then, with a camp man's practical delicacy, a pair of his dry wool socks
pulled up over her wet stockings and tucked into the blanket like a treaty. He
poured coffee from the pot and put the cup into her hands with both of hers
around it and kept his own hand under the cup until hers stopped shaking
enough to hold the weight.
"Drink it slow," he said. "Coffee's hot enough to blister a mule's opinion." He
was a big man gone a little to rope and gristle, with a beard the storm had
combed flat against his jaw and scarred knuckles that looked as if every joint
had at some time been introduced to a trace chain, a wagon jack, or another
man's ambitions. His eyes, when the fire caught them, were the pale,
attentive eyes of a man who reads weather and stock and strangers for a
living. He fed his fire with pieces of a broken crate, one at a time, like a man
paying out a currency, and beyond the lean-to's edge his mules stood hipshot
and miserable in the rain, tails to the wind, ears down, enduring.
"You're camped in a draw in a flood year," Willa said, when her voice came
back to her, hoarse and strange in her own ears. It was not what she had
meant to say first, but the surveyor's daughter in her noted terrain the way
other women noted faces. "The wash back there took my horse not a half
mile off. If this draw runs, you'll be swimming by morning."
"Then we'll swim with local knowledge," he said. "This draw's a side gut. It'll
send the runoff past us polite, so long as the main creek stays in its banks,
and if it don't, I've got the wagon bed and six mules with strong opinions
about water. We've sat out worse, me and them." He jerked his chin toward
13
the picket line and raised his voice a degree. "Ain't that so, Preacher." The
nearest mule, a long-eared gray with a face like a disappointed deacon,
rotated one ear at the sound of its name and let it fall again. "Preacher's the
educated one," the man said to Willa, gravely. "The rest of the string takes
their theology from him."
She laughed before she could decide whether laughing was safe, and the
laugh shook something loose in her chest that had been wired tight since
Jonah Beck came through the schoolhouse door, and for a moment she had to
put the coffee down and hold the blanket with both hands and look into the
fire until the moment passed. The man attended to his crate wood and his
mules and the rain with a diligence that gave her the privacy of not being
watched, and she understood he was doing it deliberately, and that a man
who could be deliberate about such a thing in a storm camp at midnight had
more governance in him than most. When she trusted her voice again she
said, "You haven't asked my name."
"No, ma'am."
"You haven't asked what I'm doing out in this."
"No, ma'am. A person afoot in a night like this has generally had the day
explain itself already. Names'll keep till the weather's done deciding whether
we're going to be acquainted long." He poured his own coffee and settled
against the wagon wheel, and the lantern between them threw his shadow
large and small as the flame leaned. "Mine's Halloran, though. Since
courtesy's cheaper than coffee. Reuben Halloran. I freight between Fort Hays
and the river towns for whoever's paying toll rates." He said it evenly, a man
laying a card face-up to show the game was honest. "The mules answer to
Preacher when they're feeling churchy. I answer to Rube."
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"Willa," she said, and stopped there, at the edge of her own surname, like a
rider at a flooded crossing gauging the current. Halloran nodded as if a first
name were the complete and customary denomination of women found
drowning at midnight, and asked whether she was hungry, and when she said
she was not — a lie so transparent it had its own weather — he produced
jerky and a cold biscuit from his possibles bag and set them on the crate
beside her without comment, in the manner of a man leaving an offering
where a wild thing might find it when it was ready. She ate the biscuit in four
bites, hating her hands for their clumsiness, and then she slept — she did not
decide to; the decision was taken out of her hands by the fire and the coffee
and the great, humming exhaustion of a body that has spent itself to the dregs
— and even going down into it she was aware of her arm curled hard around
the oilskin bundle tucked inside the blanket against her ribs, her fingers
locked in its strings like a drowning woman's in a rope, and of Halloran,
rising once to tend the picket line, observing the bundle and the locked
fingers and saying nothing at all, which told her more about him than the
coffee had.
The morning came up the color of pearl. Willa woke with her cheek against a
folded grain sack and the canvas ticking softly above her, and for the first
breath she did not know where she was, and for the second she knew
everything, and the knowing had a taste like iron. The rain had stopped
sometime before dawn. What it left behind was a prairie scoured to a
brightness that hurt: every swale a sheet of standing water catching the sky,
every fence post wearing a bright necklace of droplets, the grass bent all one
way and glittering, and the air washed so clean that the hills she could not
have sworn to yesterday stood out twenty miles off, blue as slate. Steam rose
off the wet earth where the sun struck it. Somewhere a meadowlark was
conducting an audit of the silence and finding it satisfactory.
15
Her dress hung from the wagon's sideboard, dried to a board by the wind,