“So?”
“So you want to keep owning some things, at least.”
“Sure, but I resent the worry of it.” He ushered her in, and she stood in darkness as he lit a kerosene lamp and then another, revealing a squatting black stove, a rocking chair, a cot, a bearskin on the floor, antlers on the walls. “Take off your boots, would you?”
The cabin’s interior was perfectly, painstakingly tidy. The blanket on the cot was tucked smoothly around the thin mattress; another was folded across the foot. His few dishes were stacked on a shelf above the sink. He hung his rifle on a rack that held three others, their stocks and barrels gleaming.
“Did you cut the logs yourself?” she said.
He was pouring whiskey into tin mugs. “I did. But I bought milled lumber for the roof and rafters.” Handing her a mug and indicating the rocking chair, he said, “Sit there.” He busied himself lighting a fire in the stove. When he sat on the cot, their knees were almost touching.
“You keep your place very tidy.”
“I had enough mess for a lifetime with Gilda.”
“You were so savage when you were little. And now look at you—sweeping and folding. Everything in its proper place.”
“Everything savage stays outside now. In its proper place.”
“Do you have a girl, Caleb?”
“Can’t I keep my cabin clean without you seeing a woman’s touch?”
“It’s not that. I’ve just wondered ever since we stopped…” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. They’d never put a word to it, anyway. It had always been a kind of ellipsis.
He leaned back against the wall, his legs crossed. “There are girls,” he said, “but there’s no girl.” He watched her. She saw a languid stirring of his old slyness. She thought he would make a joke or a proposition, but he said, “I’ve been on Barclay Macqueen’s ranch before.”
“Bannockburn.”
Caleb nodded. “Some associates of his hired me for a hunt. We had permission. Nice country. The house is something.”
“Good or bad?”
He shrugged. “Depends on your taste in houses.”
“I’ve only seen it from the air. Even though I might—” She stopped.
He finished for her: “Go to live there.”
She nodded. Her chest was tight. Why was she afraid? Caleb got up to pour more whiskey into her mug. He stood beside her, his hand on her nape. His touch was cool. She’d forgotten the coolness of him.
“Who cuts your hair now?”
“Someone who charges in money.”
He tugged her out of the chair and onto the floor with him, sideways into the triangular space between his legs, loose in his arms. For a long time, he held her in silence. He kissed her mouth, but the kiss was innocent, led no further. Everything that had ever happened with Caleb seemed innocent now, compared with Barclay. “Your heartbeat is coming through your whole body,” he said.
“I’m telling it to stop.”
“Not stop.”
“To slow down. It’s not listening.”
“I could help you go away. There are places where he wouldn’t find you.”
She resented Barclay horribly; her gratitude to Barclay was bottomless. She wished she could vanish and never return; she couldn’t bear leaving him. Who are you?
“The funny thing is I think I love Barclay. I’ve never admitted that before.”
His cheek was against the top of her head. “You have a strange way of showing it.”
She knew she should leave; she wished they could crawl into his cot together. “It’s a strange kind of…” She trailed off. She could not say the word love again. “It’s a strange thing.”
* * *
—
Barclay knew she had flown a man from the mountain strip back to Missoula, and he knew that man was Caleb, and he knew she’d driven him to his cabin and stayed inside for three hours. “Three hours,” he said. They were standing in the kitchen of the green-and-white house, the table between them. “Tell me, what could possibly have kept you busy for three hours?”
“If you sent a spy after me,” she said, furious, “he probably looked through the window. So what did I do?”
“You screwed him.”
His certainty drew her up short. “But I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie.” Black eyes, stark freckles.
“I’m not. You’re lying. I know because I’m telling the truth.”