colorless and his lips blue with the cold, steadied the team. Steam rose from the horses’ hides and puffed from their nostrils. The sky was low and leaden overhead. Hobbling and stiff, Mac opened the coach door. “Watch that first step,” he cautioned. “The ground’s froze and liable to jar your teeth out.”
The coach was full. Groaning, the men helped one another with the women and the baggage. A slender, handsome woman and her two pert teenage daughters, traveling with their elder brother, were handed down last and stood in a tired, unhappy cluster, small and out of place in the desert landscape.
Helpless under the distraught glances of the women, Mac looked around the deserted yard. “Gals are usually out to meet the coach. Miss Grelznik, at any rate. Miss Grelznik!” he called. “Coach’s in.” Smoke curled placidly from the chimney and the stovepipe behind the house; chickens, daring out of their coop in the bitter air, pecked the ground in a desultory fashion. But there were no faces at the windows nor Imogene’s usual call of “Company!” to warn Sarah.
“Karl!” There was no answering shout. “What in the hell…” Mac muttered. “Begging your pardon, ladies. Go on inside, the gals must be tied up some damn place. Looks like they got a fire lit, anyway. Just make yourself at home.” Relieved to get his unaccustomed duties over with, he hurried back to the company of the livestock.
In the dining room a fire burned high, holding winter at bay beyond the windows. A homey smell of onions and roasting meat permeated the air, mingling with the mellow smell of old wood and old whiskey. Cold enough to risk impropriety, the misses pulled their chairs close to the wide hearth and lifted their petticoats to toast their feet on the grate. Their mother hovered near, keeping a watchful eye on their modesty and on itinerant sparks. She had ventured a few hellos, but no one had come.
In the relative warmth of the stable, Mac rubbed down the horses and covered them with heavy blankets. A rustling just louder than a mouse caught his ear and he looked up over the horse’s broad back.
“Mac,” Sarah whispered. She was as pale as a wraith, her face the same dull pewter as the square of sky that filled the open door at her back. She wore neither hat nor coat.
“Where’ve you two been hiding? I’ve a coach full-” Mac’s voice trailed off, then he said, “What’s happened, Sarah?”
She opened and closed her mouth several times without producing any sound. Her eyes were distracted and her hand shook as she pushed back a loose strand of hair. A horse kicked in its stall. She jumped as though she’d been pinched, and sucked in her breath sharply.
“Sarah?” Mac walked around the horse’s rump, the currycomb in his hand.
“Imogene is dead.” Sarah moved her hands before her, the little unfinished gestures of a crippled bird.
“Oh Jesus.” Mac looked at her, then at the floor. “Jesus Christ.” He set the currycomb blindly on the partition between the stalls, missing it by half a foot, and it clattered to the floor. Sarah came to take his hand, warming the maimed, gnarled fist between her small hands. “How did it happen?” His voice was thick. He looked for a place to spit, but didn’t.
“Two days ago-she was feeling poorly Sunday, she hurt here”-Sarah pressed her hand to the side of her abdomen-“so bad she couldn’t stand up straight. The next day, Monday, she…” Sarah’s throat closed, choking off the words.
“No need now.” Mac patted her shoulder clumsily.
“No, I want to tell it. Monday it was read bad, sometimes she didn’t know who we were.” Sarah spoke in the monotone of a schoolgirl reciting a lesson she’s committed to memory. “Monday, late, she died.” Turning her face to Mac’s shoulder, Sarah cried, then abruptly stopped.
“We-K-Karl and me-buried her. We-had to take a pick to the ground to break it.” She cried again and Mac stood miserably by patting her arm.
“Karl was under the weather too. Is he up and around?” Mac asked.
Sarah stared at him dumbly, then stammered, “Up and around. Yes. He is. Up and around,” she repeated. Then she cried, “Oh God!” and fell again to sobbing. In time she stopped and raised her eyes. “Do you want to see the grave?”
