She said it on the morning she first stood without holding the door frame.
Wade had come down the cellar steps with a tin cup of coffee and found her
already up, wrapped in his spare shirt over the bandaging, her hair braided
back with a strip of calico. The pallet was made, the blanket folded with
corners squared the way soldiers did it, and she was standing in the low room
looking up the steps at the blade of daylight that fell through the door.
"You should not be standing," Wade said.
"I have been lying down eleven days," Enola said. "My legs remember their
work." She took the cup with both hands, steady, and drank standing,
watching him over the rim with the flat dark eyes that had unnerved him
since the first night — not frightened eyes, measuring ones. "There is a thing
I have come to in the lying down. I will say it before the doctor comes, so
she can argue at both of us and save a trip."
"Say it, then."
"I will go to San Tomas and speak to the law."
Wade set his jaw. The cellar smelled of earth and potatoes and the faint iron
tang of her healing. Above them, the windmill at the draw turned and
complained, turned and complained.
"You'll do no such thing," he said.
"I did not ask," Enola said. "I have been eleven days your secret. And a
36
secret is a thing other men own. Barlow owns half of it already — his riders
talk in the saloon about what Sutter keeps in his cellar. The sheriff owns a
piece, since he has guessed it and is kind enough not to say so. The town
owns the rest, since they have stopped your credit and your work over a girl
they have not seen." She set the cup down carefully on the crate that served
her for a table. "I am the only one who owns nothing of it, and I am the thing
itself. That is wrong arithmetic, Wade Sutter."
"It isn't arithmetic. It's a town that wants you dead or gone, and a rich man
who'd pay for either. You walk into San Tomas and you walk into his
hands."
"I walk into the law's hands. There is a difference, when the law is made to
look."
"The law in San Tomas has a name," Wade said. "It's Tom Reilly, and he's
one man with a star and a bad knee, and Amos Barlow has thirty riders and
the bank."
"Then the law will look small beside him." Enola's voice did not rise. It never
rose; that was worse than shouting. "All the more reason it must be made to
look while there is a witness living to be looked at. Wade." "A witness in a
cellar is a story men can burn. They have already burned your haystack to
teach you the price of stories. A witness in their courthouse is a fact. Facts
are heavier. Men must lift them with both hands, and other men can see them
lifted."
He had no answer ready that was not fear wearing the clothes of sense, and
she saw it, and — to his irritation and his shame — she did not press the
victory. She only sat down on the edge of the pallet, slowly, because the
wound pulled, and folded her hands, and waited for Dr. Hart the way she
37
waited for everything: as if time were a horse she intended to outlast.
Dr. Hart came at midday with her bag and a loaf of bread and a face already
set for argument. She examined Enola on the pallet, pronounced the healing
good and the patient impossible, and sat on the crate and polished her
spectacles, which Wade had learned was what Abigail Hart did instead of
praying.
"You've heard, then," Wade said.
"I've heard that Amos Barlow has petitioned the county for a formal inquest
into the raid on the Stanton road," Dr. Hart said. "A hearing. Witnesses under
oath, a record kept, the Army invited to send an observer. It's to be held in
the courthouse in San Tomas in four days." She replaced her spectacles. "He
means to have his version of that ambush written into the territorial record
with a seal on it, Wade. Raiders, savages, horses run off toward the
reservation. Once it's sworn and sealed, it's the truth forever, and every man
who repeats another version afterward is a liar by law. It's the cleverest thing
he's done. You don't burn a story you can bury under paper."
"He demanded it?" Enola asked.
"He demanded it," Dr. Hart said. "He expects to control it the way he
controls everything else in that courthouse — the judge owes the bank, the
clerk is his wife's cousin, and half the witnesses will be riding B-Bar horses.
He expects a coronation." She looked at Enola over the spectacles. "What he
does not expect, because it has never once occurred to him, is you."
"No," Enola said. "Men like Barlow do not expect the dead to keep
appointments. And I am supposed to be dead. That has been his whole
arithmetic." She rose again, more carefully this time, and stood between the
two of them in the cellar's low light, her hand pressed flat over the bandaging
38
at her ribs — not for support, Wade thought, but the way a person touches a
thing to be sure it is still there. "I will go to his hearing. I will sit in his
witness chair. I will say the names of the dead where the clerk must write
them in the book. Loche first. Then the others. A book is a hard thing to
burn, Doctor. It has too many copies."
"Enola." Dr. Hart's voice gentled, which Wade had never heard it do for any
living patient. "They will call you a hostile. They will say a Mescalero girl's
oath is worth nothing, that you lie to protect your own. The Army man will
be sitting there with his notebook, and if the room turns, Reilly cannot — he
may not be able to — "