A rider visiting a villager was going to occasion talk. No way not. But he could at least be smarter about it than that.
He watched the village kids throwing snowballs up and down the street. There were shrieks and name-calling, and no harm done.
Sleds plied the street further down, children amusing themselves on a white surface—while in Shamesey, snow meant muddied and dirty piles along the sidewalks. Here there were such snow-hills, but they were clean and clearly fair game for sledders.
On the way to the meeting he’d seen what was beautiful in Evergreen; in there, in that church, he’d seen what wasn’t.
But maybe they weren’t to blame for what they were doing. Ridley was mad and Ridley didn’t like the talk in there, but, he realized suddenly, the villagers in that church were proposing things that were going to hurt the village and draw off people the village needed, that had to be Ridley’s view of things.
And what was the truth? The notion in these people’s minds must have started small—just the notion that the staging area for everything they relied on was gone—and they were legitimately scared for their lives and safety up here.
So he couldn’t blame them too much at all for their plans, and he doubted Ridley did. When he thought about it—why shouldn’tthey take what was down there? They were overexcited and maybe a little quick to protect their own interests above others, but he didn’t think they were bad people.
He didn’t know what it would be to be a kid in this sparkling and white wintertime world that riders who went with the trucks would never see. Maybe a little more innocent—maybe less. He didn’t figure their minds. He’d be leaving come spring and probably wouldn’t spend another such winter—he’d be on his way and guiding the trucks and earning his living.
“Where’s the smith’s place?” Danny asked as they walked this street imperilled by snow-battles in which two riders enjoyed a curious immunity.
Ridley pointed a gloved hand toward the end of the village. “Near the gate, third building back.”
It wasn’t the building he’d guessed it was. It was much less conspicuous. “What are the big ones?” he asked.
“Miner barracks. Tavern.”
Of course. If miners and loggers came in for the winter, they had to have somewhere to stay. In Shamesey there were several hotels for the truckers who didn’t rent space in private homes.
For good and certain they didn’t stay near the horses in the rider camp.
“This house here, now,” Ridley said, and indicated a painted, prosperous-looking house on their way: the owner evidently didn’t believe, unlike most everyone else up and down the street, that a little space of sun was the signal to unshutter and enjoy the light. “This is the doctor’s. This is where they took the girl.”
“Huh,” he said, but nothing else. He didn’t want anything to do with the matter. And didn’t want to discuss Brionne in any detail. But Ridley said further, as they walked toward the rider-gate, that narrow portal that led into the camp:
“She lost her daughter.”
“The doctor did?”
“And her husband, right after. He was a good man. A real good man. All the kids were going skating—they do, when the weather’s been socked in for weeks: special outing. You know kids. Bouncing off the walls by then. Callie and I, every month or so we take ’em out to the pond just up the road, and sometimes you’ll see kids from Mornay join us. And there were some then. Faye, that was the kid’s name—she was fourteen the week before—Faye got to talking to a boy from Mornay, and she was kind of at that age, you know, skated off from the rest, she and the boy, just kid stuff, just flirting. It was about this time last year. The ice wasn’t solid in the west end—the waterbabies keep it churned up there by their burrow, where the falls comes out, and it wasn’t at all safe. I spotted the kids. I yelled—”
Ridley shook his head. Clearly it was a bad memory. And Danny didn’t know what to say. Maybe Ridley just wanted to talk about it, or wanted him to know something essential about the girl he’d shepherded in and what her situation was. He didn’t look at Ridley, just walked beside him.
“They skated off the other way from where I was,” Ridley said. “Playing games. She hit the thin ice. I yelled at her to go flat, and she maybe started to, but the ice split, and the fool boy tried to grab her—which put twice the weight on it. They both went under. He climbed out. She didn’t come up. Her father went in looking for her, without a rope, and he nearly drowned. The marshal and his deputy got her out, sucked into the waterbaby den, right where the water flows out. Just too late. Wasn’t anything to do. Sometimes the drowned ones will come around. But this one didn’t.” Ridley shook his head. “Her father went along quiet till spring and the ice started melting, just made his call on an old man who’d died, and then he went home and locked the office door and blew his brains out.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah,” Ridley said. “Darcy Schaffer, that’s his wife, she’s the surgeon for us and all the miners, only doctor we’ve got since her husband died, but she just isn’t opening her doors. I don’t know how the marshal talked her into it. I know what they were thinking when they took the girl there. But—”
“Hard on her, then, if the girl dies.”
“Yeah,” Ridley said. “Real hard. I’ll tell you, she was in the house when her husband killed himself. Middle of a storm, the windows were shuttered—she never unshuttered them after, just stayed like that since last spring. If you get a cut that’s not near your heart, you go to the druggist, that’s all. The Sumners—they own the pharmacy—they’ve gotten real good at first aid. And,” Ridley said with a sigh, “single women and doctors both being scarce here on the peak, God knows there’s been a lot of men on her doorstep this year—one guy, a real nice fellow, everybody thought sure she’d take to—and one night this last summer three drunk loggers carved each other up on her porch, trying to get clear space to talk to her on the subject. Didn’t impress her in the least. She’ll see to a birthing or go over to Irma Quarles’ place—the preacher’s mother. She’s got a chronic lung condition, and Darcy’ll come out and see her, but that’s about the limit.”
“Doesn’t sound as if the woman needs more grief,” Danny said, thinking to himself that he wouldn’t give a spit in hell’s furnace for the chance Brionne Goss would wake up and answer to the doctor rather than to her own brothers.
And God help the doctor if she did. God hope she never did.
But that was an ugly thought, an ugly wish, and he didn’t want to think it, because they were reaching the gate that led into the rider camp, where the horses might pick it up.
He buried his thoughts real fast in the meeting, and the argument, and the lawyers, none of which Cloud would understand, as Ridley pulled the chain that lifted the latch on the gate—a simple affair, a gate with a free-standing post that a human could walk around and a horse couldn’t—same arrangement as in the board and earth tunnel that ran as a snow-covered mound and windbreak beside them, like a little hill, the only structure that went right through the camp wall—or that the camp wall humped over. They went through into the rider camp, to home, at least for the next several months, into that warm bath of the horse-carried ambient, with <we’re here,> and <we’re here,> on either hand, human and horse.
That caused a nighthorse excursion out into the cold, Cloud and Ridley’s Slip immediately, and Rain, who seemed to have his inquisitive nose into every event. More leisurely out of the dim light and close warmth came pregnant Shimmer, and then with a thump of a wide-flung barracks door, came the human offspring, half into her coat and trailing a scarf, onto the porch and down the steps, to be caught by her father and swung aloft.