It was minutes, hours, half the night.  They surfaced, exhausted, kissed one last time, and went no further. With caution at least partially restored, they settled into a tangled embrace, the blankets pulled up around them again.  Charlotte had only one thought, that she wanted this.  Everything about their time together told her that he felt the same way.

21

Suddenly, when nothing was supposed to change, everything had changed.  Charlotte held that idea warm inside her.  She expected to feel nervous and shy.  Instead, she was deeply calm.

She made corn cakes for breakfast, saving the ducks for dinner.  They ate in silence.

Her first thought was to clean the cabin.  She wanted to move out of it slowly, not all in a rush the following morning.  She didn’t want to feel as if she too were abandoning it.  Who knew?  Maybe she’d come back one day when everything else had fallen apart and this is where she would live.

She’d spread items out so far that it took some doing to get it all back into the wagon.  Then she swept the cabin again, reaching up with the broom for cobwebs in the rafters.  Not in my house you don’t, she said to the spiders.  Eventually, she knew, if no one claimed it, there would be birds’ nests in the eaves, mice scurrying in the dark corners, damp rotting floorboards, the chimney falling in.  But she didn’t want to dwell on that.  Instead she designed a chicken coop in her head and imagined where it would be, then a kitchen addition with a good cast iron cookstove, then a bathing alcove with a copper tub, and an outhouse and a smokehouse.  Soon she’d come up with a whole compound.  And who, she wondered, would be there to build it for her?  She saw the chimney falling in again.

She washed clothes in the creek.  Following that she brushed the horses.  Following that, she didn’t know what to do.  Knitting, she told herself.  Somewhere in the wagon was a shawl that she’d begun but the stitches were tiny, the yarn silken, and it was too frustrating.  It would have to be Moby-Dick again.

The gray horse was gone.  She waited, sitting under the tree, trying to comprehend Ahab or even Ishmael.  Before the waiting turned into anxiety, Chace appeared.  Her mind stopped focusing on the rifle by her side.

“Is there anything I should know about?” she said, trying to keep down all the other thoughts that came unbidden at the sight of him.

“Nothing.  But I found this.”  He held it out.

“It’s an eagle feather.”

“It is.”

“Where did you get it?”

“There’ve been two eagles feeding on a fish kill farther up the creek.  I thought maybe I’d go back today to see if they were still there.  They weren’t but the feather was.”