Mac nodded and she led him from the gloom of the stable. After the close, animal-warned air, the west wind cut like a knife, brittle and clean and so cold it burned to breathe. Holding tightly to his hand, Sarah went across the yard and around behind the house. Fifty yards away, in a small clearing in the sage, a broken rubble of clods bristling with sparse brown grass was heaped in a mound. At one end, a rough cross of two-by-fours had been driven into the earth. There was no name on it.
Moss Face was curled up near the unpainted cross, his nose buried under his tail. He whined as they approached, and Sarah gathered him in her arms and hugged him close. He’d grown long and rangy, a faded red bandanna was tied around his neck, proclaiming his domesticity.
Mac pulled his hat off, his hands red and white with the cold. Sarah stood at his side, looking past the grave to the dark Fox Range. A narrow wedge of blue showed above the mountains. Pale rays of a cold sun shone through the break in the clouds, firing the snow on the peaks.
After a time of silence, Mac dug his knuckles into his eyes and spat carefully downwind. “Where’s Saunders?”
Sarah jumped. “Karl? Karl has gone to Fish Springs for a wagon part.”
He stared at her incredulously. “Now is a hell of a time to be going for wagon parts,” he barked. “Why that goddamn, blockheaded, numbskulled, knucklebrained son of a bitch. If he had half the sense he was born with-”
Sarah started to cry, wailing loud and frightened like a child, and like a child, she clung to his arm. “Please don’t. Please.”
Subdued to a grumble, Mac walked with her to the house. Sarah’s nose was strawberry-colored with crying and the cold, and her teeth chattered. Mac took her to the warmth and privacy of the kitchen, where she recovered herself somewhat, the necessity of seeing to the guests making her dry her eyes and stiffen her back. When he left, she was tied into her apron and tending to a savory venison stew.
Mac let himself out by the back door to avoid the clutch of people warming themselves with fire and whiskey in the main room. His grizzled head bent against the wind, his collar turned up around his ears, he walked to the barn.
Gaps between the boards, widened each summer as moisture was sucked from the already parched wood, moaned as the wind blew over them. Hard white light filtered through, draining color until the straw, the worn wood, the horse blankets on the wall, the leather harnesses, the coils of rope, the cans lining the crossbeams-all the contents of the barn-looked dull and lifeless. Mac, too, looked bleached with time and life, his shoulders stooped under his sixty-odd years; his sparse, wiry hair was almost white, and the furrows that seamed his face made him look less gnomish than simply tired. He slumped down on a half-filled nail keg and the sharp, tearing sounds of grief, sobs robbed of tears from years of being strong, grated from him.
In the murky half-light of the loft above, a shape shifted and the faded red plaid of Karl’s shirt rose from the bales, the battered felt hat pulled low. For a moment, sympathetic gray eyes looked down on the grieving old man, then soundlessly ducked down behind the barrier of hay.
Sarah managed to show the guests to their rooms and get dinner on the table; then, exhausted to the point where she was shaking, she excused herself to pick at her own dinner in the comfort of her kitchen.
Mac joined her after supper. He knocked timidly. “Sarah, it’s Mac.”
“Come in, Mac.” She lifted her eyes from the congealed mess of stew on her plate and managed a weak smile. He sat down heavily opposite her, and for a while neither spoke.
The sounds of feet on the stairs, as the guests said their good nights and carried their candles up to bed, roused Mac from his thoughts.
“You go on back with Liam. I’ll stay on till Jensen gets a new boy.”
Sarah stared, openmouthed. “Mac! I can’t leave Imogene.” Confusion clouded her face, and tears welled up in her eyes.
“Jensen was going to put you out anyway. I was to tell you. Soon as he found somebody else. He’d always pretty much known Mr. Ebbitt never showed, but there weren’t no complaints and he was satisfied to leave things well enough alone. But your friend Harland Maydley make a stink. Said he’d go over Ralph’s head if he had to. Since the lease was signed by two women, it ain’t legal.”
“Karl could take over, couldn’t he? Sign a new lease or something?”
“And you’d stay on?” Mac gave her a long knowing look, and she bridled a little.
