The Week My Pills Ran Out
Marnie
There were four white pills left in the brown bottle on the morning the hay crew came to Tallow Creek. I knew the number the way I knew every number in that store. Forty-one sacks of sweet feed. Nine rolls of fence wire. Sixteen years of one pill every morning, with coffee, before the sleigh bells.
I stood at the kitchen window over the store with the bottle in my hand and looked at the mountain. Bleakwood fills that window the way a face fills a doorway. In late October the snow had come halfway down it and stopped, as if it were thinking things over. I have lived under that mountain my whole life. I have never once looked up at it without feeling that it was looking back.
“Don’t,” I told it, which is a thing I said most mornings, and I broke a pill in half with my thumbnail.
The pharmacy van had come up from Missoula on Friday the way it came most Fridays, with the cold box for Maren Trask’s insulin and a white paper bag with my name on it. This time there was no bag. There was a printed slip clipped to the delivery sheet. Discontinued by the manufacturer. Please consult your doctor about alternatives.
My doctor was Dr. Imrie, who had been my mother’s doctor, and he had retired in April to a lake in Idaho with no telephone on purpose. The new pharmacist in Missoula was a polite young man who called me ma’am. When I phoned him on Saturday he said there was a shortage across the whole region. He could order something similar in four to six weeks, with a new prescription from a new doctor, who would want to see me in person and write down what I was.
Write down what I was. I put the phone back on its hook very gently, the way you set down something that might go off.
I swallowed the half pill dry and put the other half back in the bottle. Seven halves left. A week, if I was careful, and I have always been careful. Careful is the only thing my mother ever made me promise.
Her rules were three, and she gave them to me on my sixteenth birthday at the kitchen table, with the radio on low so my father would not hear her voice shake. One white pill every morning. Never let one of them stand close enough to breathe you in. And never sign any paper that has your name and that word on the same page.
The word was Omega. She did not like to say it out loud. She was one, and she had come to Tallow Creek from somewhere she never named, with one suitcase and a brown bottle exactly like mine. She married a man who sold feed and had no wolf in him at all. Emmett Harlan knew what she was and married her anyway, and he kept her secret for twenty-two years like a man keeping a match dry in his shirt pocket. Pneumonia took her when I was nineteen. A bad heart took him three years ago. The store came to me, and so did the bottle, and so did the rules.
Nobody in Tallow Creek knew. Tallow Creek is one street along a creek that never freezes all the way across, and the people on it are kind, and nosy, and not one of them has a nose worth mentioning. They thought I ran warm because I stood by the store stove all day. I let them think it. I let everybody think everything, for sixteen years.
I braided my hair, tied on my father’s old canvas apron, and went down the stairs to open.
The Feed and Seed sits at the bend of the street where the plow turns around. My father nailed a strip of sleigh bells to the front door on a leather thong the year I was born, so he could hear customers from the back. They have been ringing ever since. Inside there are mineral blocks stacked to the ceiling, and sacks of sweet feed that put molasses into the air, and kerosene, and creosote, and the dry heat off the iron stove standing in the aisles like one more customer. The pharmacy refrigerator hums behind the back counter. Beside it, on a shelf, sits the radio set, a heavy gray box with a hooked microphone that talks to the lodge up on Bleakwood and nowhere else.
I lit the stove. I turned the sign. I opened the credit book, where every family in the valley has a page, and ran my finger down the column of what the Quinlans owed. I did all the small things that make a morning into a morning.
My skin felt wrong. Not hot, exactly. Awake. As if every inch of it had been asleep for years and had just now heard its name.
The bells went at five past eight, and Maren Trask came in out of the cold in a man’s wool coat with frost still on the shoulders.
Maren is small and seventy-one years old and has never in her life wasted a sentence. She lives up on Bleakwood with the pack there, in a cabin of her own, and she drives down in a brown Ford when the road is open and sends the Bleakwood men when it is not. She came to the counter and put both hands flat on it.
“Insulin,” she said.
“It came Friday.” I took the box out of the refrigerator and set it in front of her. “Six vials. The driver says there might be delays after Christmas, so I would keep one back.”
“I always keep one back.” She did not pick up the box. She looked at me instead, the way she looks at a sack of flour before she pays for it. “You are flushed.”
“It is the stove.”
“It is October and you have the stove on half.” Her eyes went down to my hands, then back up. “Are you sick, Marnie Harlan?”
“No.”
