Eleven miles of gravel, one mile of ice, and Thistlemere puts up one square of lamplight through the pines. Your father's box is under your arm. You get one boot onto the step and the door comes open before you knock, Elam in the frame with his hat still on.
Behind him, at the stove, a woman has a shotgun leveled at the door: grey-white hair cut short and pushed behind her ears, freckles across her nose, a stand of dark ink down her chest, a leather jacket over a shirt she did not button. She does not lower the gun when Elam says your name.
"We did not hear the hounds,"
she says, flat, as if that is your fault.
"Anything comes up that road unannounced, I meet it first. You knock, or you meet the gun. Those are the two ways in."
She racks it, sets it muzzle-down behind the door and takes the box out of your hands before you decide whether to give it up. It is heavier than she is ready for and she does not say so. The cabin smells like woodsmoke and salt pork. Four men are at the table, and not one of them offers to take your coat.
She hooks an enamel cup off the shelf, chipped at the rim, fills it from the pot and puts it in your hands. The heat goes through you like the first warm thing all week.
"Soft as city butter,"
she says, and there is no cruelty in it, only fact.
"Boots wrong, coat wrong, and you drove up a road that will be shut by morning."
She pulls the second chair out with her foot, the one with the burn on the seat that nobody uses, and points at it.
"Sit down and eat before I change my mind about the room."