A freight wagon had backed against it to unload sacks of grain; two Mexican boys were sitting on the pine planks where she had stood bound three days before, swinging their bare heels and eating dried plums in the sun. The rope was gone; the bluebottle flies were gone; the crowd was gone.
The terror that had seemed so permanent, so absolute when Hutchins had held the ledger in his greasy hands, had vanished into the dry air of the basin like the morning frost from the grass. It had left behind only an old wooden platform, a town full of men who could not look each other in the eye, and a long, open road running west toward the mountains where a woman could ride in her own coat, holding her own cloth, with the whole sky wide before her.
December descended upon the high basin not with sudden blizzards, but with an austere, dry iron that froze the ground two inches deep by nightfall. The Peloncillo range stood sharp and rimed against a turquoise horizon, stripped of all autumn color until the mountains resembled chipped flint. The scrub oak turned brittle in the draws, and every morning the windmill threw long, razor-thin icicles from its wooden paddles down into the stone tank, where they shattered against the frozen water with the sound of breaking crystal.
In this season, life narrowed to the discipline of hands. A ranch in the winter tolerated no hesitation; neglected leather cracked, ungreased axles seized in their boxes, and cattle drifted with the bitter northern gales until they piled against line fences and died of thirst.
Tala had taken over the rhythm of the kitchen and the lean-to without a word of instruction. She rose each morning before the red coals in the stove had died to grey ash, coaxing the flame to life with shavings of pitch-pine and split mesquite. She made no unnecessary sound. Her moccasins—which she had fashioned from a side of smoked elk hide Jonah traded from a mountain prospector—moved across the square floor pavers like dry husks before a breeze.
She set to work on the two yards of indigo wool she had purchased from Baum’s store in Black Mesa. At night, by the steady yellow flare of the astral-oil lamp, she spread the dark fabric over the scrubbed pine trestle table. She had no paper pattern. With a piece of dry gypsum chalk picked up from the creek bank, she traced the lines directly onto the wool: the high, close collar that would turn the wind, the deep scye of the armholes that allowed room for a woman to swing an axe or handle a team, and the double front overlap that would button from throat to hip against the mountain drafts.
Jonah sat at the opposite end of the table, his spectacles perched on his broad nose, repairing work harness. Between his knees he held a wooden stitching horse, its foot-pedal clamp gripping a heavy trace of four-ply steer hide. With an awl made from a ground-down triangular file, he punched each hole through the stiff leather with a rhythmic punch-hiss, then passed two needles threaded with waxed shoemaker’s hemp through the leather in opposing directions, pulling the stitch home with a slow, powerful spread of his arms.
The only sounds in the room were the click-scrape of Tala’s tailor’s shears parting the heavy wool, the snap of Jonah’s waxed hemp, and the muted roar of the mesquite knots burning in the firebox.
Neither of them spoke for an hour. It was not the cold silence of strangers who feared each other, nor the heavy quiet of prisoners who had run out of complaints. It was the companionable quiet of two people who had lived long enough beside hardship to know that unnecessary speech wasted heat.
“The black cow calved down in the willows,” Jonah said at last, not lifting his eyes from the trace. “A heifer. Red with a white star. The mother was weak from the frost, but she took the milk.”
Tala’s shears paused on the chalk line. “Did you bring them into the shed?”
“The calf is in the pen beside the forge, under two sacks of clean wheat straw,” he said. “The cow will stay by the creek till morning. She has water, and the cutbank keeps off the wind from the divide.”
“The wind will veer to the east before midnight,” Tala observed quietly. She laid the shears on the table and picked up her needle, threading it with the strong black linen. “The smoke has been flattening against the dirt roof since sundown. When the east wind comes off the malpais, it brings the sleet.”
Jonah pulled a stitch tight, the hemp singing as it seated into the groove. He paused, looking over his spectacles at the dark square of the window. Outside, through the glass, the stars had vanished, swallowed by a low, murky bank of cloud that rolled down from the limestone benches.