“I’m saying that for this to work—for us to work—I need to feel like I know whose side you’re on, Karen. And where you’re going to be. I can surround myself with people I don’t trust anywhere. Only here is there a person I do trust. If you will let me.”
I swallowed. “I think I need to go for a walk.”
She nodded. “Don’t be gone for too long if you plan on coming back.” She poured herself another cup of tea, while I watched, and meticulously measured, leveled, tapped, and stirred one perfect spoonful of sugar into it. She didn’t argue with me about it being dangerous to go out in the night and the wet, just as I hadn’t argued when she went out to the barn.
Without looking up, she said, “Take your coat and good boots. The rain is cold.”
I really did mean to make sure I weren’t gone long at all. You know what they say about plans.
* * *
Well, mine worked out about as well as you’re probably expecting. When I walked out the kitchen door, the lowering sky was graying toward the solid slate of winter daytime, and the valley below was full of mist. I admit I stood on our porch for a bit and looked out over the city and the ocean beyond. You’d never see nothing like those lights all aglow in the sea of mist, and the cloud overhead catching the strawberry light as if somebody held a cloudy sheet of quartz up to the sun. It all looked like some kind of fairyland.
Where I grew up, if a night was rainy it was just pitch, dark as a stack of black cats, and there was still a kind of magic to me in the gas lamps and electric lights strung all over like jewels.
We didn’t have gas nor electric up here in the hills, though I reckoned it couldn’t be long before Priya sorted that and our whole house was running off a windmill or I didn’t know what.
Assuming she stayed.
I took an old Boss of the Plains that I’d got secondhand—thirty dollars for a brand-new hat was too rich for my blood, even if it was pure beaver-belly felt and waterproof as a good tin roof, but this one had been affordable despite having just a few moth holes and none in the crown—off its sheltered peg by the door and clapped it on my head to keep some of the wet off. Then I stood moodily on the porch for a while longer, keeping my hat dry for no reason at all except I was having a hard time getting going.
I had to take Priya for who she was. But she had to take me for who I was, too. And I guess we kind of also had to knock chips off each other until we got into a shape that fit together comfortable, at least most of the time. And those two things had to somehow be compatible.
It would probably be good for her to go. Better for her work if she went than sitting out here in some backwater with me. She could go to San Francisco. Maybe even Chicago or New York, someplace where there was real opportunities for somebody who could do what she could do.
And if she wanted to go, I’d . . .
I’d do what I could to help her in it. And hold down the fort here, and hope maybe someday she came home? Rapid was growing, and it might be a city to rival San Francisco someday.
Without really noticing what my feet was doing, I’d started to walk. The rain drummed into my scalp under the crease the original owner had worked on the crown of that buff-colored Stetson, running down to drop off the flat bit in the front of the brim in a steady stream. My neck stayed dry. It was a real good hat.
I decided to walk back along the ridgeline that rose up above our house. It was away from Rapid, but there was only trees on some bits of the back side, because the front side was steep and the not-so-steep bits of the back had been logged off already by the previous owners. So there was plenty of light reflecting up from Rapid and down off the clouds, which there wouldn’t have been if I’d wandered into a more wooded part of our land.
So the barrenness helped me, but still—if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have logged it out. I liked the trees, and they helped hold the ground together. I should go cut a bunch of blackberry canes once it warmed up a little and stick them in the ground there where they might bramble up and kind of steady the slope there. It was getting pretty badly gullied.
Well, I got up the hill all right, and I turned around and looked back down at the city, and our little ranch below, and the roil of mist that was the Sound beyond. The sweep of the harbor light wasn’t nothing but a streamer of glowing ribbon, and I couldn’t even make out the lighthouse on the headland from up here except as a sharp glow every three seconds as it made its circuit. You know every lighthouse is timed differently, so if a sea or airship captain is way off course they can look at a chart that’s got all the times on it and so long as they’ve got a pocket watch—and they’ve all got pocket watches—they can time the light and figure out where they are neat as you please.
