“Seven years,” Jonah said. “We came out from Missouri after the war. I had three hundred dollars mustering-out pay from the Union cavalry and a team of mules that had survived the march through Arkansas. We built the first two rooms of the house with our own hands—cut the cedar poles from the high ridge, hauled the river mud in a canvas sheet, and laid every brick before the frost came in November of sixty-nine.”
He reached out, his thumb tracing a rough scar on the back of his left hand where an old adze cut had healed into a white ridge.
“She was a small woman,” he continued, his voice soft, almost lost beneath the whisper of the night wind through the mesquite. “Not large-boned like the women who crossed the plains with the ox trains. She liked flowers. She tried to grow blue columbine in the gravel behind the kitchen, but the dry wind burned them down every July. So she took to planting the yellow cliff-rose that grows wild in the malpais. She said if a plant had the courage to live in dry rock, a Christian ought to have the decency to give it a bucket of water.”
Tala listened, her chin resting upon her forearms. In the flickering light, her dark face was motionless as carved walnut.
“My mother was like that,” Tala said quietly. “When the soldiers moved our clan from the cool water of the Gila to the dry flat at San Carlos, there was nothing to eat except the sour flour from the agency barrels and the beef that had died on the transport wagons. My mother took the seeds of the wild wild melon that she had carried in a little pouch of deer gut inside her hair. She planted them in the mud of the drainage ditch behind the soldier’s latrines.”
She looked into the small bed of coals, remembering the green vines that had crept across the grey alkali dust eighteen years before.
“The other women told her it was foolish,” Tala said. “They said the soldiers would ride their horses through the vines when the fruit was green. But my mother said: ‘A seed does not know about soldiers. A seed knows only that the earth is dark and that water is coming down from the ditch. If we stop planting because a blue-coat has an iron gun, then we have already died in the winter.’”
Jonah lifted the coffee pot from the coals with a rag wrapped around the iron handle. He poured two measures into the battered tin cups, the hot, black liquid steaming with the rich, bitter scent of roasted Rio beans. He handed one across the pit to Tala, taking care that his fingers did not brush hers as she took the rim.
“The soldiers burned her melon vines?” Jonah asked.
“Yes,” she said, blowing gently on the surface of the coffee. “A lieutenant on a black horse rode through the patch three days before the fruit was sweet. He told her she was stealing water from the cavalry garden. My mother did not weep. She waited until the moon was dark, then she went to the cavalry garden with an iron digging stick and pulled up forty-two of his green cabbages and threw them into the river where the current carried them down to the reservation line.”
A low, dry chuckle broke from Jonah’s throat—the first real laugh Tala had ever heard from him. It was a strange, rusty sound, like an old iron gate turning on dry hinges after years of disuse, but it warmed the space between them more than the mesquite coals.
“She had iron in her, Sika did,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “When she sat in our lean-to during the blizzard of seventy-six, watching Mary burn with the lung rot, she didn't pray like the circuit preachers do, asking for the Lord to take pity on our misery. She boiled her licorice root, and when she poured it into the spoon, she looked at the fever like it was an enemy who had crept into the room without an invitation. She told Mary in that broken Spanish: ‘Breathe, little sister. The mountain does not fall down because the cold wind blows against the rock.’”
Tala took a sip of the scalding coffee. It was bitter, strong enough to float an iron nail, but it sent a clean, solid warmth down into her ribs.
“Jonah,” she said, her voice dropping lower. “Why did you not marry another woman after Mary died? In the towns, a man with a good ranch and forty cows takes a second wife before the grass is green over the grave.”
Jonah set his cup upon the flat rock. He reached into his coat pocket, drew out his pipe, and filled it with a pinch of black plug tobacco, pressing it down with his calloused thumb.