Chapter 8 The Man With the Horses

The Fain place had changed since morning. Delmar had the horses out of the corral and standing in the yard, saddled, both of them, and Judd was loading boxes into the bed of a flat-nosed truck that had been old when Delmar was young. The dog was in the truck. The porch light was on even though it was the middle of the day, because the middle of the day had gone dark, and the windmill was spinning hard in a wind that had come down out of the northeast and smelled of hot pine. "You came back," Delmar said. He was tying a bedroll onto one of the saddles, and he did it with the quick, sure hands of a man who had done it ten thousand times. "I figured you'd be down the road with everybody else." "I told you I'd come back." "You did." He pulled the last knot tight and stood back and looked at the horses. "That's why I'm still here. I got a neighbor up the creek with a trailer who says he can come for the horses before dark. If he comes, I go. If he doesn't come, I don't." "Delmar, the road's the only way out and it's going to close." "Then he'd better come." Bryn took out her phone. No bars, and the little circle in the corner told her the network had been gone for a while. She keyed her handheld instead and got a scratch of traffic, Gerta's voice chopped into pieces between bursts of static, someone two valleys over calling for a dozer that was already committed. The command post was talking, but it was talking in a language the mountain would not carry, and listening to it was like listening to people shout across a river in a storm. "You can't raise him," Delmar said, watching her face. "I tried at noon. His phone rings and rings." "Then we go to him," Bryn said. "Your horse trailer, or his, and we load them and we take the road like everybody else." "He's got a broke-down truck and no help and he's forty minutes up a two-track." Delmar shook his head once. "You and I both know he's not coming. He's a good man and he's not coming. He'll go get his own family first, and I would too." The dog lifted its head from the porch boards and watched the road, as if it could hear the truck that was not going to arrive. Ash settled on its back in a gray film and it did not shake it off. In the corral the two horses stood close to the fence, noses down, tails into the wind, and there was nothing in the world they could do for themselves and nothing a man could do for them that did not end on a road with the fire coming down on both sides. Bryn stood in the yard and let the arithmetic finish itself, because it was the only honest place to stand. One road. Two horses. A trailer she did not have. Sixty years of a life carried in a barn she could not lift onto a truck. Judd came around the truck and stood in the yard with his hands in his pockets, a tall boy with his grandfather's flat jaw and none of his grandfather's calm. He looked at Bryn and then at the fire above them, which was visible now between the trees as a brightness in the smoke, a wrong sunset in the wrong direction. "Gramps," Judd said. "We should go." "Don't you start." "I'm not starting. I'm saying it. There's fire on three sides." He turned to Bryn. "It's on three sides, isn't it? I counted the smokes this morning. One over the ridge, one up Kittle Draw, one back in the lightning stuff. That's three." Bryn looked at the boy and decided he deserved the truth more than his grandfather did. "It's on three sides. The one up Kittle Draw is the closest, and it's moving down the drainage toward this place." Delmar heard it and did not turn around. He put his hand flat on the horse's neck and stood there, and Bryn understood suddenly what she was looking at. It was not stubbornness. It was arithmetic of a different kind, the kind where you counted what you could carry and what you could not, and where you decided that if you could not carry the horses then you would not go, because the horses were the last of the life he had built and there was no version of leaving that he could stand to live inside. "You can't take them," Bryn said quietly. "Not on the road. Not with the wind coming. And you can't stay for them either, because the fire doesn't take horses and leave men. It takes everything in the field." "I know what it takes." "Then you know that if you stay, Judd stays, because he won't leave you. That's the part you're not saying out loud." She stepped closer so that the boy could hear her but the wind would not. "You've got a choice. Not a good one. But every man on that ridge up there has spent the last week making the same kind of choice and most of them made it wrong, and the ones who made it right are the ones who set down the thing they were carrying and walked out. You set down the horses. Judd carries you. That's the trade, and it's the only one on the table." Delmar Fain stood with his hand on the horse for a long moment. The windmill creaked. The ash came down and settled on the mare's back like gray snow. And then, without a word, he unbuckled the girth and pulled the saddle off, and set it on the fence rail, and did the same to the second horse, and opened the corral gate and turned them loose into the upper pasture. "Run, you stupid animals," he said, and his voice broke on the word in a way that had nothing to do with crying. "Go on." The horses went, first at a trot and then at a run, up the pasture toward the timber, blowing and tossing their heads, and Delmar watched them until they were out of sight, and then he picked up the saddle and put it in the truck. "All right," he said. "Let's go get the boy's things." They were on the road four minutes later, Judd driving, Delmar in the middle, Bryn in the passenger seat with the map on her knees, and the fire up Kittle Draw was close enough now that they could hear it through the open windows, that washing, crackling, freight-train sound that she had first heard on Galt Ridge and would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life. Then the wind swung hard around to the east, and everything changed. ---