“Then you are something else.” She took the box and tucked it inside her coat against her ribs, where it would not freeze on the drive. “I saw the Cairnmouth trucks from the hill road on my way down. Three of them at the river bridge, loaded to the sky. They will be in your yard within the hour.”
My stomach turned over. I had forgotten. It was the last week of October, and every year at the end of October the Cairnmouth pack trucked the valley’s winter hay up from the river country. Every year they stacked it in our back yard for the ranchers to collect. And every year the crew slept in the bunkroom over our warehouse, because my father had rented it to them since before I could walk.
Every year it had been old Amos and his two cousins, three Alphas so old and so long bonded that my pills never had to work very hard.
“Amos is driving?” I said.
“Amos retired in the summer. His hip quit on him.” Maren put a bill on the counter for the insulin, though Bleakwood has an account, because Maren pays for her own medicine and always has. “It will be young ones this year. I saw them at the bridge.”
“How young?”
“Young enough.” She buttoned her coat to the throat. At the door she stopped with her hand on the frame and did not turn around. “Whatever you are carrying, girl, carry it with both hands. People drop things when they try to carry them with one.”
The bells rang behind her. Through the frosted glass I watched her brown Ford pull away up the street, toward the mountain. I took the other half pill out of the bottle and swallowed that too. Six halves.
I heard them before I saw them. Air brakes at the bend, three long sighs one after another, and then the whole front window went dark with hay.
Three flatbed trucks, stacked so high the bales leaned against the morning. They pulled into the yard one behind the other and shut off. Chaff blew across the street like snow that had changed its mind. I stood behind the counter with my hand on the credit book and did not move, and I told myself it was because I was a businesswoman waiting for business.
The bells went.
The first man in had to duck under the door frame. He was enormous in the friendly way, the way a barn is enormous, with sandy-red hair and a beard to match and laugh lines that were already working before his mouth was. He wore a canvas coat open over flannel. Chaff stood in his hair. The tip of the little finger on his right hand was missing, an old, neat injury, and he lifted that hand to me like a man waving from a tractor.
“Morning,” he said. “You’ll be Miss Harlan. Silas Corrigan, out of Cairnmouth. Amos sends his regards and his list, and says to tell you his hip is a traitor.” He put a folded sheet on the counter. “He also says the bunkroom is ours if your father’s offer still stands. I was sorry to hear about your father.”
“Three years ago,” I said. “The offer stands. Same price as always.”
“Amos said you’d say that. He said you’d say it before I asked the price, and that you’d be right.”
The second man came in behind him and shut the door softly, so the bells only murmured. Tall and lean, with warm brown skin and close-cut dark curls, and long careful hands with engine grease worked into the creases of the knuckles. A pencil stood behind his ear. He nodded to me and then looked at the stove, and I watched him notice that the damper handle hung crooked.
“Wes Halloran,” Silas said, tipping his head. “He keeps the trucks alive. He doesn’t talk until he likes you, so don’t take it personally.”
“Your damper is cracked,” Wes said to the stove.
“So he likes the stove,” I said.
Wes looked at me then. Something at the corner of his mouth moved, and he looked back at the stove as if it were safer.
Then the bells went a third time, and the room changed.
He was the youngest of them, maybe thirty, and the darkest. Black hair cut close, a lean face, a thin pale scar that pulled through the left side of his upper lip. His eyes were the color of strong tea. He came one step over the threshold and stopped dead, with the door still open behind him and the cold pouring in around his boots.
His head lifted half an inch.
It was the smallest movement. A man hearing his name across a crowded room. But Silas stopped smiling, and Wes stopped looking at the stove, and every hair on my arms stood up under my sleeves.
I had seen that movement once before, at twelve, when a stranger Alpha came through town and stood too near my mother at the gas pump. She had taken my wrist and walked me home so fast my feet hardly touched the street.
The young one looked at me. Not at my face. At my throat, where the collar of my shirt lay against the side of my neck. His nostrils moved once.
“Eli,” Silas said quietly. “Shut the door. You’re letting the weather in.”
Eli did not shut the door. He turned around and walked back out through it, and the bells rang and rang behind him in the cold.
Silas let out a breath. “I apologize for him. He’s got the best nose in Cairnmouth and the worst manners, and the two came together.”
“He does not have to like my store,” I said. My voice came out level. I was proud of it.
“He likes it fine,” Silas said, and he looked at me a moment longer than a man needs to look at a woman to sell her hay. His own nostrils did not move. He was older and steadier, and he was not going to let them. But his hand on the counter closed slowly into a fist and opened again, and then he smiled as if nothing had happened at all. “Where would you like the stacks this year?”
