Part 4
“No,” Dana said, before he’d moved.
“She’s been lying up there since last night. She’s not interested in us.”
“She’s a grizzly bear, Dad.”
“She’s your mother’s bear.” He took the shotgun off the porch where he’d leaned it and held it out to her, stock first. “You take this. If she comes at me, wait till she’s on me. Not before.”
“I’m not going to shoot Mom’s bear.”
“Then you’d better hope I’m right.”
He went up the hill slowly, partly because of his hip and partly because slow was the right speed. He kept his eyes off the bear’s face and talked the way Ruth had talked, the voice for the post office lady.
“Evening, Agnes. It’s just me. It’s just the husband.”
The bear lifted her head. Forty yards. Thirty. He could see the frost on the long guard hairs of her shawl, a pink scrape across her muzzle, and the steam of her breath rising straight up in the still air. At twenty-five yards she got to her feet, all at once, and his knees locked. She didn’t come toward him. She walked uphill, away from the fence, maybe twenty yards, and stood there with her back to the gulch, watching him.
Walt reached the iron fence and put his hand on it. Ruth’s stone was half buried, with snow packed into the letters of her name. He hadn’t stood here since they’d lowered her into ground so frozen the county had to thaw it with a propane heater for two days. He had told himself the knoll was too steep for his hip. The knoll was not that steep.
He held up Dana’s phone. One bar. Two. It buzzed in his hand with a message that had been waiting all day for a signal: Still on for Monday? We can’t wait to see the place! — Jen & Rob Halloran. He thumbed it off the screen and dialed 911.
The dispatcher’s name was Corinne, and she sounded about nineteen. She took it all down and read it back to him, and he could hear her trying to decide whether he was a crank. When he gave her the name of the mine, she paused.
“The deputy for your district’s on a rollover on the highway. I’m going to notify the county road department and the sheriff, and someone will come close the gulch road at the county road as soon as they can. Sir, is anybody in the path right now?”
“A woman and two little kids on the flat. The Ruiz place.”
“Can you reach them?”
“I’m going to try.”
Dana had Tess’s number from the night of the croup. Tess picked up on the second ring, alert and frightened the way people are when the phone rings at dusk for no reason.
“Marco’s on a double at the mill,” she said once Walt explained. “He’s got the truck. My car hasn’t started since this cold came in. Mr. Kessler, I’ve got a seven-week-old.”
“I know. We’re coming down. Get the kids dressed warm. Don’t pack.”
“How long?”
“Half an hour.”
“Okay.” He heard her breathe. “Okay. Mateo, find your boots.”
He looked over at Agnes before he started down. She hadn’t moved. She stood on the high ground above the graves with her nose toward the Queen, waiting for something he couldn’t hear.
Down in the yard, he went to the round pen first. Juniper came to him with her ears flicking back and forth between him and the hill. He slipped her halter off and hung it on the post. If the water came down the creek, a penned horse would drown in the lowest corner of the ranch. Loose, she had a chance.
“Go on,” he said. “Go up.”
She stood a moment, then turned and trotted up the slope toward the knoll. She stopped short of the bear, maybe fifty yards off, and planted her feet. The two of them stood up there together in the dusk like neighbors at a property line.
Inside, Dana was moving fast. She’d found his pills, his good gloves, the wool cap Ruth had knitted. She put the green well log in her coat pocket without asking, which he noticed. Then he heard her stop.
She was standing in front of the kitchen shelf with Ruth’s recipe box in her hands. It was a dented green tin, the cards inside soft as cloth from use. Ruth’s reading glasses still lay on the windowsill beside it where she’d left them the morning she died, and Walt had dusted around them once a week for two years.
Dana picked up the glasses too. Then she went into the bedroom. When he came to the door, she was reaching for Ruth’s blue robe, still on its hook behind the door.
“Dana.”
“Just give me a minute.”
“We don’t have one.”
“You’ve had two years!” She turned around with the recipe tin in one hand and the glasses in the other, and her face had come apart. “You kept every single thing exactly where she put it. Her boots are still by the door. Her toothbrush is still in the cup. I come up here and it’s like she just stepped out to the barn, and I’m the only one who has to remember she didn’t. And now I’m supposed to leave it all for the creek?”
He had never heard her say any of this.
“I left it because I couldn’t stand to be the one who moved it,” he said.
She stared at him.
“That’s the truth. Not because it was hers. Because I didn’t want to be the one.”
He crossed the room and put his hands over hers, over the tin and the glasses, and held on without taking them.
“Your mother,” he said, “would be in the car right now with the engine running and the heater on high, honking at us.”
Something came out of Dana that was half a laugh. She set the recipe box on the dresser. She set the glasses on top of it, folded, the way Ruth always did. Then she wiped her face with the back of her wrist and walked out past him without a word.
He followed her. He didn’t look back at the room.
Dana had the hatchback running and turned around before he had his belt fastened. She backed past the pump house, and her headlights swept across it in the blue dusk, and Walt saw the frost on the little building’s walls shiver.
Behind them, with a crack like a rifle shot, the well blew its cap. A column of water rose out of the pump house roof, ten feet into the air, and fell back as steaming spray across the yard…
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