"She's got it," Eddie announced to the yard in general, at dinner. "Whatever it is. The horses told me.
They held a meeting."
"They held it in your honor and voted you more brushing," Naya said, without looking up from her
plate, and Eddie's face went through surprise into delight so fast it was like watching a lamp lit. Rosa
crossed herself, thanking heaven for a household development she approved of: somebody else, at last,
to keep the boy in his place.
On the third day, Silas paid her. Not Saturday — he had considered the matter and rejected his own
schedule, on the grounds that a person who has been sold should not be asked to extend a week of credit
to the man who held the paper, however the paper was now endorsed. He counted three dollars onto the
kitchen table after supper, coin by coin, the way Slade had counted his price, and he did it deliberately,
taking the ugly echo head-on so it could be looked at and retired.
"Three days," he said. "Dollar a day. Saturday it settles weekly from here. Count it."
She counted it. She examined one coin at the edge, with her teeth in thought, then, catching herself,
set it down with distaste at her own gesture — a captivity habit, Silas understood, checking whether the
world was still cheating at the level of metal. She made a small leather pouch appear from her clothes —
she had sewn it, he realized, from a scrap, in the bunkhouse, at night; when did she sleep? — and put the
coins away one by one, and tied the thong, and only then looked up.
"Now I am owed nothing until Saturday," she said. "And I owe forty cents." She produced, from the
same impossible economy of hiding places, a small stack of coins and counted out exactly forty cents
and set it, precisely, at his elbow. "Mrs. Lane's dinner. Now we owe nothing."
Silas looked at the forty cents. It was, he understood, the most consequential money in the house —
more than the tin box, more than the hundred and thirty — because it was a woman who owned three
dollars and a torn dress insisting that her accounts with the world be kept straight, by her, at her speed,
against all comers. To refuse it would be to steal the whole meaning of it. He took the coins and put
them in his pocket gravely, like a man accepting communion.
"Square," he said.
"Square," she agreed, and Rosa, watching from the stove with the expression of a woman at a play
she has waited years to see, said, "More coffee, debtors," and filled both their cups whether they wanted
or not, which was — though none of them knew it yet — becoming the ministry of that house.
The week filled in. She learned the ranch's geography the way Silas had learned it over nine years,
but faster, and with corrections. She found the seep spring above the creek that Silas had always halfknown about and had never improved, and cleared it with Eddie in an afternoon, doubling the trough's
slow supply. She rotated the chickens' run. She reorganized Rosa's root cellar by a system Rosa resisted
for exactly one hour and then adopted with the air of a queen granting a patent. She had a way of being
in a place that was not occupation but residency, and the ranch — which had been, for three years, a
house and some acreage where a grieving man performed the chores of a life he no longer entirely
claimed — began, almost audibly, to tick again like a clock rewound.
What she did not do was talk about herself. She asked questions freely — about Clara, gently, once,
and took the answer without embroidery; about the war, and accepted his refusal of that subject with a
nod that said she kept such rooms herself; about the town, whose names she was learning like a map of
hazards. But of Salt Wash, of the band, of the brother who had run at the river, she said only what the
first day had cost her, and then closed the account. Silas, whose whole nature after three years of
practice was a closed account, recognized the system and honored it from his side of the fence.
It was Eddie who broke the ice of the unspoken, because nineteen has no respect for systems. At
supper on the fifth night he said, straight out, with his mouth full: "Were you scared? On the platform?
Because I would've been scared out of my skin, and everybody says you just — looked at the
mountains."
The table went still. Rosa's spoon paused. Silas prepared, uselessly, to intervene.
"I was deciding," Naya said, after a moment, "which man I would kill first, if I got a knife." She said
it conversationally, as one discusses the weather expected tomorrow. "The man with the rope at my
throat. Then Slade. Then —" she considered Eddie with a faint, dreadful sweetness "— whoever was
nearest after that. It is good arithmetic to do when you are afraid. It gives the fear a job." She ate a bite.
"You would not have been scared, Eddie Lark. You would have been deciding. Everyone decides. The
ones who run and the ones who freeze — they are also deciding, only their sums come out different."
Eddie nodded slowly, a boy who had just been handed a heavier tool than he expected and was
finding he liked the weight of it. "Who'd you pick if it was me holding the rope?" he asked, grinning,
incorrigible.
"You?" Naya said. "I would wait. In one minute you would drop it and apologize to the rope." And
Eddie, delighted, crowed, and Rosa laughed, and Silas — Silas laughed too, out loud, before he could
decide not to, and the sound startled him in his own house like a stranger's voice, and he did not mind
being startled. He had forgotten his laugh had that pitch to it. Clara would have known it anywhere.
That night, locking nothing in his own house as always, he lay awake and listened to the ranch settle
— Sol stamping in the corral, the dogs sighing in relay, the creek below its banks doing its small,
perpetual work — and from the bunkhouse, faintly, through the stone and the dark, came a sound he had
not heard in that house's geography in three years, and it took him a long moment to name it, because
naming it felt like laying a hand on something that would vanish at a touch.
She was singing. Low, in her own language, a song with no interest in being overheard — a work
song, maybe, or a road song, something with a rhythm like walking. It went on a while. It stopped the
way it had started, without ceremony.
Silas lay in the dark in the house that did not lock, and thought of Clara, and did not feel the usual
guilt that attended thinking of anything beyond Clara; and he thought of the week, ending Saturday, and
of Naya's prerogative, stated on the first day and unrescinded, to decide again. He found he was not
afraid of her decision. He found he was only — and the discovery amused him, tiredly, in the dark —
very interested in deserving it.
Chapter 7 — What the Town Said
The week would end on Saturday, and Saturday was also the day the ranch's needs sent them, inevitably,
to town. The wire from the first list had never been loaded — events had driven simpler purchases out of
Silas's head — and the lower fence would not wait for diplomacy. So on Saturday morning, with the pay
envelope logic of the day ahead of them (Silas would pay her at the ranch, at the table, as agreed; money
of business did not travel to town to be gossiped over), they rode in together, with Eddie trailing on the
bay, important with a list of his own, which consisted of licorice and a new harmonica reed and was
written, optimistically, in pencil on his forearm.
Red Hollow had had six days to decide what it thought, and Red Hollow had decided several things,
in several directions, at the top of its voice. Silas heard the town's decision in the quality of the silence
that met them at the first hitching rail: not the silence of the auction, but a layered quiet, men finding
sudden business with their boots, women drawing children in a half-step closer — and underneath it,
loud as church, the talk that had plainly been going at full boil a second before and would resume the
moment they passed. He had known these people nine years. He could read their silences like weather
vanes.
The first test wore an apron. Prudence Harrow stood in her store doorway with her arms folded,
having arranged herself there with the timing of a general, and when Naya would have followed Silas up
the steps, Prudence spoke, not loudly — she did not need loud; she had moral pitch, which carries
farther.
"Mr. Wren. Your — person — can wait outside. I don't serve her kind in the store. The street's public.
The store's mine." She looked at Naya then, full, and whatever she saw she had pre-forgiven herself for