Silas Wren had come to Red Hollow for salt, fence wire, and coffee, and for nothing else in the world.
He wrote the list on the back of an old feed receipt before he left the ranch, the way Clara had taught
him to do in the years when a trip to town was still an ordinary thing and not an errand he put off until
the larder forced his hand. Salt. Wire. Coffee. Lamp oil. He folded the paper twice and put it in his shirt
pocket, and he rode the nine miles with the list sitting over his heart like a small, plain promise: go in,
buy what was written, ride home.
The town had other plans for the day, though Silas did not know it yet.
Red Hollow in the spring of 1876 was not much to look at and knew it. One street of sun-cured
boards and adobe, a church with a bell that had cracked in the heat of '71 and rung ever since with a flat,
apologetic note, a saloon, a livery, Harrow's general store, a jail with one cell, and a well in the square
that the whole town depended on and argued about in equal measure. The well was the reason for the
town and the excuse for most of its quarrels. In a dry country, water decided who stayed and who buried
their hopes and moved on.
He tied Biscuit at the rail outside Harrow's store, in the shade, where the dun gelding could reach the
trough. Biscuit was not young and not handsome, but he had never once made a foolish decision in
company, which was more than Silas could say for most of the men he knew, himself included. He
patted the horse's neck, settled his hat, and only then noticed that the street was too full for a Tuesday.
Wagons stood three deep near the square. Men he had not seen since Christmas were leaning on the
corral fence by the livery, passing a bottle in the open, at eleven in the morning, as if it were a fair day.
Women stood in the shade of the store awning with their arms folded. Boys ran between legs and were
cuffed and ran on again, delighted, sensing a holiday nobody had declared.
Silas felt the old pull in his chest, the one that said turn around, buy nothing, ride home, eat beans
without salt. He had felt it at every gathering since the winter Clara died. Crowds asked things of a man.
They asked him to laugh, to talk, to be the man he had been before. He had gotten good at declining, but
declining took energy, and the sun was already white and pitiless overhead.
"Silas Wren, as I live." Dr. Finch came down the store steps with his black bag in his hand, out of
habit more than need. "Town's got itself an entertainment. Lord forgive us all, calling it that."
"What entertainment?" Silas asked.
Finch looked toward the square, where two livery hands were dragging a freight platform into the sun
and setting it level on stones. A platform. Silas had seen that platform used for exactly one purpose in
his nine years in the territory, when the army auctioned mules, and once, shamefully, when a debtor's
household goods were sold off plank by plank while the debtor stood and watched his wife's chairs
become other men's bargains.
"Slade's back," Finch said. "Obadiah Slade. Came in last night with a wagon from the south road.
Soldiers took a band near Salt Wash last week — deserters, raiders, God knows what the paper will say
— and Slade's got a captive to sell. A woman. Apache." He said it low, and he said it angry, which for
Finch was the same as another man shouting. "He's got a paper, or says he does. Amos is looking at it
now. There's men here from Hale's outfit with money in their pockets, Silas. And Jubal Cross rode in at
dawn, and when Cross rides in somewhere, it isn't for the scenery."
Silas looked at the platform. A boy was sweeping it, very importantly, as if sweeping made it decent.
He thought of his list. Salt. Wire. Coffee. Lamp oil. He thought of Rosa waiting at the ranch, who
would want to know what the town was doing and would cross herself and be furious in two languages.
He thought of Eddie, who at nineteen had never yet seen the worst thing men could make a game of, and
who would hear about this by sundown whether Silas stayed or not.
He should have gone into the store. That was the plain truth he would turn over later, in the night, the
way a man turns a stone in his pocket. He should have bought his salt and ridden home and let Red
Hollow do what Red Hollow was going to do without him, the way he had let it do everything for three
years.
Instead he said, "What time?"
"Noon," Finch said. "When the shadow's shortest. Slade likes a full street."
"Then I've got an hour to buy salt," Silas said, and went up the steps into the store.
Prudence Harrow was behind the counter, and she was dressed as if for church — dark dress, cameo
at her throat — because a day like this, in her reckoning, was an occasion the town should meet
properly. She had laid out bolts of bright cloth and a jar of stick candy where the crowd could see them
from the door. Whatever else the day brought, it would bring customers, and Prudence Harrow had not
kept a store alive through drought and her husband's death by letting sentiment interfere with trade.
"Mr. Wren," she said. "We don't see you for a month of Sundays, and you pick today." Her eyes went
past him to the square, bright and hard. "Well. You're just in time to see the town made safe. That's what
I call it. Safe. There's folks who'll say it's a hard thing, and I say the hard thing is burying your husband
with his hair gone and half the valley burned, and after that a body learns what hard means."
Silas set his list on the counter. "Salt, Mrs. Harrow. Wire. Coffee, if the price hasn't learned to fly."
She measured and wrapped with quick, angry competence, talking the whole time to him, to the
room, to the day itself. The woman had been taken with a raiding party. The soldiers had been merciful
not to hang the lot, though there were those who said mercy was wasted. Slade had bought the right to
her from the patrol fair and legal. What one man did with his property after was his business, though a
decent man, in Prudence's view, would send her far away — to a reservation, to a mine camp kitchen,
anywhere the sight of her did not have to be borne by widows.
Silas listened the way he listened to weather: without arguing, and without believing all of it. In his
years as a young scout he had learned that the first story told about a fight was a coat of paint, and the
truth was the wood underneath, and you had to scratch to know the difference. He knew nothing about
the woman on the south road except that she was alive, bound for a platform, and that every person in
this store had already decided her whole life in three sentences.
"Will that be all?" Prudence said.
"Lamp oil," Silas said.
She set the tin down hard enough to ring. "Nine dollars and forty cents. I suppose you'll want it on the
book."
"No, ma'am." He paid in coin, counted exact, the way he always did, because the book at Harrow's
store was a chain with small links and he had seen men wear it for years. "I'll take the goods now and
load them after."
"After what?" she said, and then, understanding, smiled without warmth. "Oh, you'll stay, then.
Everyone stays. Even the righteous, Mr. Wren. Especially the righteous. It isn't every day the town gets
to see itself be strong."
He did not answer that. He stepped back out into the light.
The square filled the way a stock tank fills — slowly, then all at once at the edges, with dust. By
noon there were perhaps a hundred people, which is to say all of Red Hollow and half the ranches within
riding distance. Corbin Hale's men were there in a loose, practiced bunch, six of them, with Hale's
foreman, a slab-shouldered man named Whitaker, holding a leather purse that clinked when he shifted
his weight. Hale himself had not come. Hale never came to things that might be described later in a
courtroom. His money did his standing for him.
Jubal Cross stood alone by the well, rolling a cigarette with great care, a thin man with a beautiful,
ruined face and eyes that moved over the crowd the way a cat's eyes move over a yard — not looking
for anything in particular, pleased by all of it. He nodded at Silas. Silas did not nod back, a small
discourtesy both men registered and filed away.