“Don’t talk like that,” Gertrude said into the wool of her blanket.
“Why not? It’s true.” He stopped the knife. The wood-scrap fell into the ash with a tiny *pfft*. “You think because we’re sitting here in the dry that things don’t die out there? That buck we saw yesterday on the ridge—the big one with the split ear—he didn’t make it two miles past the cedar break before the wind got into his brisket.”
“He was an old deer,” she said, her voice muffled. “He’d have died in the spring anyway.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Amos shifted his weight, the dry floorboards groaning under his hips. “You’re angry because I spoke my mind about the ledger.”
“I’m not angry about the ledger, Amos.”
“Then what is it? Is it my uncle? You act like because my name is Cutler, I’ve got horse-thief branded on the back of my neck every time I walk into a store in Austin.”
Gertrude threw the buffalo robe back with a sudden, rough jerk that sent a shower of dry horsehair over her boots. She sat up in the dim, freezing dark, her heavy woolen skirts bunched around her knees, her face pale and round in the hearth-glow.
“Your uncle didn’t brand you,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake now; it had that hard, flat certainty of a person reading from an invoice that didn’t balance. “You brand yourself every time you start talking about how nothing matters because we’re all just passing through the rocks. I have seventy-four dollars in gold sewn into the lining of my stays, Amos Cutler. That’s not for a tombstone. That’s for a small house with four glass windows and a well that doesn’t go dry in August. If you want to spend your life sleeping under a tarp and shooting wall-eyed mules, you can do it by yourself. I’ve lived in other people’s back rooms long enough to know what happens when the wagon tongue breaks and nobody’s around to splice it.”
Amos looked at her for a long moment, the juniper peg still held between his thumb and his knife. The blue light from the coals caught the sharp line of his cheekbone and the deep hollow under his temple where he’d taken a kick from a roan colt back in sixty-eight. He didn’t smile. He didn’t make a joke about her gold or her seventy-four dollars. He simply laid the wood down on the hearth, slid the knife into its sheath with a dry *click*, and stretched his long legs out straight toward the dead embers.
“It’s not twenty miles to Willow Creek,” he said quietly. “It’s twenty-four. And the wind is coming from the north-northeast, which means it’ll be in our teeth the whole way down the draw.”
“I know the draw,” she said.
“I figured you did.” He pulled his old wool coat up over his shoulders, settling his head back against the rough limestone of the chimney jamb. “Go back to sleep, Gertrude. I’ll keep the fire going until the tallow burns down.”
*
By dawn the snow had stopped, leaving the world outside the window hard, white, and so bright that even through the greased paper the light felt like cold iron against the eyeballs.
Amos was already up, his boots making a heavy, crunching sound on the frozen crust outside the door as he broke the ice in the horse trough with the poll of his axe. Gertrude stood by the small window, scraping a hole in the frost with her fingernail until she could see the gray line of the ridge where the post oaks stood up against the sky like charred fence pickets.
The buckboard was still sitting where they had left it behind the pen, its broken tongue sticking up into the air at an awkward, drunken angle, half-buried in a drift of wind-packed sleet. Beside it, the gray gelding stood with its head down, its long winter coat frosted white along the spine, blowing small, smoky plumes of breath into the stillness.
Amos came back around the corner of the cabin five minutes later, carrying a bundle of dry cedar kindling under his arm and an old iron kettle he’d found in the lean-to. His face was red from the wind, and his mustache was stiff with frozen moisture where his breath had iced up against the hair.
“The wheel hubs are frozen solid,” he said, setting the kettle down on the hearth with a heavy thud. “We’re going to have to pour boiling water over the spindle nuts before we can even hook the traces.”
Gertrude didn’t answer immediately. She picked up her heavy woolen shawl from the back of the chair, folded it twice, and wrapped it tight around her shoulders, crossing the ends over her chest until she felt the firm, reassuring pressure of the stays and the stiff paper packet of gold sewn into the lining.
“Amos,” she said, watching him blow on his red, stiffened fingers.
“Yeah?”
“If we drop the tallow, like you said last night… how much weight does that take off the axle?”
Amos paused, his hands halfway to his mouth. He looked at her sideways, his gray eyes catching the cold morning light that came through the newly scraped hole in the window-paper. A slow, dry grin—not the sharp one he used when he was teasing her, but something quieter, almost hesitant—touched the corners of his mouth.
