Wednesday, 2:05 p.m.
As long as the hammer rang, I had time.
I put it to myself like that in the kitchen, with the window over the sink open and the sound coming across the yard, one and two, one and two, a metronome set for somebody else's lesson. He'd said he'd be at the forge till three. I had put the envelope with the films in the bottom drawer of the house office, under my old vet-school binders, and now I stood in the hall with my hand on the drawer under the wall phone.
In eleven years I had never opened one. He'd never said don't. I had picked up the first, in the March of our first year, and seen the looped forward-leaning hand, and asked, and he had taken it from my fingers, mildly, as you'd take a knife from a child, and put it in the drawer. It was the only door in our house I'd never tried.
The morning after that first card he made pancakes, badly, and burned the first three and ate them himself, standing at the stove with his back to me, and neither of us said one word about the drawer. I had taken that for an answer. In eleven Marches I'd watched a card come and the day go flat and quiet around him like a field under snow, and I had let him keep it, because I thought love meant leaving a man one locked room. Standing in the hall with my hand on the drawer, I couldn't have told you what I was being.
Then I did what I'd have done for any patient I couldn't afford to lose. I weighed it. A betrayal I could survive, against a man I might not get back, and one clock, and a hammer that could stop at any stroke. The hammer rang. I opened the drawer.
I got out a butter knife and laid them on the kitchen table in the order they'd come, oldest first, and slit each one clean along the top. Then I photographed them, front and back, on the tabletop, the way I photograph a wound before I clean it, so that whatever happened next there would be a record of what had been there.
Cards, plain white, folded once. Each began with a number and ended in a dash and a letter, and between them a woman had put down as few words as she could and never left the room.
The first said Fifteen. Under it: There were flowers already. That was all.
The second said their mother asked for him. The third said a mother was dead, of a stroke, and the sentence didn't say whose. I read it three times and couldn't find the owner of the pronoun. The fourth I read standing up. Dr. T sold the practice and went. And under that, that nobody knew where. I ran everything I had against it and got nothing, no doctor, no practice, no Callum.
The fifth said she wasn't going to stop. It didn't say stop what. The sixth said their mother was gone and buried next to his father and that he could have come, and I'd known most of that already, from a night in February and a phone going face-up beside a plate. Two of the cards were only a number and the initial, as if she couldn't think what to add and couldn't stand to miss the date. The one from three Marches ago said The ice went out early. The one from two Marches back said someone had been asking in the post office for his address, and that she'd told them nothing.
Then the last, the one I'd put in the drawer myself, in March, with the rest, without a thought.
Twenty-five. Open this one, Cal. He knows where you are.
I sat down.
The numbers weren't birthdays. They weren't anniversaries either, because they began at fifteen and counted up by one every March, and this March had made twenty-five. Twenty-five years. Take twenty-five from this year and you get the winter Callum was nineteen, and a March, and something that had happened to somebody, that his sister had marked on a card every year since, to somebody who never turned one over. There were flowers already. Flowers mean a funeral.
Wren, he'd said, in the dark, with his eyes open on nothing. Is it cold?
I picked up Wren and the ice went out early and held them side by side, and they had nothing to say to each other that I could prove.
He knows where you are. It could be a warning. It could be a woman building a paper trail that said she had warned him, for whoever she meant to hand him to. I have read a great many consent forms, and I know a warning and a threat can be the same sentence with a different face on. The caller had known about Inga's photographs. The only person I could name who knew about Inga was the woman who'd written these, and I didn't have her name. I had D., and a box in Port Ashby.
Outside, the hammer stopped. My hands went out over the table on their own.
It started again. One and two.
I opened the laptop. Kettle Lake 2001 death. I got a walleye derby, a hockey roster, a zoning notice as a scanned PDF, and the Kettle County Record, which has a digital archive that starts in 2009. Before that, a gray banner: Coming soon. I tried Kettle Lake March 2001 and died and Reeve, and I got a lot of Reeves and none of them mine. I typed Wren* beside it and got a bird sanctuary and a woman who sold quilts.
