set it after breakfast."
She nodded, and that was the whole of it, and it pleased him more than any welcome he could remember. He had spent ten years being welcomed in ways that meant nothing — a wave from a porch, a nod in a saloon, a bed offered for a night and forgotten by morning. This was different. This was a woman telling him what needed doing because she assumed he would still be there to do it, and the assumption sat in his chest like something warm and unfamiliar that he did not dare name.
June came out of the barn with a bucket and a laugh already half out of her mouth. She had been singing to the horses, he suspected, because she did that when she thought no one was listening, and she stopped the moment she saw him, coloring a little, and then laughed at herself for coloring, which was so entirely June that Elias found himself smiling before he knew he was going to.
You're in my way, drifter, she said, though he was not, not really. "The mare needs her feet looked at, and you're standing where I need to stand."
I'll move, he said, and stepped aside, and she stepped into the place he had vacated as if it had been hers all along.
The mare was the nervous one, a sorrel with a white blaze and eyes that showed too much white whenever a stranger came near the corral. She had been the worst frightened the night the fence was broken, and she still shied at sudden movement, still tossed her head at the sound of a hammer. June had taken her on as a particular charge, the way she took on everything that was frightened or overlooked, and she had a way with the animal that Elias, who prided himself on his hands with horses, watched with something close to humility.
She doesn't trust hands that grab, June said, when Elias came to the rail to watch. "She trusts hands that wait. Come here. Slow. Don't look her straight in the eye like you're fixing to argue with her."
Elias did as he was told, which was a new sensation and not an unwelcome one. He approached the mare the way June told him to, his steps slow, his shoulders turned a little sideways, his hands loose at his sides. The mare watched him, ears pricked, nostrils flaring, and then, when he stopped a few feet off and simply stood there, she took a step toward him, and then another, curious despite herself.
There, June said softly. "See? She comes to you if you let her. Everybody wants to chase. Nobody wants to wait."
She showed him how she lifted the mare's forefoot, talking all the while, low and steady, her hands quick and sure, and Elias listened the way he had once listened to old trail hands who knew things he did not. He had broken horses in half a dozen territories, and he had done it with patience and rope and time, but June's way was gentler and somehow surer, and when the mare stood quiet for her, and then stood quiet for him, Elias felt a small, ridiculous pride, as if he had been given something rather than taught something.
You're a natural, June said, and then, because she could not leave a compliment unteased, added, "for a man who rides in and fixes fences for free and sleeps on floors."