She felt the hot, stinging flush rise up from her collar into her cheeks—not the red of the wind, but that ugly, shameful heat that always came when someone told the truth about her in a voice that didn’t care whether she liked it or not. She turned away, her fingers digging deep into the pockets of her apron until she found a bent three-inch spike she’d picked up outside the blacksmith’s shop in Llano.
“Go on then,” she whispered. “Get the cedar pole. Take the chest out and leave it in the snow. Do whatever you like with the wagon. It’s your team.”
Amos watched her for another long heartbeat, his mouth half-open as if he meant to say something else—something sharper or perhaps softer—then he snapped his knife shut, shoved it into his pocket, and walked out the door without another word.
*
By noon they had the buckboard rigged, though it looked less like a vehicle and more like a timber-raft meant for a flooded river. Amos had chopped two straight cedar poles from the thicket behind the spring, stripped the bark with his broadaxe until the pale, damp wood gleamed pink in the snow-glare, and lashed them beneath the bed with thirty feet of greasy rawhide lariat he’d soaked in the remains of their wash water to make it bite home.
The grandmother’s chest of drawers was indeed left inside the cabin, shoved back into the dark corner behind the flour sacks where the mice wouldn’t bother it until spring. In its place on the wagon bed sat only Gertrude’s tin box of nails, her three woolen blankets, the small iron skillet, and two bags of parched corn Amos had traded a spare saddle-blanket for back in November.
Gertrude sat on the wooden bench, her hands flat on her knees beneath her shawl, while Amos led the gray gelding out from the lee of the shed. The animal looked smaller than it had the day before, its ribs showing faintly beneath the frosted hair like the hoops of a half-stave cask, and it kept its head down, blowing sour, wet breath into the snow.
“You’re going to walk,” Amos said, adjusting the throat-latch on the gelding’s bridle with stiff, red fingers.
“I always walk down the steep part,” she said.
“This isn’t the steep part. This is just the lead-in. The grade drops off about two miles down where the creek cuts through the limestone.” He paused, looking her up and down with that critical, measuring squint he used for a fence-line. “You’ve got those heavy boots on?”
“They’re my father’s,” she said. “They don’t leak.”
“They’ll slip on the ice if you don’t keep your heels down.” He spat into the snow, the dark brown tobacco juice sinking instantly into the crust with a small hiss. “Get behind the tail-gate. If the cedar starts to slide when we hit the pitch, I want you to keep the drag-chain from wrapping around the hub. If that chain jams, the gelding’s legs are going to snap like dry bean-poles.”
“I know what a drag-chain is for, Amos Cutler.”
“Just telling you so you don’t go trying to save your lard tin if she starts to roll.”
They moved out in single file, the gray gelding picking its way gingerly over the frozen ruts where the mud had set like gray iron. The air was dead and cold, smelling of pine smoke and the sharp, metallic tang of coming snow that hadn’t yet found a cloud to fall from. Amos walked beside the horse’s head, one hand twisted into the near-side hame-strap, his long frame leaning sideways against the slope to keep the vehicle from tipping into the ditch where the scrub-oak had drifted over.
Gertrude walked ten paces behind, her eyes fixed on the muddy, manure-stained heels of Amos’s boots as they rose and fell against the white crust. Every few yards the cedar poles beneath the wagon bed would groan—a low, wet *thrum* that traveled up through the frozen ground and vibrated straight into the soles of her feet.
The world was entirely gray. The sky had lost its blue-white glare and turned the color of a wet slate shingle, pressing down upon the cedar ridge until the tops of the hills seemed to dissolve into the mist. There were no birds, no sound of cattle, no distant barking of dogs from the valley farms; there was only the steady, rhythmic *crunch-squeak* of the boots in the snow and the occasional sharp *crack* of a frozen branch snapping under the weight of the rime.
At the second draw—a steep, rocky chute where the limestone had broken away in jagged slabs like broken plates—the gelding stopped.
The horse didn’t rear or snort; it simply planted its four feet together in the slush, lowered its head until its nose almost touched the ice, and let out a long, shuddering sigh that shook its whole shoulder.
