She looked at the canvas bag of gold double eagles—more money than she had ever seen in her life, enough silver and gold to buy forty horses, fifty sacks of flour, and clothes for every child in her clan on the reservation. She looked at the copperplate document that promised her forty acres of rich river bottom where the red willows grew, the land where her grandfather had dug the irrigation ditch with a wooden spade before the soldiers came.
Then she reached out, took the gold-mounted pen from Bradley’s fingers, and laid it back down upon the paper without uncapping the nib.
“Mr. Bradley,” she said.
Her voice had that absolute, quiet finality of a heavy stone dropped into a dry well.
“When Elias Hutchins tied my wrists with hemp rope in the square at Black Mesa,” she said, “he told the people that I had no father, no name, and no rights under the law. He told them that for two hundred dollars, any man with boots could take me to his barn and tell me when to eat and when to work.”
She picked up the copperplate document by its corner, holding it between two fingers as though it were a dead scorpion picked up from the floor.
“Now,” she continued, looking Bradley squarely in his watering, pale eyes, “he sends you in a fine buggy with five hundred dollars in gold to buy my signature, because he wants to sit in the big house in Prescott and make laws for the people of this land.”
She dropped the paper back onto the table.
“Go back to Black Mesa, Mr. Bradley. Tell Elias Hutchins that my name is Tala, daughter of Sika. Tell him that my truth is not a steer to be sold for fifty dollars in November and bought back for five hundred dollars in March. Tell him that every word I spoke before Judge Miller is written in the great book in Tucson, stamped with red wax, and that it will stay there until the paper rots into the dirt.”
She pointed to the canvas bag of gold coins.
“Take your gold,” she said. “Take your deed. And take your horse off this bench before the sun reaches the noon line. If you are still standing on this gravel when the shadow turns, Jonah will fetch his Springfield, and we will see if your fine Prescott coat can keep off a fifty-caliber slug any better than Elias Hutchins’s ledger did.”
Bradley’s face turned an ugly, mottled crimson. He snatched the paper from the table, shoved it into his portfolio, and grabbed the canvas bag of gold with a quick, nervous jerk that tore the green ribbon.
He stood up, his professional veneer entirely vanished, his thin lips trembling with rage.
“You’re an ignorant, stubborn savage,” Bradley spat, his voice shaking. “You think because an old circuit judge took pity on you that you’re a white woman? You’ll die in an agency ditch, both of you! Elias Hutchins will have the sheriff on this ranch before the hay is cut!”
Jonah stood up.
He did not shout. He did not draw a weapon. He simply rose to his full six feet of bone and sinew, his shoulders broad as a draft horse, his black-sooted forearms hanging loose at his sides, and took one slow, deliberate step toward the lawyer.
Bradley did not wait for a second step. He bolted through the kitchen door like a frightened rabbit, his boots scrambling frantically across the veranda gravel. He leaped into the buggy, hauled the gelding around with a vicious pull on the reins that made the horse rear against the bit, and drove out through the gate at a breakneck gallop, the hickory wheels throwing showers of red dirt against the stone wall of the corral.
Tala stood by the table, watching the dust cloud drift away down the draw toward the southern road.
Her heart was beating with a hard, rhythmic labor against her ribs, but her hands were steady. She looked at the clean pine table where the gold had rested five minutes before, smelling the faint trace of lavender water and pomade that the lawyer had left behind in the room.
Jonah walked to the doorway, watched the buggy disappear behind the malpais ridge, and then turned back into the kitchen.
He looked at Tala. A quiet, profound amusement—warm, dry, and deep as the earth—twinkled in the grey depths of his eyes.
“Forty acres on the Gila,” he remarked, his voice as dry as cured corn. “That was a fair price for three lines of ink, Tala.”
Tala picked up the clean linen cloth from the bench and wiped the spot on the table where the lawyer’s portfolio had rested, scrubbing away the smell of the town.