So I tried the one name I did have, from a porch in February. Inga Reeve.
It was the funeral home in Kettle Lake, Nyberg's, a plain page in a serif font. Inga Marie Reeve, 71, died peacefully at home on February 2. Preceded in death by her husband, Leif. Survived by her daughter, Dagny (Port Ashby), and her son, Callum. A box where a photograph goes. A gray silhouette in it, no face. Under it a line about a reception at the Lutheran church, and in lieu of flowers.
Dagny. I said it out loud in the empty kitchen, once, to hear what it weighed.
I found her in four minutes. A one-boat towing outfit on the south shore of Lake Superior, a page with a photograph of a red-hulled tug called the Inga R., and a number. There was a woman at the rail in the picture in a watch cap, turned half away.
I called it at five past three.
It rang five times. Then a voice, clipped and rough, a smoker's voice: This is Dagny. I'm on the water or I'm asleep. Say what you need. And under it, steady as a pulse under a coat, a diesel engine turning over. The greeting had been recorded standing next to it.
"This is Hanne Sorley," I said. "I'm Callum's wife. I'd like to talk to you about him. Please call me."
I hung up. He knows where you are. An engine idling under a voice. And another voice, on another phone, that a machine could make into anyone. I looked at the eleven cards until the kitchen began to feel like a room where someone was about to be told something, and then I left them where they lay and went out to the barn.
Pilot stood at her hay net working through it in the plain gray light of the aisle. Her left side was loud. I ran a hand down her near foreleg out of habit and found it cool and dry, and she put her ears back at me, and forward, and went on eating. It was the nearest thing to good news I'd had since Tuesday, and I stood there and took it as if it were mine.
Tires came up the lane at twenty past three, slow, as a man drives who has a trailer behind him most days and has forgotten he isn't pulling one. A pickup stopped by the barn door. Mr. Aubrey got down out of it in stages, one hand on the door frame and one on the seat, and reached back in across the cab for a paper sack.
"I won't keep you," he said, before I'd reached him. "I know what you look like when you've been up all night, Hanne, and you look it."
He was a tall man and had been a big one, and the plaid shirt was buttoned to the wrists in June. He held out the sack in both arms: senior pellets, a brand the feed mill has to order.
"She's a snob about her supper," he said. "I didn't want her going off it on your account."
"She's eating like it owes her money. She passed the oil at six."
"Did she." He went past me to her door and took his cap off and held it against his chest, as he does for her, and looked at her over the boards. Pilot swung her big head round and put her nose in his shirt and blew. He laughed, low in his throat, and laid his hand flat on her blaze. "There's my girl. There's my silly girl. You gave us a night, didn't you."
I set the sack down by the feed-room door. Across the yard the hammer went one and two.
"And I owe you," he said, without turning round. "Your machine rang me Monday."
"My machine."
"The one that talks like Marit. This is Sorley Equine with a reminder about your account. I said, 'Marit, I'm sorry, it's on the kitchen table under the phone book,' and she went right on about the balance due. I apologized to a recording for the best part of a minute before I caught on." He took a folded check out of his shirt pocket and held it out between two fingers. "Tuesday's in there too. I guessed high."
I put it in my back pocket without looking at it. We'd bought the calling service in the spring, when Osric and I started saying every dollar out loud. It rings three hundred clients a month in Marit's recorded voice, at whatever hour she sets, and nobody likes it, least of all Marit. I hadn't pictured it ringing a man like him in his kitchen.
"You didn't have to drive over for that."
"I had to drive somewhere." He put his cap back on and took it straight off again and looked into it. "I'll tell you the rest while I'm standing here, or I'll lose my nerve and write you a letter. I've got a thing in my pancreas. They found it in April. There's a young fellow in Rice Lake who'd like to put me on the chemo, and I've decided not to fuss." He said it as he'd have given me the price of hay. "He tells me I won't see another winter. I believe him. He seems a truthful boy."
The hammer rang. The mare pulled a mouthful out of her net and stood there with it hanging out of her lips, listening to nothing.
