“I have them,” Baum said. He looked at Tala, who stood two paces back near a display of tin lanterns. He did not look at her with contempt; his blue eyes held that heavy, tired sorrow of old men who have seen too many wars and too many migrations. “And for the Fräulein? The calico came in from Saint Louis on the Tuesday stage. Good cloth. Fast dye.”
Tala stepped forward to the counter. She had three silver half-dollars in her coat pocket—coins Jonah had given her the evening before as her share of the wagon repairs they had done for the teamster who had broken an axle near their gate.
She did not look at Jonah for permission. She pointed to a bolt of dark wool cloth—a deep, indigo blue like the evening sky over the Peloncillos—and a card of bone buttons.
“Two yards of the blue wool,” she said in her clear, quiet English. “And twelve bone buttons with the large holes.”
Baum blinked, surprised by the correctness of her speech, then bowed his head slightly. “Ja. Two yards.”
He unrolled the heavy bolt across the counter, took a brass-edged yardstick from beneath the rail, and measured the cloth with two smooth movements of his broad arms. He snipped the edge with a pair of heavy tailor’s shears and tore the wool across with a loud, satisfying rip.
As Baum was wrapping the cloth in brown paper, the street door opened with a rattle of its brass bell, and a boy of twelve or thirteen entered. He wore an oversized pair of trousers held up by a single canvas gallus and carried an empty tin milk pail.
It was the boy who had held the horse brush on the livery stoop on the day of the auction.
He stopped three feet inside the door when he saw Tala. His mouth fell open slightly, his face flushing red beneath a layer of stable dirt and freckles. He shifted his weight from one bare foot to the other, his eyes dropping to the floorboards.
Tala watched him. She remembered his hands—how they had turned the brush over and over, wanting to look away from the rope around her wrists, yet unable to leave the square because the spectacle had drawn him like a dog to a carcass.
The boy took a breath, stepped toward the counter, and set his pail down. He looked up at Tala, his lower lip trembling slightly.
“I’m... I’m sorry about the rope, miss,” he blurted out, his voice cracking between boyish treble and manhood. “My pa told me not to say nothing to Elias, but it wasn't right. Everybody in the barn knew it wasn't right.”
The room went completely still. Baum stopped folding the brown paper. Jonah did not move.
Tala looked at the boy’s freckled forehead, at the dirt beneath his fingernails, and at the raw, genuine shame that burned in his red cheeks. This, she realized, was the anatomy of the town: not a solid wall of villains like Hutchins, but a collection of frightened people, old shopkeepers who wanted to sell their salt, and young boys who knew what was evil only after it had already been accomplished in the public square.
“Your father was afraid,” Tala said, her voice soft but carryingly distinct in the quiet store. “Fear makes men blind. It is better that you see now, while you are still small enough to learn how to speak before the rope is tied.”
The boy swallowed hard, nodded once with a jerky movement of his chin, grabbed his empty pail, and ran out the door, the brass bell ringing frantically behind him.
Baum cleared his throat, finished tying the brown paper parcel with jute twine, and pushed it across the counter to Tala. Beside it, he laid two bone sewing needles and a spool of black linen thread.
“No charge for the needles, Fräulein,” Baum murmured, not looking at Jonah. “A small courtesy of the house.”
Tala took her three silver half-dollars and laid them on the wood. She picked up the cloth and the needles, leaving one silver coin on the counter for the goods she had bought, and pushed the other two back into her pocket.
“Thank you, Mr. Baum,” she said.
They carried the supplies out to the wagon in silence. The three men on the lard tubs across the street had disappeared; the two women with the sunbonnets were gone from the sidewalk; the street was empty except for the dust that blew in little red devils between the adobe walls.
As Jonah backed the team into the street to turn toward the west, Tala looked back once at the empty platform in the square.