The Thaw Will Come

Hannah Coyle had learned to tell the weather by the way the dog wouldn't settle, and tonight the dog would not lie down.

She had homesteaded the quarter-section alone for two winters now, since the fever took Tom and the ground was too iron-hard in January to bury him deep. She had broken the sod he'd marked, set the corner stones he'd argued for, and learned the thousand small cruelties of a land that did not care whether a woman lived or died on it. The plains ran flat and pale to every horizon, a country with no wall to lean against, and she had stopped expecting it to be kind. She only expected it to be true. The cold would come. The wolves would come. Men would come, in their season, and you met each the same way — squarely, with the door barred and the rifle oiled.

The first flakes had started at noon, fine as flour, and by dark the wind had teeth. Snow does not fall on the high plains so much as it is hurled, sideways, in long howling sheets that erase the world to arm's length. She had brought the cow in close and forked down hay and counted herself ready. Then the dog stood up from the fire with its hackles raised and looked at the door, and a sound came through the storm that was not the storm.

A knock. Then a slump, as of something giving up against the wood.

She did not open it at once. A woman alone does not open a door at night in a blizzard for the asking.She lifted Tom's rifle from its pegs, thumbed back the hammer, and called through the planks, "Stand off and name yourself."

What came back was not a name. It was a young man's voice, half gone with cold, saying only, "Please," and then nothing.

She opened the door against the weight of him and he fell across the threshold into the firelight — a man not much past twenty, snow caked white in his hair, one hand pressed to a side that bled dark through his fingers and through the coat and onto her floor. A bullet wound, and not a fresh one. He had ridden a long way carrying it. His horse, she would find in the morning, had not made the last mile.

She should have left him in the doorway. The plains taught you that mercy was a luxury, like sugar, to be spent careful. But she looked at his face, gone the grey of old ash, and she thought of Tom on the bed they'd shared, asking for water she could give and a cure she could not, and she found her hands were already moving — dragging him in, kicking the door shut against the howling dark, packing snow against the wound to slow it.

He woke once while she worked, eyes finding hers, and tried to speak.

"Don't," she said. "Tell me in the morning. You'll keep till morning or you won't, and talking won't change which."

He kept. Toward dawn the fever set in and he spoke a name that wasn't his, and a woman's name, and a town's. And once, clear as a bell in the dark, he said: "They'll follow. When it thaws, they'll come."

Hannah sat by the fire with the rifle across her knees and watched the window go from black to grey, and she did not doubt him. She knew the country. She knew how snow stops a thing only as long as snow lasts. Somewhere out in that white nothing, men were holed up the same as she was, waiting on the same sky, and