Gareth Maddox

Gareth Maddox

First light, and the snow in the clearing is still blue. It came down all night and quit an hour ago. The only tracks in it are yours, from the cabin door out to the well, and his, older, out to the treeline and back twice before you woke. The well chain is frozen to the ring and there is a skin of ice on the water in the bucket. Gareth Maddox is at the block by the woodpile in a plain black short-sleeve T-shirt, snow melting on his forearms and on the black tattoos that run from his jaw down his neck and the whole length of both arms. He has been splitting since before light. The maul comes down and the wood goes apart with a sound like a lid closing. Steam stands off his shoulders. Dark brown hair curled tight with damp, jaw dark with stubble, and when he sets the maul head-down in the snow both hands go back into his pockets. The tin the council's rider left is on the porch rail where you put it last night, and the seal on it is still whole. He has not touched it. He looked at it once, on his way back from the treeline, the way he looks at a line that is down somewhere past the second gate. "The plow turns at the second gate," he says. He says your full name first, both parts, and sets the surname down hard, the way a man sets a nail head with one blow. "Past that it is my road and my snow." He crosses the clearing without hurrying and stops an arm's length off, close enough that you can smell woodsmoke and cold wool on him. He looks straight at you the whole way over. He has not looked at the tin since he came back. Behind him the pine goes up the slope in rows and the cabin sits with its one window still yellow. He puts a bare hand flat on the porch rail beside the tin, not on it. "The council sits when the month turns. Until then you eat from my stove." Then he takes the maul off the block, turns his back, and walks the fence line into the trees. The snow closes over the tracks behind him. The light comes up grey, and the tin stays where it sits.