counting. The wire sang in the wind at a pitch that changed with the gusts,
and once, when lightning strobed the world white, she saw the posts
marching away over the swells in both directions, black and regular and
beautiful, the only straight thing left in creation, and she fixed her jaw and
walked it.
The hail stopped. The rain did not. It settled into the steady, slanting, engined
downpour of a storm that has finished introducing itself and means to stay,
and the cold began its subtraction in earnest. It took the feeling from her
fingers between one post and the next, so that she had to look to be sure her
hand was closed on the wire at all, and it took the shivering — which
frightened her more than the cold itself, because she knew from the stories
that the shivering is the body still fighting, and its failure is the negotiation
ending — and it began, politely, like a clerk with a ledger, to suggest
substitutions. Rest a moment. The grass is soft where it bends. The posts will
be there when the rain stops. Her father's voice, which she carried the way
10
she carried the compass, answered these suggestions with the contempt they
deserved: Josiah Cade, who had once walked eleven miles out of a January
norther holding his frozen gloves in his teeth, did not sit down in weather,
and neither, said the voice, does any child of his. She put the posts between
herself and the clerk's suggestions and kept counting. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
Thirty-three. Somewhere behind her, back in the drowned dark, men with dry
coats would be supposing she had gone to ground, or been taken by the creek
— or, she permitted herself the thought, cold and bright as the compass
needle, they would be supposing correctly that the storm had done their work
for them and erased her off the prairie as neatly as it had erased her tracks
and the road and every sign that she had ever fled at all.
She was on the post she would later count as the thirty-ninth when the
process that had been carrying her declined to produce the number forty. She
stood with both hands on the wire and her forehead against the wet wood,
and the clerk with the ledger was saying, with great reasonableness, that a
person could not be blamed, that horses fell and women drowned and the
prairie kept what it was given — and she was composing the beginning of an
agreement with him when she saw the light.
It was not lightning. Lightning by then she knew the way she knew her own
pulse — the whole world snatched white and thrown back into darkness.
This was smaller, and lower, and it stayed. A yellow point, swinging a little,
down in a hollow off to her left where no light had a business being, and she
stared at it through the rain with her heart slamming up into her throat, and
she thought: it is a lantern. She thought: it is a trick of my eyes dying. She
thought: it is Coulter's camp and I am saved into the wrong hands. And then,
because the clerk's ledger had no entry for a lantern, and because the voice of
Josiah Cade had nothing to say against walking toward a light, she let go of
11
the wire — it cost her more than anything that day, that letting go — and
turned down the slope toward it, walking on feet she could no longer feel,
one hand out before her like a woman in a dark house, and the light swung
and steadied and grew, and under it she made out the shape of a wagon sheet
rigged as a lean-to, and the black picketed shapes of mules, and a man
standing up out of the lantern light with a rifle in his hands and his hat
running water, saying something she could not yet hear over the rain.
He very nearly shot her, which she forgave him for later, and he very nearly
tripped over her first, which he did not forgive himself for at all. He had
heard his mules go restless on the picket line — a freight man hears that the
way a mother hears a stair — and had come out from under his wagon sheet
with the rifle and the lantern to see what the storm was worrying them with,
and he found it standing in the rain at the end of the line in a dress black with
water, one hand out, making no sound. He said afterward that if she had
screamed he might have fired from pure startlement, and that he did not care
for the arithmetic of how close it had been. What he said at the time was,
"Well. You're not a mule," in a tone of great reasonableness, and then the
rifle was down and he had hold of her arm above the elbow, and the strength
in that grip was the first real fact her body had been offered in an hour, and
her knees, which had been negotiating, took the offer and folded.
She came back to herself under canvas, out of the rain for the first time since
noon, with the smell of wet wool and coffee and mule all around her and a
fire going in a scooped pit at the open side of the lean-to. The man was
working over her the way she had seen farriers work over a cast horse: swift,
impersonal, attending to the machinery. He had her boots off and her feet in
his hands, chafing them with a roughness that hurt beautifully, and when she
tried to sit up he pushed her back down with one forearm, not ungently, and
12
said, "You'll sit up when I say your toes are yours again. I've seen feet come
out of a night like this the wrong color, and it ain't a thing I charge extra to
prevent." He got her out of the worst of the wet — her outer dress and shawl
spread steaming by the fire, a blanket of his own around her shoulders, and