They worked all day. I watched them through the back window more than I sold anything.
Silas threw bales up onto the stack two at a time, with his sleeves pushed past his elbows, laughing at something Wes said that I could not hear. Wes ran the old hay elevator my father used to rent out, and when the belt jammed he lay on his back in the chaff underneath and fixed it with a wrench and a few words I was glad I could not hear either. Eli worked alone at the far end of the yard, on top of the stack, catching every bale that came up and setting it down square. He never once looked at the store.
He did not have to. I could feel him not looking.
The wind came from the yard. It brought them in with every gust, through the cracks around the back door, under the molasses and the stove. Cut alfalfa and woodsmoke, warm, the smell of a barn in August. Engine oil and fresh cedar shavings. And under both, cold and sharp, snowmelt running over stones and a match struck in the dark.
It is not a thing a person smells. I know how that sounds. But I stood at my own counter and named three men by the air, and the gland at the side of my neck, the one my mother always told me to keep covered, ached like a bruise somebody kept pressing.
I sold Lowell Quinlan two salt blocks and gave him the wrong change. He gave it back. Nobody ever has to give change back at the Feed and Seed.
At six I turned the sign. The sky over Bleakwood was going violet, and the hay crew had gone up the outside stairs to the bunkroom an hour before. I heard boots over the warehouse ceiling, and water running, and once Silas’s big laugh. I wiped the counter twice. I was wiping it a third time when the bells rang.
Eli Strand stood inside my closed store with the dark behind him. He had washed. His hair was wet and he had put on a clean shirt, and it did not help either of us at all.
“We are closed,” I said.
“I need gloves.” He did not move from the door. “Mine split on the wire.”
“Second aisle, bottom shelf. Leather on the left.”
He went and got a pair without looking at the price, brought them to the counter, and set a twenty beside them. I rang it up. I counted his change into his palm without touching his palm, which takes practice, and I had sixteen years of practice.
He closed his fingers over the coins and did not go.
“What do you take?” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Every morning.” His voice was low and even, and he was not being cruel. That was the worst part. He said it the way a man tells you your tire is going flat. “Whatever it is. A pill, I would guess. The old kind. The kind that makes a woman smell like nothing at all.”
My hand was flat on the credit book. I kept it there. “I think you should go up to bed, Mr. Strand.”
“I will.” He put the gloves in his coat pocket. At the door he stopped and looked back, and in the light from the stove his pupils had gone so wide that the tea color was only a ring. “It is wearing off, storekeeper. I could smell you from the river bridge.”
Sweet Feed and Molasses
Marnie
I did not sleep. I lay in my bed over the store and listened to three men sleep over my warehouse, and every time one of them turned over, I knew which one it was.
That is not possible. I want that understood. A person cannot hear across forty feet of yard and two walls and know a man by the way his weight comes off a bunk. I knew anyway. Silas slept like a felled tree. Wes got up twice to check something in the trucks, and came back, and wrote something down by the scratch of it. Eli did not sleep at all. Neither did I. At four in the morning the two of us lay awake on either side of a dark yard, and I would have given every sack in the store to know whether he was thinking about me or about how to get away from me.
In the morning I took half a pill. Five halves.
It went on like that for three days, and I would like to say I was dignified about it.
The ranchers came in from up and down the valley with their flatbeds to collect their winter hay, and they came into the store after, because nobody in Tallow Creek collects anything without coming in to talk about it. I wrote tickets and took money and asked after everybody’s knees and calves and grandchildren. I kept the back door shut and a scarf around my throat in a heated room. Mrs. Quinlan told me I looked feverish and should eat more liver.
Silas came in every morning for coffee from the pot on the stove, which my father had always given the hay crew free. He leaned on the end of the counter and talked while he drank it. He talked about Cairnmouth, where the Tallow runs into the big river and a cairn of white stones stands on the point that nobody remembers building. He talked about his grandmother Hester, who runs the pack at ninety and cheats at cards. He talked about hay the way some men talk about weather, as if it had opinions.
He never once leaned in. He stood at the end of the counter, always the end, always with the wood between us. But on the second morning I reached past him for the sugar and saw him grip the counter edge with both hands. When I came back he was smiling at the window, and his knuckles were white.
“You can sit by the stove,” I said. “You do not have to hold up my counter.”
“I like your counter.” He picked his coffee back up. “It’s a good honest counter. A man could hold on to it for days.”
I laughed. I did not mean to. It came out of me like a bird out of a barn, and Silas looked at me as though I had handed him something.
