He came stumbling into the cabin with an armload of dry cordwood and dropped it clattering by the stove. Once he’d gone back to the porch and stomped the snow off his boots and shook out his coat, he came back to the stove and stacked the quartered birchwood neatly beside it and opened the stove and fed it a log.
She sat silent in a rocker, not rocking, and watched him warm his hands. She tried but she could no longer read him, and he no longer looked at her. Silent fury and indifference and even shamed assent can seem like kin on some men’s faces.
They stayed that way until the snow ceased falling and the clouds cleared like a true sign of some brighter yet short-lived day. Like a tide withdrawing before the towering wave. Like a dying man briefly lucid before the warrant of a promised end.
If an inanimate thing can be literal, the hourglass she cradled and prepared to upend was that.
“Give me an hour?” she said.
“Till?”
“Until you come after me.”
He finally squinted at her in the cold gloom of the cabin. She saw something behind his eyes, but it was fleeting. His quick glance at the corner where a double shotgun was propped betrayed one route of his thinking, but only one.
She knew she could try to blame the rotgut whiskey for her transgression the other night, but she also knew that was a falsehood. She’d wanted to lie with John Joe Grady, her good man’s only good friend. Her predation had been both hot and calculated, an urgent necessity. She knew if the circumstances could ever be rerun, she would not hesitate to do the same. It was something must have been waiting in their stars, their bones. Their blood.
Outside, an ice-blue day was dying, the far white mountains golden-tipped and draped like pale giants by a work shirt sky. A robin’s egg dome.
“I don’t rightly know what you are,” he said to her.
“Who or what?”
“What. Deer or wolf. I caint tell.”
“You surely can. One don’t exist without the other.”
With that she tipped the heavy hourglass and placed it on the table and unlatched the cabin door. She wouldn’t append the insult of sentiment.
All was silent as she stood for only a moment, breathing the clarity of the heartbreak air into shifting lungs, learning a new truth: this was no longer home and she was no longer beholden. The static blue of evening was slowly fragmenting and softening with sundown, a solo wolf in the hills shaming for downright solitude the locomotive yowl of freight trains in the dimming valley.
He might be foolish enough to follow, but she didn’t think so, and it didn’t matter.
She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form.
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Image © Sam Williams