Clay mud was turning slick as things you don’t like to think about under my boots, and even my beaver lid was starting to feel a little waterlogged. Also, I was starting to yearn for the warm, bright kitchen I could see below, and the hot tea and the pretty woman I might find inside—unless Priya’d given up on me and gone to bed already.
Well, if she had, she’d left a lamp in the window, and that was something.
I had just about taken my first step and surely not my second when I heard a whole string of loud, hard knocks, sharp as gunshots or the timbers of a mine cracking. The slope shifted under my boot, and I couldn’t tell in that endless moment of panic if it started an instant before the knocks or if the knocks set it off. My arms windmilled furiously, reaching out to the twigs of those sad scraggly pines clinging to the bit of ridge too steep to log out even though they were too far away to catch and they wouldn’t have supported my weight for as long as it takes a bull to buck off a kitten even if I did manage to grab ’em.
Your body does what your body’s gonna do, under those-like circumstances.
Then I felt the whole clay slope give way under me, and I was riding a landslide down. And that’s where I proved for good and all that I grew up riding half-broke what-you-have-’ems, and that my da taught me right.
Reader, I held on to my hat.
* * *
That mudslide tried to buck me off, too, but I stayed with it. I got my heels dug in and crouched back and just tried to stay upright, while every bounce and judder sent jags of pain through my bruised-up fajitas. I’m not sure if the corset I was still wearing from the evening out helped me or hindered me in staying plumb; the whalebone sure didn’t do my floating ribs no favors.
Collapsing down a hill at a high rate of speed weren’t that landslide’s only trick when it came to tossing an inadequately serious wrangler, though. It threw some rocks at me, too—fast-moving and bouncing high, though none bigger than a big apple—and one or two of those made contact. It also liquefied under me, like when you’re standing on the beach where the surf comes in and you can feel the sand just sinking away under your feet every time the water comes and goes.
I didn’t think about that then, though. Here’s what I thought about, in order, though not in words exactly:
Stay up. Stay up. Keep your hands free. Stay up. Duck! Ow. Stay up. Oh, not the tree. Stay up. I ain’t staying—
I felt myself going over, the mud on my left side sliding faster than the mud on my right. The slurry of god-knows-what was up around my thighs by then, pulling me around, and my bad hip—well, you probably know what it feels like when a half-healed hurt gets cranked around like that. I ain’t ashamed to say I screamed like there was no tomorrow, so loud I heard the echoes bouncing off rocks and raindrops and pine trees and probably the rocky shore of the Celestial Empire for all I know.
I’d have died then, in the mud and the rain and the dark, except that was when the landslide stopped. Not all of a sudden, but sort of trickling off, slowing down and then grinding to a halt. I whimpered. I was still, left-handed, holding on to my hat.
I just stood there—hung there, really, by my imprisoned legs on a cattywampus slant—for a long few minutes, panting and trying to wipe the mud off my face and out of my eyes with a hand t
hat was just as muddy and mostly good for making things worse. I was so shook it took me until my heart started to slow from a dead run down to a nice stately gallop before I realized that my left hand was clean, having been elevated and protected by my hat brim, and also washed well in the rain that was trickling down my upturned sleeve right into my armpit, if you don’t mind me being indelicate. So I wiped mud out of my eyes and flicked it away and rinsed my fingers in the rain, and repeated the process a few times until I could almost see again.
About then I realized I was alive, and I had to have a long stern talk with myself about the unsuitability of hysterics in young ladies as who is still in peril of their lives before I could begin to come up with a plan on how to go on. I was helped in soothing myself by all the damned questions in my head, however.
I’d heard the tommy-knocker, plain as day, right before or as the landslide started. Had he caused it? Had he been trying to warn me? Was he still out there somewhere with that damned big axe? Was the mudslide likely to start up again, with his help or without it?
