The Caravan Road

The road through the Marrow Valley was the same as every other road. Dust, dry grass, a rusted bridge skeleton every few miles. I'd been walking it for three days with a guitar on my back and nothing new in my head.

I'm Lucinda, by the way. I'm thirty-one, I play music for meals, and I've been on the circuit since the trade routes opened up again. Five years of the same towns. Five years of the same songs.

Then I came over the ridge past the old toll station and saw a wagon painted blue with yellow birds on it, and I knew that wagon before I knew I knew it.

* * *

You don't forget a wagon like that. Blue paint, which nobody bothers with anymore, and yellow birds with long tails stenciled along the sides. I'd helped push that wagon out of the mud at a solstice market five years ago. The horse pulling it was a rangy dun with a crooked left ear. I remembered the ear. I remembered a lot of things about that week, if I'm being plain about it.

One night. One night with the trader who owned that wagon, and then I left before sunrise because that's what I did back then. Didn't leave a note. Didn't leave anything.

I stood on the ridge like an idiot for a good ten minutes, working the math. Was it her? It was her. Cherise. She'd told me she was twenty-nine that summer, so she'd be thirty-four now, and I'd done that arithmetic in my head a hundred times since.

I could have just kept walking. There was a fork a mile back. I didn't take it.

I caught up to the wagon about an hour later, jogging the last stretch with the guitar bouncing on my back. The dun heard me first and flicked that crooked ear. Cherise was up on the bench with her boots off, driving barefoot, which was so much her that I laughed before I even got close.

"Well," she said, looking down at me. "Look who it is."

"Hey, Cherise!"

"Hey yourself!"

The conversation consisted of that for about twenty steps. She didn't tell me to get lost, so I fell into step beside the wagon, which I took as a good sign. The dun eyeballed me the whole time.

"You still have this horse?" I said.

"Still have this horse. Still have this wagon. Still driving the same route, more or less." She shrugged. "You still have that guitar?"

"Never goes anywhere without it."

"Huh." She flicked the reins, not hard, just something to do with her hands. "Five years, Lucinda."

"I know."

"You left in the middle of the night."

"I know."

"You didn't leave a note. You didn't leave so much as a boot print."

"I know, okay?" I said. "I'm not proud of it. I've had five years to not be proud of it, and I've used all of them."

She looked at me then, really looked, and I saw her deciding something. I let her decide. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, tied back with a red strip of cloth. Same brown eyes. Same way of chewing the inside of her cheek when she was thinking.

"Walk if you want," she said finally. "Camp's at dusk, whenever the light gets low. We can talk then. Or not talk. Whatever."

"Talk sounds good."

"Talk. Sure." She almost smiled. Almost. "Don't serenade me yet, is what I'm saying."

"I wasn't going to serenade you."

"You were absolutely going to serenade me. I can see it on your face."

* * *

We walked most of the afternoon and talked about nothing. The weather. The price of salt at the last trading post. A stretch of road where somebody had planted actual corn, which still felt like a miracle in year fifteen after the grid went down. She told me about a bridge collapse that had rerouted her whole spring. I told her about a tavern in Dry Creek that paid in onions.

It was easy, is the thing. Easier than it had any right to be, given how I'd left things.

"You still play the same stuff?" she asked around the middle of the afternoon.

"Some new stuff too."

"Write anything about a trader with a blue wagon?"

"Not yet."

"Hm." She let that sit. "You'd better not. I've got a reputation."

"What reputation, the barefoot thing?"

"That's a comfort choice, Lucinda. It's deliberate."

"It's because your boots give you blisters. You told me that five years ago."

"Then my reputation is honesty about my feet."

I laughed and she almost smiled again, and this time it got further than almost.

Dusk came on fast the way it does in the valley, all purples and long shadows. She picked a spot off the road behind a low rise, near a dead creek bed. I helped unhitch the dun and set the picket line while she got a fire going. She had a camp routine, everything in order, everything in the same place every time. I remembered that too. The woman had a system for everything except me, apparently.

We ate beans with dried peppers and some flatbread she'd bought two posts back. It was good. Better than my cooking, which is a low bar, but still good.

"So," she said, wiping her hands on her trousers. "Say it."

"Say what?"

"Whatever you walked an hour out of your way to say."

I turned my plate around a couple times. "I don't have a speech."

"Everybody has a speech."

"Fine. Here's mine. I was twenty-six and I was a coward, and I thought leaving clean was better than leaving messy, and I was wrong. That's the speech. It took me about two years to figure out it was wrong, and another three to work up to apologizing if I ever saw you, and then you just happened to be on the road today and I had nothing prepared."

She chewed on that, and on a piece of flatbread.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. That's a real speech. I accept it." She pointed her spoon at me. "But hear my side. I spent a while being mad. Then I spent a while deciding people who travel are just like that, they move on. It's the roads. Everybody on the roads is leaving somewhere."

