hating. "No offense intended to — well. Some things are offense, intended or not. My husband —"
"Your husband," Naya said, evenly, before Silas could frame a single syllable, "is dead. I am sorry for
it. I did not kill him. I was fourteen years old and four hundred miles away when your husband died,
Mrs. Harrow, and my mother was alive then, and taught me that grief is a room a person lives in, not a
stick to hit strangers with." She stood in the dusty street in Rosa's good skirt and her too-big boots, with
the whole town watching her back, and her voice did not rise at all. "You will not sell me a spool of
thread. That is your right; it is your store. But do not tell this street you do it for your husband. You do it
because hating me is easier than the room. I know the room. I also live in one."
The silence that followed that was of a quality Silas had never heard in Red Hollow, not even at
gravesides. Prudence Harrow's face underwent several weathers. Her mouth opened. Her hand went,
involuntarily, toward the cameo at her throat — toward, Silas realized, the little painted portrait inside it
— and for one unguarded instant the stick dropped and there was only the room, and the woman in it,
standing in her own doorway looking stricken at having been seen so exactly by a stranger in a
borrowed skirt.
Then she recovered, the way people do, by finding anger closer to hand than grief. "Get off my
steps," she said, but she said it to Silas, because Silas was safer. "Take your — shopping — to the
Chinaman's stall, if he's fool enough. My store's closed to this — household — until it's a Christian one
again."
"We'll manage, Prudence," Silas said, mild as milk, and felt, rising in him, not anger exactly but a
tired and total clarity. "We managed the wire's purchase in my head at your prices for nine years. We'll
manage it elsewhere at the same prices and half the sermon." He touched his hat with a courtesy so exact
it was a blade. "I'm sorry about Daniel. I was sorry at the time and I carried a corner of his box, in case
the years blurred it. Nothing about today touches that."
They bought wire and salt at the freight stall by the livery, at a premium, from a man who charged it
with embarrassment and threw in lamp oil free with the air of a sinner buying indulgences in the wrong
church. Eddie, who had vanished on his own errands, reappeared with licorice and no harmonica reed
and a face full of news, which he delivered in a rolling undertone as they loaded the pack horse: who
had said what, in the saloon, in the barbershop, at the well. The town's factions, as mapped by a
nineteen-year-old with licorice on his chin: the Hale men, who said Wren had stolen Hale's purchase out
of pure spite and would be taught the price of it. The miners, who had opened a betting book — actually
opened it, money down — on how long before she ran off with a horse. The churchwomen, divided
between those who thought Silas Wren had done a Christian act and those who thought he had done a
scandalous one, with both halves agreeing to bring it up at the Ladies' Aid as an agenda item titled,
ominously, The Situation at Wren Creek. And — Eddie lowered his voice, though they were alone at the
livery rail — Jubal Cross, who had sat in the saloon for two nights buying nothing, and had said, when
the barkeep asked his opinion, that he'd never seen a knife used so polite, and that the whole thing wasn't
over, not by a jugful, because Obadiah Slade did not lose a hundred and thirty dollars' worth of
reputation without presenting the bill to somebody.
"Cross said that?" Silas asked.
"Word for word. Danny at the bar wrote it in the racing form. I read it." Eddie squirmed, then added
the item he had been saving, the one troubling him. "And Tom Harrow asked me — Prudence's boy, he's
ten — asked me if it's true she eats at the table. With plates. He wasn't being mean, Silas. He was just —
nobody's told him anything except the stick part. He wanted to know about the plates."
Silas thought about that all the way home, or would have, if the road had given him time. It did not.
Dr. Finch flagged them at the valley turn, on his own mare, bag on the saddle, having ridden out
expressly, he said, to look at a wrist — "a medical matter, don't argue with science, young woman" —
and Naya, after the assessment she performed on every new instrument, allowed him the wrist, and
watched his gentle, competent examination with an attention that slowly changed character as she
understood that the doctor's interest was entirely in the rope's work and not at all in her as a spectacle.
Finch cleaned the cut, salved it, wrapped it in linen so neat it looked starched.
"You'll have a scar," he said. "Thin. It'll fade to a line. I've seen the like on wrists that pulled plows
after, so don't let anyone sell you delicacy." He tied off the bandage. "My wife — dead now, God rest
her, she was Cherokee on her mother's side and it shortened her welcome in three towns before this one,
and lengthened my education considerably. If you need a doctor, you send. If you need an ally with a
medical degree and no sense, likewise. No charge, and that's not charity —" he caught himself, glanced
at Silas, who had plainly briefed no one and yet — "— that's town credit, first visit, everybody gets it,
ask anyone, total fiction but we'll all swear to it."
"You are a kind man practicing at being a rascal," Naya said, flexing the wrapped wrist, "so no one
will ask more kindness of you than you can hide. I see you, Doctor."
Finch rode home, Silas noted, looking ten years younger and entirely found out.
They were two miles from the ranch, in the cottonwood bottom where the road crosses the creek,
when they met the minister coming the other way — Reverend Ott, on foot, walking his circuit with his
hat in his hand and his Bible in a oilcloth wrap, a small, damp, earnest man who had buried Clara and
the baby and had sat up the whole night before the funeral in Silas's kitchen saying almost nothing,
which Silas had counted then and counted still as the finest pastoral work of his life. Ott stopped. He
looked at Naya a long moment, not as a problem, but as a man looks at a text in a language he is honest
enough to know he reads badly.
"Miss Naya," he said — using, Silas noted, the name, and the miss, and the town would hear of that
too — "I am Samuel Ott. I keep the church. I won't pretend my congregation is ahead of me on the road
you're walking; half of them are behind me, and I'm slow. But the church door is a door. It doesn't ask
for papers." He turned his hat in his hands. "Also — my wife's people. There's a girl — there was a girl
at the mission school, years back, before your time maybe. Taught there. Marah — no. Nahla. Ring any
— no. Forgive me. I ask everybody. It's a ministry of its own, asking." He smiled sadly at his own
foolishness and walked on, hat still in his hand, into the heat.
Naya watched him go a long way. "The town is not one thing," she said at last, as if entering a
correction in a ledger she kept.
"No," Silas said. "It's about nine things, and they all talk at once, and the loudest one's usually
Prudence. But no. Not one thing."
"Good," Naya said. "One thing can be killed or bought. Nine things —" she nudged the mare up the
bank — "nine things must be lived with. That is harder and better." And she rode ahead of him up the
home trail, sitting straight, the white bandage bright on her wrist, toward the house under the
cottonwoods where Rosa — who had spent the afternoon, they would learn, baking enough for a siege
and composing, in two languages, the speech she intended to deliver to the Ladies' Aid whether invited
or not — was watching from the porch with her hands on her hips and an expression that announced the
town could come when it was ready. She was.
Chapter 8 — Paper Claims
Slade came back on the ninth day, and he came, as Rosa put it, dressed for law — which in Red Hollow
meant he had brought the law with him in the person of Sheriff Doyle, riding two lengths behind Slade's
buggy with the face of a man escorting a smell he was professionally obliged not to comment on. Eddie
saw them from the hayloft and came down the ladder announcing it, and Naya, who was currying Sol in
the corral, went still in the particular way Silas had learned to read: not fear, but a marshalling, like a