I hadn’t felt a tremor at all. It was possible that I had caused the whole thing myself, with my own stupid clambering about on an unstable slope in a driving rain that hadn’t let up in half a week if not longer.
In any case, I felt a real permutation that I ought to get myself off that said unstable slope before it unstabled up again.
Oh good goddarnit, what is Priya going to think when I don’t come home?
I couldn’t think about it like that or I was going to start crying. Instead, I had to think like I was going to stagger in the door caked in mud and exhausted and get yelled at good for being out all night.
I tried lifting up the leg that weren’t screaming at me, and it was like pulling against a rod cast in cement. You know how if you stick your foot in something, mulch you’re shoveling or a big pile of seed corn or wet sand at the beach or what have you, when you pull it out there’ll be resistance, sure, but you’ll be able to feel the little particles of whatever moving on your skin a bit, shifting around like as you put the traction on ’em?
Well, there weren’t none of that. The mud around my legs had gone from being so liquid as to be unsettling to hardening up until it might as well have been all cold, hard metal. Even when I wrapped both hands around my own thigh and pulled at it, not so much as a grain of silt shifted. And the moving and struggling made my twisted hip hurt even more, a long swell of pain every time I strained against it.
I didn’t think I’d dislocated it again, at least. But it was surefire letting me know it existed. So I twisted in such a way as to put as little strain on it as possible—which made my other hip unhappy, but that hip just got unhappy, not nail-spitting mad—and tried to think my way out of this.
Priya might come looking for me once the sun was up, and she might find me if she did. Or she might not. Maybe she’d think I’d lit out after all, and that broke my heart to contemplate.
I could try shouting some more, but I was on the back side of a ridge from the town and from our house, both, so line of sight was broken and sound might not carry. It bounced around funny out here anyway, and might lead any rescuers right off a cliff.
On the other hand, I realized, I was really starting to shiver. Half-buried in the cold earth, with both it and the cold rain leaching warmth out of me . . . I might just be dead before morning. Or past reviving, anyway.
“Dammit,” I said. I cast about, mostly feeling because it was dark, hoping to find something flat and strong with which to dig. A bit of slate, some planed lumber, anything. If nothing else, the work would help keep me warm.
What I found was splintered branches, round jumbled stones, and mud packed so tight it might as well have been stone. A tree limb with a sharp end was my best bet—the Indian women dig for roots and rabbit nests and so on with those—but after a while of trying to break the closest one to a useful length I remembered I was still carrying around a chunk of quartz the right size for my hand with a sharp-chipped edge. I was just hefting it when I heard, much softer than before, five little knocks like midnight taps on a bedroom door.
I looked up, and there was my borglum, standing on top of the mudslide and glittering like stardust in the rain and dark. He had his pickaxe over his shoulder, and his beard was all bristled and full of rain, and with me a third buried as I was he was tall enough to look me in the eye.
He regarded me and I regarded him. Slowly, as if I were moving in front of a nervous cat, I took my hand off the chunk of quartz out of concern that it might have looked as if I were reaching for a weapon. He, in turn, set his pickaxe down on the ground and took his hand off the haft. It stayed standing upright, being heavy at the bottom, and he took a step away from it.
“Howdy,” I said, after we’d stared at each other for a mayfly’s lifetime. “My name is Karen.”
He leaned forward from his toes, in a way I don’t think any human except maybe a trained dancer could do, and stared me right in the face from a few inches away. I held as still as if a catamount was checking me over, arms at my sides, probably forgetting about breathing. He smelled pleasant, like cool caves, like stones in the rain.
He put one stone-hard finger against my chest.
“Karen,” I said one more time. I wanted to shift around to face him more directly, but of course my lower half was stuck where it was stuck, so I just twisted from the waist and tried to ignore the hip and corset twinges.