"Is that what you tell yourself about me?"

"It's what I told myself so I'd stop being mad. Worked okay." She shrugged. "Mostly."

"And now?"

"Now you're sitting at my fire eating my beans, and I haven't decided what that is yet." She looked at the fire, then at me. "I'm not a person who gets tangled up easy anymore. I learned that lesson."

"I'm not asking you to get tangled up."

"Good."

"I'm asking if I can walk with your wagon for a while. There's a route through the valley posts I haven't played, and you know every post between here and the river."

She thought about it longer than the answer probably deserved, or maybe exactly as long as it deserved.

"Alright," she said. "You can walk with the wagon. We'll see how it goes."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. I snore."

"You do not."

"I absolutely do. Ask anyone." She stacked our bowls and stood up, brushing off her trousers. "You said you had new songs."

"A few."

"Play me one. The beans earned it. Not a sad one, I've had a day."

I got the guitar off my back and tuned it by the firelight, taking my time, stalling a little, I'll admit it. She settled back against a wheel of the wagon with her arms crossed, watching me like she was daring me to be good.

"This one's called Low Water," I said. "It's about a river that stopped being a river."

"Cheery."

"You said not sad. This one's more annoyed than sad."

"Fine. Annoyed is fine."

I played it. It's a good song, one of the few I've written that I actually like, and she listened all the way through without talking, which for her I already knew was a compliment. When I finished she didn't say anything for a second.

"Play it again," she said.

So I did. Second time through, she hummed along on the chorus without seeming to notice she was doing it, and that did something to the whole middle of my chest that I wasn't ready for.

"Alright," she said when it ended. "That one's good. That one can stay."

"Just that one?"

"The rest of you is on trial, Lucinda. One song is not a verdict."

"Fair." I set the guitar down and stretched my legs out toward the fire. "For what it's worth, the wagon looks good. The birds."

"Repainted them last year. The paint came from a woman in Harrow Creek who makes it out of milk and lime."

"You always did like the fancy stuff."

"I like things that last," she said, and looked at me when she said it, and I couldn't tell if it was a dig or an invitation, and she didn't help me out.

The fire cracked. The dun shifted somewhere in the dark. She fed another stick to the flames and then she said, quietly, "It's a long road to the river. Six days, maybe seven."

"I heard."

"Plenty of nights for more songs."

"Plenty," I agreed.

She nodded and got up to check the picket line, and I sat there by the fire with my heart doing things I didn't have a plan for. Six days. I could ruin this in six days or I could not, and for the first time in five years I actually wanted to be the second kind of person.

The next morning we got rolling early, which for Cherise meant early and for me meant before I'd finished my first cup of whatever she calls coffee. It isn't coffee. I've stopped asking what it is.

"So," she said from the bench, barefoot on the boards, "five years. What have you been doing?"

"Playing. Walking. You know how it is."

"That's not an answer."

"It's an answer-shaped object," I said, and she snorted. "No, honestly, it's the same year over and over. Tavern, market, tavern, a town with one good well, a town with no good well. I played Dry Creek last winter and they paid me in onions."

"Onions."

"Eleven pounds of onions. I ate like a queen and nobody would stand near me."

She laughed, that short laugh she tries to keep down. "What about the route along the north ridge? The one that washed out?"

"Don't remind me. I took that in year two. Lost a boot in the mud, actual lost, never found it, walked two days with one boot and a rag tied on."

"You would."

"I looked like a scarecrow that had given up. A farmer's wife took pity on me and fed me eggs, and her husband looked at me the whole meal like I might make off with the chickens."

"Fair concern," she said. "You have a face like someone who might make off with chickens."

"I do not."

"You kind of do."

I walked alongside the wagon with my thumb hooked in my guitar strap and let the conversation drift where it wanted, which was nowhere in particular, and that was fine. The valley was brown grass and blue sky and the odd skeleton of a bridge off to the east, rusted through, dropping into a field like it had knelt down to rest and never got up.

Around midday the left rear wheel started making a noise.

"You hear that?" Cherise said, before I'd even noticed.

"Hear what?"

"That." She reined the dun in and cocked her head at the wheel, listening, chewing the inside of her cheek. "That's the axle."

"Is it bad?"

"It's an axle noise. Could be nothing. Could be everything." She swung down and crouched by the wheel, and I crouched next to her, mostly pretending to help, and after a minute of her tapping things she said, "Bearing's loose. I can fix it, but it wants an hour and a flat spot to work. We're stopping early."

"No argument from me!"

"There's shade under that dead tree up ahead. We'll camp there."

"It's barely past noon."

"The wheel doesn't care about your walking schedule," she said, and led the wagon off the road.

* * *

She had the wheel off in no time, which surprised me until I remembered she'd been doing this alone for years. Everything had a place. The tools came off the wagon in a certain order and went back in the same order, and I sat on the grass a few feet away with my guitar