Tala understood the geometry of the offer. A man who wished to demonstrate power brought the water to you, expecting you to take it from his fingers with lowered eyes. A man who wished to trap you stood between you and the horse. Jonah had placed the horse between himself and the open desert, leaving the road behind her entirely unobstructed. If she took the water, she did so by stepping forward of her own volition; if she turned and ran south toward the blue shadow of the Chiricahuas, he would have to cross twenty yards of open scree to reach his mount.
She waited for a dozen heartbeats, listening to the cicadas that shrilled in the heat-baked brush. Then she walked to the bay.
The horse turned its head, its brown eye large and liquid, its ears flicking forward. It gave a soft, snorting sigh through its nostrils, smelling the trail dust on her calico dress, but did not shy. Tala reached up. Her fingers, dark-skinned and calloused from grinding maize and hauling firewood, wrapped around the damp canvas strap of the near-side canteen. She lifted it clear of the horn.
The weight was solid, reassuring. She unscrewed the tin cap, the threads squeaking with a tiny grit of dust. She did not gulp; she took a mouthful, held it against her parched tongue until the tissues softened, and then swallowed slowly. It was cool, faintly brackish with salt, but sweet beyond anything she had tasted in Hutchins’s holding shed. She drank three long swallows, replaced the cap, and hung the canteen back upon the brass pommel.
She did not say thank you. In her mother’s tongue, gratitude was not tossed about like loose copper coins for small decencies; gratitude was a debt incurred only when one spirit answered for another. To thank a white man for water was to acknowledge that he owned the rain.
Jonah remained on the stone. When she had stepped back to her position ten paces down the trail, he stood up, dusted the seat of his trousers, and took a small package wrapped in greasepaper from his saddle pocket. He set it on top of a flat limestone boulder beside the track, weighed it down with a round pebble so the wind would not carry it, and walked back to his horse.
“There is salted beef and three cold biscuits from the boarding house,” he said, swinging up into the saddle with a creak of leather. “They are dry, but they keep.”
He turned the horse’s head westward and urged it forward with a light touch of his heels. The bay stepped out into the dust, the pack mule following with its steady, bobbing gait.
Tala approached the flat stone. She picked up the greasepaper package. The grease had soaked through the coarse brown paper, smelling of cured pork and woodsmoke. She tucked it inside the fold of her blanket-shawl, pressed it against her ribs, and resumed her place ten paces behind the mule’s hocks.
As they climbed out of the wash, the sun began its slow decline toward the western rim of the world, turning the red ramparts of the mountains into walls of smoldering copper. The silence between them was not the tense silence of the auction platform, where every breath was measured against violence. It was the hard, dry silence of people who knew that words could not change the grade of the trail, the heat of the afternoon, or the facts of what had been done in Black Mesa.
Tala watched Jonah’s shoulders. He rode with a slight slump, his left shoulder carrying higher than his right, the posture of a man who had broken a collarbone years before and allowed it to mend without the aid of a town doctor. He did not glance back to see if she was following. He did not slow down to let her close the gap, nor did he quicken the pace to test her endurance. He moved across the earth as though he were merely a piece of it that had been given legs, indifferent to her scrutiny, yet keeping an unvarying circle of empty air around her that no one attempted to cross.
It was this space, more than the affidavit in his pocket or the gold he had thrown on the ledger, that kept Tala moving. In the reservation camps, space was the first thing they took from you; they put four families in an adobe box twelve feet square, counted your blankets, and made you stand in line for flour while the soldiers leaned over the railing and laughed. A person without space had no choice except to hate or to wither. Here, beneath the giant sky that stretched from the Peloncillos to the San Pedro valley, she had ten paces of dirt behind the horse that belonged to no one but herself.