And Enola stayed. That was the fact underneath all the paper, the fact no
letter could phrase around: she had been vindicated by a dying boy's
signature and a herd of horses and a sheriff's warrant, and Lieutenant Osborn,
when Reilly's report reached Fort Stanton, had sent word that the detachment
had no further interest in Enola. She was free to go anywhere a free woman
could go in New Mexico Territory in 1879, which was a shorter list than the
word free deserved, and she went, instead of anywhere, back to Wade's
cellar, and then up into the shack, where she took the corner by the window
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and the running of the small household into her hands as if these were simply
the next tasks in a life that had always been mostly tasks. San Tomas had
opinions about that too. San Tomas had opinions the way the draw had wind.
They weathered it the way you weather anything on that land, by continuing.
The fire came the night before the territorial hearing — the hearing at which
everything was to be formalized: the brands read into record, Malone's
statement entered, Barlow's and Deke's pleas taken. Wade woke to the smell
before the light, the way a man who has lived around burning things wakes,
already knowing. The lamp, the report would say. A lamp left burning in a
shack of dry pine and old paper, in a Territory where lamps took houses the
way fever took boys, regular as seasons. No one ever proved otherwise. No
one in San Tomas, including Tom Reilly standing in the yard at dawn
looking at the black square where the shack had been, ever quite pretended
otherwise either. Some proofs are a courtesy the world declines to offer, and
men learn to read the shape of the hole instead.
He had gotten Roach and the mare out of the corral first — that was instinct,
older than thought — and Enola had gotten out beside him with her bundle
and her blanket and nothing else, and then she had gone back in.
He would remember the rest of his life trying to make the memory behave:
the orange seams of light in the walls, the roof already sighing, his own voice
going raw on her name, and Enola coming back through the smoke at a
crouch with his mother's Bible against her chest in one arm and his tool roll
— thirty pounds of iron — dragging from the other hand, her face blackened
and her eyes streaming and utterly furious at the fire, as if it were a person
who had interrupted her. "You went in for a book," he said, holding her by
the shoulders in the yard while the roof went, "you went in for a book and a
bag of iron, you—"
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"The book is your mother's." She was coughing and would not be comforted
out of order. "The tools are your living. The rest is lumber and tin, Wade. I
have seen you read that book when you thought the house was asleep. A man
does not leave his mother in a fire." She set the Bible down carefully on the
one dry patch of yard, and then, out of the front of her dress where she had
thrust it in her hurry, she took the silver concho — she had kept it on her
person since the morning in the wash, wrapped in cloth against her skin —
and she put it in the coffee pot for safekeeping.
They stood in the yard among his entire rescued fortune while the shack
finished: a saddle, a Bible, a coffee pot, his tools, a windmill standing over
all of it with its blades turning slow in the heat-wind, and Roach and the
mare in the corral settling, as horses do, faster than people. Everything else
he had owned in the world — bed and table, stove and stores — went up in
one column of orange and black and was done before the sun was. Enola
stood beside him with soot on her face and watched it without speaking, and
Wade understood, standing there, that she had seen this exact sight before
from the other side of it, more times than he would ever see it, and that her
silence was not shock but a terrible fluency.
In the morning they held the hearing anyway — there was never any
question of it, which was perhaps the whole point of the fire, answered.
Wade washed his face in the windmill's trough and put on his one clean shirt,
the one Enola had carried out in her bundle, and he sat a while first on an
upturned bucket in the ashes of his home with his coffee going cold in the
pot beside him. The black square still smoked in seams. The Bible sat on the
saddle. The bucket was warm through his trousers from the ground's stored
heat. And Wade Sutter, who owned a horse, a mare, a saddle, a book, a set of
tools, thirty days of other men's paper and a courthouse waiting on the truth,
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began to laugh. Not bitterly. Really laugh — the way he had not laughed
since before the rocks, with his head back and the sound going up into the
new light, until Enola turned from the trough and looked at him the way you
look at a man whose mind the heat has finally taken.
"Yesterday I had a house they could threaten," he said, wiping his eyes.
"Today I've got a horse, a saddle, and a courthouse waiting on the truth. I'm
the richest man in San Tomas, Enola, and Barlow paid for all of it."
She looked at him a moment longer, measuring — and then the corner of her
mouth did the thing it did so rarely that he had learned to count his wealth in
it. "Then the rich man will be late to his courthouse," she said, "if he sits in
his ashes admiring his fortune."
Wade stood up and kicked the bucket over flat, and he picked the silver
concho up out of the coffee pot and held it out to her on his open palm — her