He reached down beside me and picked up that chunk of quartz. Held it up between us, leaning back a little to make room. Looked at the quartz, looked at me, then held the stone significantly to his forehead before dropping it between us.
I remembered Mrs. Horner putting her finger beside her nose. Not all talk is in words, now is it?
“Is that your name?” I asked him, words that didn’t seem to make any sense. So I touched my chest again, and said, “Karen.”
He bounced a little on his toes. Maybe that was borglum for a nod.
I reached down, picked up the stone, and touched it against my temple under the hat. Then I touched his chest. That was like poking rock as well.
Now he got real het up, wavering back and forth as if in a strong wind. I did it a few more times, as if to prove I got it, and he started to calm down. We wound up standing there grinning at each other like a couple of idiots while the rain numbed my fingers and my teeth started chattering with cold.
Head Stone? Stone Crazy? Rock Crystal? Rock Steady? Rock Smart? Rock Mind? Rock Will? Rock Head, like me in dealing with Priya?
I wondered how I would say his name out loud, if I really understood it. Heck, maybe his name was Rocks Remember and we were good as namesakes.
Rocks remember. Do rocks regret things?
“I want to go home, please,” I said, very softly, and knocked five times on the hard, wet ground.
* * *
He dug me out with his pickaxe, and the less said about that the better, though he was so good with that tool he got it done in a matter of minutes and a flurry of swings and never came close to touching me at all.
He helped me out of the mud and let me lean on him until I knew I could still walk—or limp, at least—and nothing was busted. And then he let me lean on his shoulder on one side and use his pick for a walking stick on the other all the long way home.
He left me at the bottom of the porch, and after I’d hauled myself up the three steps by main force of will I turned around to bid him good night and he was gone.
* * *
And that was how I got home from my not-gone-too-long walk, and found no Priya awake, but a lamp burning on the pastry stone on the kitchen table where it couldn’t splash and burn anything. That caution, so like my Priya.
* * *
I took off my mud-stiff clothes on the porch, because I couldn’t get any colder and there weren’t nobody around to gawp at what half of Rapid’s already seen anyway.
Then I went inside and wiped myself down with a washcloth and a pai
l of water she’d set by the fire to keep warm. My hair, for a wonder, had stayed braided up and pretty well clean and dry under the hat. I had stopped shaking with cold, but I was trembling with exhaustion when I finally dragged myself away from the split-log sawhorse bench in the inglenook and stumbled off to bed with Priya. She was warm and I was cold, and she didn’t pull away. I was trying to decide if I should wake her up to tell her I nearly died again—twice in two nights, and you know that ain’t even a personal record—when I fell sound asleep against her back, and I don’t think either of us stirred until the next morning.
* * *
I woke up alone in the bed, to hear her clattering in the kitchen. Tea, of course. I walked out, and she nodded at me a little coldly, and I nodded back with my cheery “good morning” wadded up in my throat like a spit-soggy handkerchief.
I sat down at the table and said conversationally, “I got into some trouble last night. That’s why I got home so late. I’m sorry.”
She stopped banging the tea things and stared down for a minute, then came over and set the pot and two mugs on the table. It was that jasmine tea from Chinatown, I could tell by smelling it. She sat down kitty-corner to me and folded her hands around her mug, which was still empty.
“That explains the muddy things on the porch, then.”
I poured the tea and was careful not to splash her. She didn’t move her hands. I set the teapot down. Then I told her about my night.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then: “I’m already too angry at you for being careless to be more angry at you, aren’t I?”
“I hope so,” I said.
* * *
We sat there for a while, drinking tea. Or staring into it while it got cold, to be fine and accurate.
She stood up. She walked away. She came back. She did that two more times while I stared at my tea.
Finally, Priya couldn’t take it anymore. “Karen, what do you want me to say?” She glared at me down her long, fine nose. We had been putting good food in her as fast as she could take it, and her body responded like a racing pony that’s just been waiting and waiting on a little rein.
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