The High Divide by Lin Enger

had served. Possibly Jim Powers, whose remaining two letters she had already opened and read. They were not interesting, full of masculine banalities, but written nonetheless by a man who likely knew more about her husband’s past than she knew herself.
    As she watched the city move by, she leaned back and tried to relax. The place may have changed more than she had expected, but the rhythm of the horse’s shoes against the brick street could hardly be more familiar. The smells, too. The dying leaves of the sycamores, oaks, and elms, the leather padding on the seats, the sweating horse, and the scent of the people themselves. What brought her back more than anything, though, was the driver, sitting right there in front of her, straight and broad-shouldered, and wearing a canvas jacket. He might as well have been her husband all those years ago, and she half expected him to turn around and give her that long look, his pale eyes cutting into her.
    Where are you? she thought. Who are you?

8
    Along the Tongue
    D own next to the stream the air was filled with ice crystals, and the ragged blanket of clouds, no higher than the tops of the cottonwoods, dipped and swelled before a small breeze. Last night this valley had been a naked cleft beneath the dome of sharp stars. Now it was a small gray room, cut off from the world beyond it. As Ulysses pounded his feet into the cold-stiffened boots, the ox, attached by its lead to a cottonwood branch, swung its ugly head and made a low, guttural sound, like an old man huffing in his sleep.
    â€œYes, yes. Give a man the chance to piss, will you?”
    He’d leased the animal from Miles City’s liveryman, named Church, and so far he was unimpressed. Two days out, and they’d covered thirty miles at most. The ox had a tendency to wander off trail, though the ruts were well established, and come to a full stop every time Ulysses set down the switch for more than a minute. “A good puller” is what Church had said, “not an ornery bone in its body.”
    Ulysses buttoned his pants and walked up to the beast. He scratched its hard head. “That doesn’t look good,” he said. “Not good at all.” Its right eye, which appeared rheumy yesterday, was covered this morning with a greenish, viscous matter. Ulysses wiped it away as best he could. “I’ll be wanting my deposit back on you,” he told the animal, and led it down to the water, where it drank long and patiently, lifting its head a couple times and swinging around to have a look at Ulysses, as if it didn’t quite trust a man who used the switch so freely.
    â€œStill here,” Ulysses said, kneeling upstream and bending to drink. The water had a bitter, almost licorice flavor. No color to it, though, and no visible particles afloat—better water, in any case, than much of what passed for drinkable during his time in the wars. After retying the ox to the cottonwood, he went searching for dry windfall, finding what he needed in an aging stand of cedars on the hillside above camp. He set the kindling sticks to flame and put on a pot of water for coffee. Using a small keg of molasses for his chair, he sat chewing on a strap of jerky, waiting for the water to boil and adding branches to the fire. Early moments like these were the dangerous part of the day, when dreams still occupied the mind, and it didn’t help being out here alone, no sounds but the small breeze in the dead leaves, the moving water, the crackle of burning wood. He reached out and set the middle knuckle of his fist against the pot. It was getting warm.
    As he took his morning pipe, he turned in his Bible to the book of the prophet Isaiah, his eyes falling on words from its first chapter: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and