“There,” he said softly. “That was worth the drive from the river.”
Wes came in that afternoon with a toolbag and fixed my stove damper without asking. He knelt in front of the stove, took the cracked handle off, and fitted a new one he had cut from a strip of flat steel in the back of his truck. Then, while I was busy with the Larsons, he moved on to the radio set behind the counter, because it had hissed for a year and I had stopped hearing it.
When the Larsons left he was sitting on my stool with the back off the radio and a soldering iron in his hand.
“Your microphone cord was cracked,” he said. “Every time you keyed it, half your voice stayed home.”
“Nobody ever complained.”
“Nobody up there would.” He tipped his head toward the window, toward the mountain. “That is the Bleakwood lodge on the other end. Jude Hollis.”
“You know him?”
“Everybody in three valleys knows of him.” He set the iron in its stand and fitted the back on the radio, screw by screw. “He bought a load of hay from Cairnmouth six years ago, and paid twice when the first check got lost in the mail. Silas’s grandmother still tells that story.”
“He pays his account on the first of every month,” I said. “To the penny. Seth Warrick comes down for Maren’s insulin and asks about everybody’s knees. Archer Quinn argues with me about the price of chain, every time, for the pleasure of it.”
Wes smiled at the radio. It was the first real smile I had seen on him, and it changed his whole face from a closed door to an open one.
Then he looked at my left hand on the counter, at the old shiny burn across the back of it.
“Stove,” I said, before he could ask. “This one. I was ten and I wanted to see what the inside of a fire looked like.”
“Did you find out?”
“It looked like it wanted me to stay away.”
He nodded slowly, as if that were a real answer. He pushed up his own left sleeve. A long pale burn ran up the inside of his forearm, old and smooth. “Truck engine. I was nineteen and I wanted to know why it was making a noise.”
“Did you find out?”
“Yes.” He pulled the sleeve back down. “It was making a noise because it was about to burn me.”
We looked at each other across the counter, two people with the same kind of stupid written on our skin, and something warm and quiet sat down between us.
“Eli is not angry at you,” Wes said. He said it to the screwdriver in his hand. “I want you to know that. He is angry at what he is afraid of. From the outside it looks the same.”
“What is he afraid of?”
Wes put the screwdriver in his bag and stood up off my stool. He was very careful not to come around the counter, and very careful not to breathe in when he passed me. I watched him be careful, and something in my chest hurt for him.
“That is his to tell you,” he said. “But it is not you.”
Beau Trask stacked hay with them that Friday, for cash, because Beau would stack anything for cash. He was eighteen that autumn and too big for every room he walked into, and he talked to the Cairnmouth men the way he talked to everybody, all at once.
Near closing he came in for a soda and leaned on my counter where Silas always leaned.
“Those Cairnmouth guys are all right,” he told me. “The dark one doesn’t talk. The big one talks more than me, which I didn’t know was possible. The quiet one fixed my mom’s truck for free and wouldn’t even take a soda for it.” He drank half the bottle at once. “Grandma says you’ve got a fever and you’re too proud to say so.”
“Your grandmother says a lot of things.”
“She does. She’s right about most of them, though. That’s the annoying part.” He put a dollar on the counter and went back out into the chaff, whistling, and left the bells ringing behind him.
I took half a pill that night, early, because the scarf had stopped helping. Four halves.
On Saturday there was the harvest supper at the grange.
There is a harvest supper on the last Saturday of October every year. I had been to every one since I was born, and I had never considered staying home until that Saturday. I stood in my bedroom in my good green dress with my braid pinned up and looked at my neck in the mirror. The gland at the side of it, where my mother had always made me wear a collar, was pink and slightly swollen, as if something had bitten me there.
I wore a scarf. Nobody wears a scarf to a harvest supper. I wore one anyway.
The grange was hot and loud and smelled of pie and wet wool and percolator coffee. Paper leaves hung from the beams. The Larson boys were playing fiddle and guitar on the fold-out stage, badly and happily. The whole town was there, and the three men from Cairnmouth were there, because my town had decided by Thursday that it liked them.
Silas danced with Mrs. Quinlan, and then with both Larson girls, and then he came across the floor to me while the band was still finding the next song.
“Miss Harlan,” he said.
“Marnie,” I said. “You have been drinking my coffee for four days.”
“Marnie.” He said it as if he were tasting it. He held out his hand, the one with the short finger. “I want to tell you before you answer. I dance like a man moving a piano.”
“That is a terrible offer.”
“It is an honest one.”
I took his hand.
