It also didn’t seem cruel.
That, strange as it was, left Clara even more dislodged.
The trip to the ranch took almost two hours. He drove the cart quietly. She, next to her, carried her hands intertwined on her lap and watched the white landscape extend as far as the eye could see. Upon arrival, he found a solid wooden house, a corral, a barn, a well and, beyond, forest and mountain. No neighbor. No light nearby. Just wind, snow and immense silence.
Elijah helped her down and drove her inside. The house was austere, but clean. A table, two chairs, a burning fireplace, a small kitchen and a room in the background. He took out the notebook again and wrote:
“The bedroom is yours. I will sleep here.”
Clara looked at him, surprised.
“You don’t need to.
He wrote again.
“It’s already decided.”
That night, while undoing her little suitcase in the room, Clara cried for the first time since it all began. It didn’t make noise. He just let the tears fall on his mother’s old dress, as if each buried a piece of life that he was no longer going to have.
The first few days were cold in every way. Elijah would get up before dawn, go out to tend to the cattle, fix fences or cut wood, and return with clothes impregnated with smoke and wind. Clara cooked, swept, sewed, washed quietly. They communicated with the notebook.
“There will be a storm.”
“I need to check the well.”
“The flour is in the top drawer.”
Nothing more.
On the eighth day, however, something changed.
Clara woke up in the middle of the night by a rough, drowned noise, like the groaning of a man trying not to make noise. He left the room and found Elijah on the floor, by the fireplace, his hand squeezed against one side of his head. He had his face contracted with pain, the skin moist sweat and the body tight like a rope about to break.
Clara knelt next to her.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He couldn’t hear it, of course. But he saw his mouth move and, with a trembling hand, sought the notebook. He wrote just two twisted words.
“It happens next.”
Clara didn’t believe him. No one who “goes by” ends like this, writhing on the ground.
He brought him a damp cloth, helped him lie down and stayed next to him until the spasm was yielding. Before he fell asleep, Elijah wrote only one sentence.
“Thank you.”
