Mara did not offer her hand. She did not offer anything yet. She looked at the beam, and then at him, and then at the beam again, and Elias understood that he was being weighed in the same scale as everything else on this homestead: useful or not, honest or not, trouble or not.
I'm Elias Ward, he said. "I mend fences. Among other things."
June's eyes brightened. Mara's narrowed, just slightly.
We mend our own fences, Mara said.
I can see that, Elias said, and he meant it. The garden, the stacked wood, the sound roof: this was not a place kept by people waiting to be rescued. "But that stretch at the valley mouth is a two-man job at least, and a long one. And your gate's hanging by a prayer."
Mara looked toward the valley mouth, and for a moment the guardedness in her face slipped, and he saw the exhaustion underneath it, plain as the dust on her sleeves. She had been holding this place together since spring, he guessed, with only her sister for help, and the work never ended and the nights had lately become something to dread. She straightened again, and the guard came back down, but he had seen it, and he could not unsee it.
We don't take charity, she said.
I didn't offer charity, Elias said. "I offered work."
June was watching them both with open interest now, her hands still on the beam, her quick tongue plainly itching to get into the conversation. Mara glanced at her sister, and something passed between them, quick as a look between people who have shared a house and a loss and a hundred mornings of work. Then Mara nodded, once, toward the beam.
Well, she said. "Since you're standing there anyway, you might as well take the heavy end."
Elias dismounted, tied Ranger to a post where the horse could reach a patch of grass, and walked over and took the heavy end of the cedar beam. It smelled of fresh-cut wood and resin, sharp and clean, and it was heavier than it looked. Together, the three of them lifted it back onto the sawhorses, Mara counting softly — one, two, three, lift — and setting it down true. The beam settled with a solid thunk.
Mara stepped back and wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at him again, and this time there was something else in her look, underneath the suspicion: a question she was not yet willing to ask aloud.
Elias did not ask it for her. He stood in the yard of a homestead he had never seen before that afternoon, with cedar dust on his hands and the smell of a garden and a creek in the air, and he felt something he had not felt in ten years of riding. It was not restlessness. It was the opposite of restlessness, and it frightened him more than any river ever had.
He had always left before dawn. He had always been gone before anyone could ask him to stay. And here he was, standing still, in the late summer light, with a broken fence at his back and two women watching him, and for the first time in a decade, he did not want to ride on.
Mara Ellison did not invite strangers into her house. She did not invite them to linger in her yard, either, unless there was work to be weighed and a price to be settled. So she did the next thing, which was to put Elias Ward to work where she could watch him.
Walk the fence with me, she said, "before you talk about mending it. I want to know what you see."
June fell in beside them, chattering as they went, and Elias was glad of it, because June's talk filled the spaces where Mara's silence left room for a man to wonder what she was thinking. June told him about the garden and the six horses and the milk cow and the chickens, and about the creek that ran cold even in August, and about their father, who had built the cabin with his own hands and taught them both to mend a fence before they could properly read. She spoke of Silas Ellison plainly, the way people speak of the dead when the grief has settled into the work of living, and Elias listened with the particular attention of a man who knew what it was to lose family and keep going.
Mara said little. She walked the fence line with her hands behind her back, her eyes on the ground, and when they reached the ruined stretch at the mouth of the valley she stopped and let Elias look his fill.
He crouched and read the sign again, slowly, the way his trade had taught him. The posts had not rotted and fallen; they had been wrenched, the wood splintered where ropes had been tied and horses had pulled. The rails were scattered outward, as if something had burst through from the east side, toward the valley, and then milled and turned. The hoofprints were deep and fresh enough that two nights of wind had not erased them, and among the cattle prints were the prints of shod horses, standing off, herding, driving. And there, in the dust near the broken gate, was a boot print with a worn heel, and beside it the drag mark of a rope.
This was no storm, Elias said at last, standing and brushing dust from his knees. "And it was no stray herd wandering in the dark. Men drove cattle through here. On purpose. They came from the east, they pushed straight through, and they let the stock scatter your horses and trample your garden edge before they gathered them again."