He did dance like a man moving a piano. He also held me as if I might break, one big hand flat at the small of my back, the other holding mine against his chest, and for half the song he kept a careful inch of air between us. Then the Larson boys slowed down, and somebody bumped me from behind, and the inch went away.
I felt him breathe in.
His whole body stopped. Then it started again, slower. His hand at my back pressed once, hard, then went careful again. When I looked up, his pupils had swallowed nearly all the brown.
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” he said, very low, “because you’ll know if I don’t. I can’t pretend I don’t know what you are. I’m going to pretend it for everybody else in this room.”
“Why?” My voice was not level anymore. “Why would you do that for me?”
“Because it’s yours to tell.” He turned us slowly, away from the stage. “Not mine. Not Eli’s. Not anybody’s with a nose. It’s yours, and you get to decide who hears it.”
I put my forehead against his shirt. I did not plan it. It was only for a second, at the end of the song, and nobody in that hot, loud room was looking at us. He smelled like August in a barn. Under my cheek his heart was going like a man running uphill.
Over his shoulder I saw Eli Strand by the coat rack with his back to the wall. He was watching us, and his face did not do anything at all. Then he took his coat off the hook and went out into the dark, and the cold came in through the grange door behind him and touched my bare arms.
I walked home alone at ten. I had told Silas I would, and he let me, which I had not expected.
The street was empty and the creek talked to itself under its skin of ice. Bleakwood stood black against the stars with snow on its shoulders, looking down. I took the shortcut behind the Larsons’ and came up along the back fence of my own yard, where the hay stood in square dark walls taller than a house.
I heard them before I reached the gate. They were on the far side of the nearest stack, and they were not trying to be quiet.
“She is unregistered.” Eli, flat and hard. “Unbonded. No pack of record. Do you understand what that means in this valley? In a week every Alpha who drives down off that pass is going to know it at fifty feet.”
“Then nobody hears it from us.” Silas.
“They will not need to hear it. You smelled it from the bridge. So did I.” Something struck the hay, a hand or a boot. “And you know who buys names. You know what happens to a woman with no paper behind her when the wrong man finds her first.”
Silence. The creek. My own heart.
“Her body has been held down for sixteen years.” That was Wes, quiet, the voice he used on engines. “That pill does not make it stop. It makes it wait. When it comes up, it will come up hard, and soon. A week at the outside.”
“And we leave in eight days,” Eli said. “So tell me what we do, Silas. I am listening.”
I did not wait for Silas’s answer. I went in the back way and up my stairs and stood against my own door in the dark, in my green dress, with the scarf still around my throat.
Then I took the last four halves together at the kitchen sink. My mother would have slapped my hand for that. I swallowed them anyway and stood looking out at the mountain until my breathing evened out.
The bottle was empty. I put it in the drawer with all the others, because in sixteen years I had never once been able to throw one away.
It woke me on Monday night at two in the morning.
I came up out of sleep the way you come up out of a bath that has been left running, all at once, already drowning. My sheets were soaked. My skin burned from the inside, a slow deep fire like a banked stove, and every inch of it wanted something it had no name for. Between my legs I was wet and aching. It was not a dream. It was my own body, waking after sixteen years, and it was furious about the wait.
I got out of bed. My legs held, mostly. I went down the inside stairs into the dark store with one hand on the wall, and the floor came up cold through my bare feet, and it was not enough. Nothing was cold enough. I crossed to the front door and unlocked it and pulled it open and stood in the doorway in my nightgown with the October night pouring over me.
The bells rang. In the silence of that street they were as loud as a church.
Frost on the porch boards. Stars. The creek. I leaned my forehead against the cold frame and breathed, and breathed, and thought, so this is what she was afraid of. Not only the men. This.
Then I felt them.
I did not hear them. I felt them, the way you feel somebody come into a room behind you. I lifted my head.
Three men stood in the dark street at the bottom of my porch steps. They had come down from the bunkroom in whatever they had been sleeping in. Silas in jeans and nothing else, his chest heaving. Wes barefoot on the frost, one hand locked around the porch rail. Eli a step in front of the other two, as if he had been running and they had been holding him back.
Steam came off their bare skin into the cold. All three of them had the same eyes now, the pupils blown wide and black, shining in the dark like an animal’s at the edge of headlights.
Nobody moved. My scent went out into that street like a door blowing open, and I watched it reach them, one, two, three.
“Marnie.” Silas’s voice came out scraped raw. His hand on the porch post had dug into the wood. “Say go, and we go. That is all you have to do. Say it.”
