She knew that work. She had sat beside her mother in the cottonwood grove on the Gila when she was nine years old, holding the bone awl while Sika split the yellow grass roots with her front teeth. Sika had a way of turning the quill at the corner of the cloud design, doubling the stitch beneath the sinew so the red quill would not crack when the leather folded. No other woman in the clan turned the stitch that way; the elder women said it was too slow, that it wasted thread, but Sika had always answered that what was made to last should not fear the setting of the sun.
Tala held the buckskin to her cheek. The scent was old—faint, dry, carrying the unmistakable smoke of mountain juniper and grease that had crossed twenty years of desert air. A sob rose in her chest, sudden and violent, tearing at the base of her ribs like an iron hook. She had not wept at Black Mesa; she had not wept when Hutchins tied her hands with hemp rope; she had not wept when the soldiers burned the brush wickiups along the riverbank while the children hid in the rocks. But the touch of her mother’s stitches against her cheek broke the wall of silence she had built behind her teeth.
She sat on the dirt floor, rocking her body back and forth, her eyes shut tight against the dim light of the room. She did not cry with a loud wail; she wept the way Apache women learned to weep in the years of the flight—without a sound, her mouth open, the tears running hot down her jaw and dropping one by one into the folds of her calico lap, leaving dark, round spots on the faded cloth.
After a long time, the shivering in her shoulders subsided. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, her eyes red and burning in the dry air.
How had a piece of Sika’s buckskin come to rest in a cedar chest on an isolated cattle ranch twenty miles west of the Peloncillo divide?
She carried the buckskin into the kitchen and laid it on the clean white pine of the table. Beside it, she placed the heavy iron key that Jonah had left on the window ledge.
At half-past twelve, the sound of hoofbeats came from the wash. Jonah rode the bay gelding into the yard, led it directly to the trough, and pumped half a dozen strokes to freshen the water. He took off the saddle, threw a canvas sweat-sheet over the horse’s loins, and hung the bridle on the post.
When he stepped onto the porch, he took off his hat and knocked the dust from his trouser legs with three sharp slaps against his thigh. He entered the kitchen, his head lowered slightly to clear the low lintel of the door.
He smelled of horse sweat, warm sage, and the iron filings from the morning’s farrier work. He walked straight toward the tin basin on the wash bench to clean his hands, but his eye caught the buckskin lying on the table.
He stopped.
His slate-grey eyes moved from the embroidered quail track to Tala’s face. He saw the red rim of her eyelids and the tear marks dried into the dust along her cheekbones, but he said nothing about them. He dried his hands on the roller towel behind the door, hung it back upon its wooden peg, and sat down on the bench at the end of the table.
He looked at the piece of white leather for a long minute, his broad, blunt fingers resting quiet against the pine grain.
“Mary was sick in the winter of seventy-six,” he said. His voice was lower than usual, carrying the flat, gravelly weight of things that had been buried under years of rock. “We were living in the log cabin near the headwaters of the San Carlos, before the army cleared the valley for the agency line. The snow came early that year; it drifted six feet against the south wall, and the sheep died in the pens.”
Tala did not move. She sat opposite him, her hands folded over her knees, her eyes fixed on his face.
“Mary took the lung rot,” Jonah continued, looking through the open window toward the empty blue hills. “She burned with fever until her lips cracked, and I had no medicine except three drops of peppermint oil and some sulfur. On the fifth night, when the blizzard was at its worst, someone came to the lean-to where we stored the corn. It was a woman and a young boy. The boy was sick, coughing blood, and the woman had wrapped her feet in raw steer hide to keep from freezing on the trail.”
He paused. His hand reached out, touched the corner of the buckskin where the blue beads were sewn, and then withdrew his fingers as though he had no right to handle them.