“It was Sika,” Jonah said. “She had escaped from the cavalry escort three days before, after they took the camp at Eagle Creek. She stayed in the lean-to for two days. She brought dried herbs from her pouch—some kind of grey root that smelled like licorice—and she boiled it on our stove. She fed it to Mary with a tin spoon, and she fed it to her boy. Mary’s breathing cleared before the third morning. Sika would not come into the warm room; she slept on the corn shucks with the boy, wrapped in an army blanket that had the red quartermaster stamp cut out of it.”
Tala’s throat tightened. “And the boy?”
Jonah shook his head slowly. “He died the second night. The cold was too deep in his chest. We buried him in the frozen ground behind the cabin, beneath three feet of drift. I used a pickaxe to break the soil; it took four hours to dig a trench two feet deep. Sika sang no death song because there were cavalry patrols riding the trail two miles down the valley, and she knew the sound of mourning carried three miles on frozen air.”
Tala closed her eyes. The boy was her brother, Chato, who had vanished from the wickiup when she was six years old. Her mother had never spoken his name again, in keeping with the ancient law that forbade the naming of those who crossed into the dark, but on certain nights when the winter rain beat upon the hide roof, Sika would sit by the ashes and touch the empty palm of her left hand, over and over, until the light returned.
“Before she left,” Jonah said, “she gave that buckskin to Mary. She told Mary—Mary spoke a little of the Spanish that the Mexican traders used on the Gila—that if a day ever came when a child of hers was in trouble between the mountains and the river, someone who had seen that track would know she had paid her debt to the house.”
He looked up at Tala then, his grey eyes steady and direct, without a trace of pity or pride.
“Mary died four years later,” he said quietly. “Not from the lung rot, but from the childbed fever when the baby came too early. Neither of them lived. But she kept that buckskin in the cedar chest with her wedding dress. When Hutchins stood up on the platform yesterday and spoke the name of Sika, I knew what was written in the commissioner’s ledger was a lie. I did not buy you, Tala. I took my horse and my rifle and two hundred dollars of Mary’s money, and I went to Black Mesa to balance the ledger that was opened in seventy-six.”
He stood up, took his hat from the peg, and walked to the door.
“There are beans in the pot on the back of the stove,” he said, his voice returning to its ordinary, dry tone as he reached the veranda. “They need an hour of simmering with a piece of fatback. If you want to ride out to the ridge this evening, there is a gentle mare in the south pasture. She will come to an ear of corn if you whistle.”
He stepped down off the porch into the sunlight, leaving Tala alone at the table with the piece of white deer hide and the knowledge that the world, though hard and cruel as limestone, had some threads in it that neither soldiers nor money could entirely pull apart.
Three days later, the quiet of the basin was broken by the sound of an iron-tired wagon approaching from the south.
Tala heard it while she was kneeling beside the irrigation ditch that ran from the windmill tank to the small patch of squash and pinto beans behind the house. She had learned to read the sound of wheels the way a scout reads broken twigs: a buckboard had a light, quick clatter that spoke of empty spring seats and trotting horses; a freight wagon moved with a deep, grinding roar that shook the pebbles in the ditch; but this rig had the heavy, uneven jolt of an overloaded livery wagon, with one loose tire that struck the axle-nut on every third revolution—clack-whir, clack-whir.
She rose to her feet, leaving the short hoe in the soft earth, and moved behind the corner of the adobe wall. Her hand went instinctively to the pocket of her calico skirt, where she had begun carrying the horn-handled folding knife that Jonah had left on the kitchen windowsill two mornings before.
Through the shimmering heat mirage that hovered over the salt grass, she saw a black top-buggy pulled by two raw-boned sorrels. Sitting on the leather box was Deputy Vance, his broad grey hat pulled low over his eyes, his thick shoulders hunched against the sun. Beside him sat another man in a grey linen duster and a flat-topped bowler hat, carrying a black leather valise across his knees.