Part 7
Marco reached them on the grade at a dead run, and Tess handed him the baby before she said a word. The deputy drove Walt to the clinic in Callister, where a doctor Dana had worked beside for eleven years told him his hip was badly bruised, not broken, and that he was an idiot. Dana repeated the second part all the way to her house.
The road crew got a bulldozer across the bottom of the gulch on Wednesday. Walt rode up in the passenger seat of Gil Ostrander’s truck with a cane he hated and his right leg stuck out stiff in front of him. Dana sat in the back with a box of trash bags and a shovel and didn’t offer advice about the cane.
The flat at the mouth of the gulch was orange from one side to the other, frozen into ridges and hummocks, with lodgepoles lying across it like spilled matches. The road above it was gone in three places, and Gil had to drive the creek bed in one stretch. The creek was running again, loud and fast, steaming in the cold, the water still tinged the color of weak tea.
“State’s sending people up to look at the Queen,” Gil said. “And your well’s still running out the top, Mr. Kessler. We saw it from the plane.”
“I’ll get somebody on it,” Walt said. He knew exactly who would drill a relief hole right, and it wouldn’t be him, not with this hip.
The barn was gone. Only the concrete footings remained, scoured clean, with Ruth’s saddle rack bent flat against one of them. The house stood on its bench, but the water had come in through the lower windows and filled the downstairs kitchen to the counters with orange silt that had frozen solid. The front door hung by one hinge.
Walt stood in the doorway a long time. The table was buried to its top. The refrigerator had tipped against the wall. Mateo’s purple horse was gone.
The barometer still hung by the door, high enough that the water hadn’t reached it. He reached up and tapped the glass. Twenty-nine point eight, falling. The cold snap was finally breaking.
Dana climbed the stairs past him without asking. He heard her moving around up there, opening a drawer, and then nothing. When she came down she was carrying the green recipe tin with the reading glasses folded on top, exactly where she’d set them. The upstairs had stayed dry.
She held them out to him.
“You keep them,” he said.
“Dad.”
“I mean it. Keep them at your place. In your kitchen.” He paused. “I’ll be eating there all winter. I’ll be able to see them.”
She looked at him for a long moment, the tin against her coat. “All winter?”
“Till the ground thaws. Then we’ll see what’s left up here, and whether a man with one good hip ought to be living on it alone.”
Gil stayed with the truck. Walt went up the knoll on the cane, slowly, with Dana a step behind him. He didn’t ask her not to be.
Juniper was standing inside the iron fence. Somehow she’d shouldered the old gate open, and she stood among the four stones with her winter coat thick with frost, picking at the dried stalks of the yarrow Ruth had planted along the fence line. When she saw them she lifted her head and nickered, a low, rattling sound, and came over with her ears forward and pushed her nose into the front of Walt’s coat looking for oats.
“I don’t have any,” he told her. “I’m sorry. I’ll get you some.”
The snow beside Ruth’s stone was pressed down into a long hollow, frozen hard, with a few brown and pale hairs caught in the crust. Agnes’s tracks led out of it to the east, along the top of the ridge, and then turned and went down into the gulch, toward the Queen and the dumps and whatever was left of her den. They were two or three days old. She hadn’t hurried.
Below them, the creek ran loud and steaming the whole way down, talking again.
Dana had her phone out. She looked at the screen, then at him. Two bars.
“Go on,” Walt said.
She dialed and turned a little away, toward the gulch, the way she must turn away from a family in a hallway at the clinic. “Mr. Halloran? It’s Dana, Walt Kessler’s daughter. No. No, I’m calling about Monday.” A pause. “It’s not for sale. Yes, there was a flood. No.” She glanced back at her father, standing by the stone. “No, that’s not why.”
She listened a little longer, said thank you, and put the phone in her pocket. Neither of them said anything about it.
Walt brushed the snow out of the letters on Ruth’s stone with his glove until her whole name showed. Dana waited and didn’t help.
When he was done, he took Juniper’s mane in one hand and turned toward the slope. The path down was steep and icy where the sun had hit it the day before. He stood at the top of it a moment.
Then he held out his free arm to his daughter, without being asked, and she took it, and they started down together, the old mare following close behind.