“About three hundred pounds,” he said. “Maybe four if the salt has drawn the damp.”
“Then drop it,” she said.
He stared at her for a second, as if he expected her to pull out the ledger and prove him wrong by some German rule of arithmetic. When she didn’t move, he gave a short, dry nod, turned toward the door, and reached for his mittens on the peg.
“I’ll go dig the shovel out of the drift,” he said over his shoulder. “And Gertrude?”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about the oats. If the gelding gives out before we reach the creek, I’ll carry the coffee myself.”
She watched him walk out into the glare of the snow, his shoulders hunched against the wind, his long legs kicking up crusts of ice with every step. She didn’t smile, but she reached down, picked up her tin of bent nails, and slipped it deep into her apron pocket where she could feel the hard, familiar weight of every single one against her hip.
The grease in the iron skillet had gone gray and thick by the time Amos came back inside, his boots thudding against the threshold to shake off the crusted snow. He dropped a bundle of wet cedar roots by the hearth and stood rubbing his ears with his red, raw-looking knuckles, his breath pluming white in the drafty room.
“The left wheel-hub is cracked clean through the oak,” he said, not looking at her as he reached for the tin cup of cold coffee left from dawn. “Not just the tongue. The whole box is shot. We’re going to have to lash the axle to a fresh cedar pole if we want that buckboard to roll ten feet without shearing the spindle.”
Gertrude was kneeling by the grease-stained canvas bag where she kept her spare woolens, her fingers moving methodically through the folds of a gray linsey petticoat. She did not stop her work when he spoke.
“A cedar pole won’t hold the weight of the water keg,” she said, her voice small and dry in the small room. “You know how those limestone washouts are. One drop into a rut and the whole bed will twist.”
“It’ll hold if we take the water keg off and strap it to the gray’s saddle,” Amos said, taking a bitter swallow of the chicory-dark coffee and making a face. “I’m telling you, Gertrude, we aren’t rolling that wagon down the mountain as she sits. Not with four boxes of tallow and your mother’s chest of drawers bouncing around in the back like a pair of dice.”
“That chest,” Gertrude said, finally looking up from her petticoat, her round, pale face set in lines that had nothing to do with the weather, “belonged to my grandmother in Baden. It has three drawers and a walnut veneer that doesn’t rot just because some teamster from the Brazos thinks cedar poles are better than iron.”
“Your grandmother’s chest,” Amos said, his voice rising with that sudden, sharp edge that always made her want to retreat into the pantry, “is currently keeping three mice warm and adding forty pounds of dead weight to a horse that’s already dropping ribs like a dry barrel. If we leave it here in the shanty, some trapper will find it in April and use it for kindling. If we take it down the pass, we’ll both be sleeping under it when the axle gives out over the arroyo.”
He set the tin cup down hard enough to splash dark drops across the bare pine table. For a second, neither of them moved. The wind outside had shifted again, dying down into a low, mournful whistle that rattled the loose shingles on the lean-to roof—the sound of an empty world settling deeper into the frost.
Gertrude stood up slowly, her knees cracking in the silence. She was taller than Amos when she had her boots on, though she usually slouched slightly to keep from seeming so. She walked over to the window, her heavy wool skirts sweeping the floorboards, and looked out at the gray, featureless expanse of the cedar brakes stretching down toward the Llano valley like a spilled bag of charcoal.
“You’re in a great hurry to get rid of everything,” she said quietly.
“I’m in a hurry to get down before my toes drop off,” Amos said, though his voice dropped a notch, losing some of its salt. He reached down, picked up his jackknife again, and began scraping an old bit of pine resin off the handle with his thumbnail. “You think I like hauling trash over an iced-up ridge? I’ve got two mules down at the lower ranch and a saddle that hasn’t seen oil since the drought. I could have been sitting in front of the stove at the German tavern in Fredericksburg three days ago if I hadn’t stopped to pull your rig out of the mud by the creek.”
“I didn’t ask you to pull it.”
“No,” Amos said, looking straight at her now, his light gray eyes hard and bright in the dim room. “You just sat there on the seat with your hands folded in your apron, looking like you’d bought the road and found it wasn’t wide enough. You never ask for anything, Gertrude. You just wait for everyone else to be wrong so you can write it down in your little book.”