“Some men can put one life into a pine box and open another like a new ledger from Baum’s store,” he said, striking a sulfur match with his thumbnail and holding the blue flare to the bowl until the tobacco caught with a fragrant, grey puff. “I am not made that way. Mary and I built that roof together. Every cedar beam in the kitchen was notched with her hand holding the chalk line. When she died, and the boy with her, the house didn't feel empty; it felt finished. Like a book where the last page has been turned.”
He looked across the draw toward the black bulk of the Rincon mountains that blocked out the eastern stars.
“I didn't want another woman to come in and move Mary’s shelves,” he added, his voice entirely devoid of sentimentality, speaking with that flat, absolute honesty that belonged to his character. “And I didn't want a woman who looked at me to see an old man who had survived his own life. When I went to Black Mesa and saw you on that pine platform, I didn't see a woman to sweep the floor or cook my bacon. I saw Sika’s daughter being dragged into the dirt by a thief who wasn't fit to carry her water bucket. It was an unfinished account. A man cannot sleep with an open debt on his conscience when he has two hundred dollars in gold sitting idle in a sugar crock.”
Tala pulled her blankets up over her knees. The fire was dying down now, sinking into a bed of glowing crimson embers that gave off no flame, only a deep, pulsing heat that warmed the basalt wall behind them.
She looked at Jonah through the darkness. He sat with his back straight, his hat pulled low, the tiny red spark of his pipe glowing intermittently in the shadow of his brim. He was old—his hair was grey as alkali, his joints creaked when he climbed into the wagon box, and his eyes were ringed with the deep, permanent squint of forty years under the southern sun.
Yet in the vast, dangerous territory that stretched from the Gila to the border—a territory where every man was looking for an advantage, where commissioners sold rations for silver, and where deputies used guns to enforce forged papers—this solitary, granite-faced farmer was the only person who had ever looked at her and asked for nothing in return.
Not obedience. Not gratitude. Not even the surrender of her silence.
“Jonah,” she said into the dark.
“Aye?”
“When we are finished in Tucson,” she said, “and when the judge has put his red wax on the paper, I will ride up the canyon to look for my mother at the Eagle’s Nest.”
“I know,” he said.
“And if she is there,” Tala continued, her voice firm, “I will bring her to the ranch. She will not live in an agency shed, and she will not eat government rations that have the grey mould in the sacks.”
Jonah drew on his pipe, the red coal flaring bright for a second, illuminating his quiet, weathered profile against the night sky.
“The south room has two windows,” he said, blowing the grey smoke out into the cold mountain air. “It needs a new lintel over the doorway, and the floor could use two coats of boiled oil to keep down the lime dust. We will haul the lumber from the sawmill on Mount Lemmon when we come back through the pass.”
He tapped the ashes from his pipe against the heel of his boot, stood up, and spread his heavy buffalo robe beneath the rear axle of the wagon.
“Go to sleep, Tala,” he said, lying down with his head resting upon his saddle for a pillow. “We have thirty miles of alkali before we smell the tan-vats of Tucson, and the horses will want to move before the sun shows over the Rincons.”
Tala wrapped her indigo coat tight around her shoulders, lay down upon the dry canvas sheet, and pulled her blankets to her chin. The basalt wall above them held the day’s heat, radiating a faint, dry warmth against her back. Above her, through the sparse branches of the desert willow, the stars of the desert sky burned with an immense, icy brilliant light, clear and steady, without a single cloud between her eyes and the infinite reach of the world.
They entered Tucson through the eastern gate at three o'clock on the following afternoon.
The town was an ancient, sprawling labyrinth of sun-dried adobe, dusty plazas, and narrow, crooked alleys that smelled of mesquite charcoal, horse stables, roasting chile peppers, and the sour, tannic stench of hide warehouses along the Santa Cruz river. It had none of the raw, temporary look of Black Mesa; here, the walls were three feet thick, whitewashed until they glared with a blinding white intensity in the spring sun, their corners rounded by two centuries of desert wind and summer rain.