I looked at him properly then, as I'd look at a horse an owner swears is only a little off. The belt with a new hole punched in it by hand, a quarter inch past the old wear. The collar standing away from his neck. The whites of his eyes gone the yellow of old piano keys, which no barn light does.
"I'm sorry, Paul."
"Don't be. I've had a good long go at it. Better than some." He turned the cap in his hands. "Now here's the awkward part, and I'd ask you to let me get to the end of it. I've nobody to leave her to. There's no family left to speak of. There's a nephew of my wife's in Duluth who'd sell her to the first man with a stock trailer and be sorry after." He looked at the mare and not at me. "I've been putting it off. Then Tuesday night I stood right here and watched you with your arm in her to the shoulder, talking to her the whole time, and I thought, well, there it is. So." He cleared his throat. "Would you take her? After."
I opened my mouth, and nothing that was ready came out of it.
I had a barn full of other people's horses and a practice two payments behind, a man in my house whose keys I had buried in beet pulp and a voice that had my figure to the dollar. And here was this long, careful old man in my aisle, asking me for a stall as if it would cost me money, and handing me the worst thing he had as plainly as he'd handed me the feed. I had liked him well enough for two years, a courteous client with a mare too heavy for him who stood in my aisle as if it were a church. Standing there, I liked him a great deal.
For a second I wanted to tell him. The whole of it, the stair and the voice and the cards on my table. I had it in my mouth. Then the voice came back to me: If you speak to anyone, I will know.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"That's all I'm asking. Think about it." He smiled, a long slow smile that took most of his face to do. "She's no trouble. She's only got the one opinion, and it's water. She won't put a foot in it. You don't argue with her about it, you go round."
"I'll remember."
"I know you will." He put the cap on and settled it, and this time it stayed. "Let her stay on till Saturday, if you'd be so good. I'll come for her then, or you'll ring me and say she's yours. Either one's fine."
He put his hand on her neck once more on his way past and got into the pickup in the same stages he'd got out, and I stood in the barn door and watched him go down the lane at his trailer speed, lifting two fingers to me off the wheel at the bend. Pilot put her head over her door and watched him too, with her ears up, until the dust had settled on the lane.
* I had stopped hearing the hammer somewhere in there, as you stop hearing a clock. It wasn't ringing now. The forge ticked, cooling. The shop door stood open on nothing.
I ran. The kitchen door was open, and the light lay across the table on eleven white envelopes cut open along the top, and eleven cards fanned out in their order, and the laptop with Inga Reeve's funeral notice on the screen, and my husband standing in the door to the front hall with a glass of water in his hand.
He'd washed his face. His hair was wet at the temples. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the table, at the card nearest him, and then along the row of them, one after another, like a man walking down a line of stalls.
He stopped at the last one, the one that said Open this one, Cal, laid open along the top by my butter knife. He touched the cut edge with one finger, the way you'd test a wire.
"Cal."
He set the glass on the counter. He put it down so carefully it didn't make a sound.
He looked at me. There was nothing in his face that I could have named. It wasn't anger. It was a door that had been closed with great care from the inside.
He didn't say anything. He turned around and went out through the hall and the front door, and it shut behind him with a small clean click.
I gathered the cards. I put each one back in its envelope in the order it had come and laid the envelopes in their row again, oldest first, because I couldn't make myself put them back in the drawer, and shut the laptop, and it took a long time and I did it wrong. I called his name to the empty hall. Then I went to the window over the sink.
He was crossing the yard. He didn't hurry. He went past the truck, past the shop, on toward the barn, and went in through the aisle door. Through the aisle window, forty yards off, he walked the length of the barn. He stopped at the feed room. He went in.
When he came out, there were beet pulp shreds clinging to his right sleeve to the elbow, dry and brown, and he was holding a ring of keys.
The stove clock said 4:15. Not quite twenty hours to noon.
The engine caught out in the yard, a big diesel turning over cold, and I was already through the door and running for the front of his truck.