“And what does a piece of paper do against the sheriff?” Tala asked. She watched the dark nib of the pen as it hovered over the blue line.
“A sheriff is not a border rider,” Jonah answered. “A sheriff is an elected man. He cares about votes in the county seat, and he cares about his neck if he serves an illegal writ that leads to a killing. If we send a full deposition to the territorial governor, to the Indian Rights Association in Philadelphia, and to Judge Miller in Tucson before Hutchins reaches Prescott, the sheriff will find an excuse to lose the writ in his desk drawer until after the spring election.”
He looked at her across the table, his hand resting steady on the pine board.
“I can write the history of the money,” he said. “I can write that I paid two hundred dollars under protest to stop an unlawful auction of a free citizen. But the court does not care about what I saw; the court cares about what was done to you. If the paper does not carry your own words, it is only one white man arguing with another about property.”
Tala’s hand closed over her mackinaw sleeve. “My words have never been written down by a clerk. When the soldiers came to the agency, they had an interpreter who spoke only three words of our tongue. Everything he wrote in their book was a lie: he wrote that we had guns when we had only digging sticks; he wrote that we ran away when they had driven our sheep into the river.”
“That is why you will speak them yourself,” Jonah said. “I will write down every word as you give it. If there is a word you do not like, we will scratch it out with the sand-rubber. When it is finished, you will sign your name at the bottom—not with an X like the commissioners make our people do, but in the letters you learned at the mission school.”
Tala sat in silence for a long moment, listening to the slow, heavy drip of water from the kitchen eaves as the last of the roof-frost melted in the sun. She looked at the blank white sheet. For years, white men’s paper had been an instrument of violence: it arrived in the hands of soldiers to clear a valley; it hung on the wall of the agency office to tell you how many pounds of flour you were allowed to eat; it was held in Hutchins’s hand to turn sixteen years of human life into a debt of two hundred dollars.
To put her own breath onto that paper felt dangerous, like walking onto thin river ice where the black water moved swift beneath. But she remembered the feeling of the hemp rope biting into her wrists in the dusty square at Black Mesa, and she understood that silence was simply another way of letting Hutchins write the story himself.
“Write this,” she said.
Jonah set the pen to the top line.
“My name is Tala,” she began, speaking slowly, her voice flat and rhythmic as though she were reciting an ancient lineage of the rocks. “I was born near the mouth of the canyon where the red willow grows, on the water they call the Gila. My mother was Sika, of the clan that watches the quail. She was not a prisoner of war. She lived upon the land that was measured by the treaty of eighteen sixty-eight, and she planted maize beneath the ditch that was dug by my grandfather.”
The steel nib scratched across the heavy paper, loud in the quiet room—scritch, scritch, scritch. Jonah wrote with a large, square hand, forming the letters with the heavy, unornamented discipline of a clerk who had kept freight manifests in the army.
“In the month when the acorns turn brown,” Tala continued, “three men came with an army wagon. They were led by a corporal named Jenkins and a man who sold whiskey at the crossing. They took our sheep—forty-two head—and they burned the storage wickiup where the dried squash was kept. They said my mother owed twelve dollars for three blankets that had been issued to my uncle three winters before. My mother said the blankets were rotten and full of the grey lice that bring the spotted fever. The corporal struck her across the shoulders with his carbine sling.”
Jonah’s pen did not hesitate, but the muscles along his jaw tightened until a small knot of white skin showed beneath his grey stubble.