Amos stopped too, letting go of the hame-strap and wiping his sleeve across his forehead where a thin line of sweat had frozen into grey beads along his hairline. He looked back at Gertrude, his face pale and pinched around the nose.
“The chain’s caught,” he said.
Gertrude stepped around the high side of the buckboard, her heavy skirts dragging in the drift until the hem was caked in frozen brown slush. She knelt down in the mud beside the rear axle, her fingers—stiff and clumsy in their wool mittens—feeling along the underside of the cedar timber where the iron drag-chain had looped itself twice around a jagged root sticking out of the bank.
“It’s not caught,” she said, her voice muffled by the shawl she had pulled up over her chin. “It’s wedged between the bark and the stone. Give me the small crowbar from the tool box.”
Amos didn’t reach for the crowbar. He crouched down beside her, his long knees nearly touching his chest, and put his bare hand flat against the cedar pole.
“Feel that?” he said.
“Feel what?”
“The wood’s weeping. The frost got into the sap when I cut it yesterday. Now that the weight is coming onto it on the pitch, the whole pole is starting to crush down in the middle.” He looked at her, and for the first time since they had left the shanty, there was no mockery in his voice—only that flat, tired clarity of a man looking at a problem that didn’t have an answer in the books. “If we hit the bottom of this draw with three hundred pounds of iron and wet cedar pressing on that crack, the axle is going to take the gelding’s hind legs out before he can clear the creek.”
“We can unload the nails,” Gertrude said instantly, her hand going to the corner of the box beneath her elbow. “And the flour. We can carry them down the bank ourselves.”
“The flour’s ruined anyway—the bottom sack soaked through when the drift melted against the tail-gate,” Amos said, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a short piece of chalk he used for marking timber, and tossed it into the snow. “There’s only one way down this hill with that horse in one piece.”
“What way is that?”
“Un-hitch him.”
Gertrude stared at him. The gray gelding stood twenty feet ahead, its tail tucked tight against its hocks against the draft coming up the gully. “If you unhitch him, the wagon will run over us both before we reach the bottom of the cedar break.”
“Not if you’re holding the brake-lever while I guide the shafts,” Amos said, standing up with a grunt of stiff joints. He began unbuckling the belly-band with quick, practiced jerks of his fingers, his breath coming in short, gray puffs. “You get up on that box, Gertrude. Take the iron lever in both hands and don’t let it slip until I tell you the wheels have cleared the roots. If you let go, the whole contraption goes into the creek and we’re walking to Willow Creek with nothing in our pockets but your bent nails.”
“Amos—”
“Get up there,” he said, and his voice had that hard, flat drop to it that didn’t leave room for another word. He swung the gelding’s head around toward the upper bank, patted the animal’s frozen shoulder once with an open palm, and gave it a sharp slap on the rump that sent the beast stumbling up through the drifts toward the shelter of the live-oaks. “Go on, old man. Get out of the way.”
Gertrude climbed up onto the frozen wooden bench, her boots finding the foot-rest with a slippery, uncertain thud. The buckboard gave a sickening, lateral lurch the moment the horse’s weight came off the tongue, the cedar poles groaning like a ship’s timbers in a heavy sea.
Amos dropped down behind the tail-gate, his broad shoulders wedged directly beneath the cedar cross-beam, his long legs planted wide in the slush.
“All right,” he shouted over the wind. “When I say three, let the iron off two notches. Not three—just two. If you drop it too fast, the whole bed will jump the chocks.”
Gertrude gripped the rusted iron brake-lever with both mittened hands, her knuckles turning white beneath the wool. She could feel the vibration of the whole mountain coming up through the iron—the dead weight of the timber, the frozen mud, the winter and the seventy-four dollars in her stays—all of it resting on a Texas cedar pole that was weeping sap into the snow.
“Amos?” she called out, her voice thin against the gray walls of the draw.
“I’m right here,” his voice came back from beneath the tail-gate, muffled and heavy. “Count to three, Gertrude.”
She closed her eyes for half a second, feeling the cold air bite hard into the corners of her mouth, then she pulled the lever back until the iron teeth screamed in their rack.