see it, so it doesn't — startle you. I haven't known what to do with the things. So I do nothing, expertly."
Naya nodded, accepting this as one accepts weather. "Where do I sleep?"
"Bunkhouse. It's stone, it's got a stove, a good bed — Eddie's in the lean-to off the barn by his own
choosing, he snores like a sawmill and knows it. The bunkhouse has a door that bars from the inside and
a lock I put on last spring. The key hangs by the door. It'll be your key." He rode a moment. "The house
— my door doesn't lock at all. Never has. I want that understood the right way round: nobody comes
into your room. Any hour, any reason, nobody — me included — without your word first. I knock on a
door that isn't mine. That's the rule of the place, for Rosa, for Eddie, for anybody. You're not an
exception to it. You're under it."
She was quiet so long he thought the subject was closed. Then she said, "On the road, with Slade, the
men slept around the wagon so I could not —" She stopped and began again, with terrible simplicity. "A
door that locks from inside. I have not had one. Ever. Even at home, a blanket —" She did not finish.
"It's a poor lock," Silas said. "Hardware-store lock. But it's on the inside of the door, and the key'll be
in your hand. That's what I can do about the ever part."
They came over the last rise as the light failed, and Wren Creek showed itself the way it always did
— not grandly, but all at once, lamplit: the stone house under its cottonwoods, the creek a dark ribbon
catching the last sky, the corral, the barn, Rosa in the doorway with a lamp, having heard the horses two
minutes before the dogs announced them and having decided, sight unseen, that supper waited for
whoever history was bringing home tonight.
Rosa Delgado took in the whole procession in one look — Silas, the mare, the young woman in the
torn dress riding straight as a fence post, the boots too big for her laced tight — and Silas watched his
housekeeper perform, in the space of four seconds, an act of triage that generals could have studied.
Questions: later. Judgment: suspended. Supper: now.
"You are thin," Rosa announced, to Naya, in English, and then, without drawing breath, a sentence in
her own desert Spanish, slower, the border kind, an offering of a bridge she suspected might exist — and
Naya, to Silas's astonishment and Rosa's visible satisfaction, answered in the same tongue, halting,
mission-learned, but real: a greeting, a thanks. Rosa's eyebrows rose an inch, which for Rosa was
applause. "Inside," she said. "Both of you, inside, wash. Silas, the boy is down at the creek pen with the
red cow, she is calving stupid again. Eat first, cow after. That is the order God intended and the cow can
wait, she is only doing what cows have done since Noah."
Over supper — beans, beef, tortillas, coffee strong enough to file iron — Naya ate her second meal of
the day with the same careful steadiness, and answered Rosa's questions with a precision that Rosa
plainly respected: yes, she could cook; no, she did not eat the cabbage either, a confidence delivered so
gravely that Rosa laughed out loud for the first time that day, Silas realized, that he had heard anyone
laugh like a person and not a crowd. "Good," Rosa said. "We will get on. The cabbage is for Eddie. It
punishes him for his sins."
Afterward, Silas walked Naya to the bunkhouse by lantern light, carrying the small bundle of spare
clothes Rosa had assembled with the speed of long practice — a shirt, a skirt of Clara's that Silas looked
at once and then did not look at, on the principle that the dead would want their cloth used and the living
needed the lesson in not flinching. He set the lantern on the bunkhouse step. He showed her the stove,
the woodbox, the water bucket, the bed with its clean ticking. He showed her the lock, and he put the
key in her hand himself, and closed her fingers on it only by the words, not by touching: "Yours.
Nobody has another. I had the one key made."
She stood in the doorway of the small stone room, key in fist, bundle under her arm, and looked at
the room the way she had looked at the mountains from the platform, except that this door was near, and
hers, and open.
"One week," she said.
"One week," Silas said. "Sleep well, Naya."
He was ten steps gone toward the house when he heard the lock turn behind him — a small, cheap,
hardware-store sound, in the dark, under the cottonwoods. It sounded, walking away, like the best
sentence he had heard all day: a door, locked from the inside, by the person it belonged to.
In the house, Rosa was waiting with the coffeepot and a face like a court in session.
"Now," she said. "You will tell me all of it, Silas Wren. From the beginning. And do not leave out the
parts where you were noble, I want the full account to be angry about."
Chapter 6 — First Work
She was up before the light, and so — she discovered, with what Silas later learned was a species of
professional disappointment — was he. Ranch people keep a particular pride about rising, and Naya,
standing in the bunkhouse doorway in Clara's skirt and a shirt of his that Rosa had taken in by eye
during the night, looked at the lamp already lit in the kitchen window, and at Silas crossing the yard with
the milk pail, and recalculated the hour she would need to beat him by. He saw her do it. He filed that
away with a pleasure he was careful not to show.
"You said work," she said, by way of good morning.
"I did. Eat first. Rosa's law, not mine — I only enforce it where I can be seen."
Breakfast was eaten largely in the businesslike quiet of people who intend to work until dark, and
then the first day unfolded, and it did not unfold the way either of them had braced for. Silas had
expected — what? He examined himself honestly, afterward. He had expected to assign her tasks the
way a man assigns tasks to a new hand he is half afraid of frightening: small things, safe things, the
chickens, the garden patch gone to weeds since Clara. He had a whole gentle list prepared. He never got
to use it. Naya looked at his list — he had, God help him, written it down — with the expression of a
cavalry officer reviewing a child's drawing of a fort.
"The garden can wait. Gardens are patient; that is their whole character. Your corral fence is not
patient." She pointed with her chin. "There. The rails are down where the mare leans. And the well curb
is cracked — in a dry year you lose water to a cracked curb every day and call it evaporation and lie to
yourself like a Christian. And your horses." A pause of real severity. "Your horses have not been curried
since — I will be polite. Since some time."
"Eddie curries the horses," Silas said.
"Eddie brushes where a horse is already clean," Naya said. "It is a talent. I watched him for one
minute."
From the kitchen doorway, Rosa made a sound that she converted, halfway, into a cough.
So the first day was spent the way first days should be spent and rarely are: at real work, side by side
and mostly apart, each of them competent in view of the other. Silas learned more about Naya from
watching her reset a fence rail than from any conversation they would have for a week. She worked the
way water finds a course — without hurry and without waste, testing the post with her shoulder before
she trusted it, spitting on the auger bit the way his grandfather had, swearing once, softly, in her own
language, at a splinter, with a fluency that suggested the word had a pedigree. She was strong in the
wiry, enduring way, and she rested without embarrassment when she needed to, sitting back on her
heels, drinking from the bucket's dipper, looking at the work, planning the next hour in plain sight. She
did not perform gratitude. She did not perform anything. By noon Silas had stopped bracing, and it was
as if a muscle in his back he had forgotten he owned unclenched.
The horses were the true examination, and both of them knew it. A ranch can pretend about almost
anything for a day except horses. She went through the string — his Biscuit, the mare, Eddie's rawboned
bay, the two young geldings, the old red cow-horse retired to pension and opinions — with her hands
first and her eyes second, talking low the whole time in a mixture of languages that the horses appeared
to regard as entirely satisfactory. The younger gelding, Sol, who had fought every human hand since a
bad branding, stood for her like a churchgoer. Eddie watched that from the corral fence with his mouth
open.