would remember longer than most poetry โ that the band at Ojo Caliente be
left in peaceable possession of their valley and their water. Then the
agreement itself was laid on the desk: the water of Ojo Caliente
acknowledged in writing as the band's own, the Army's removal order
withdrawn and void, the signatures going down one after another. Osborn
signed. Reilly signed as witness, with the slow care of a man who knows
paper outlives intentions. Kaya signed last, in a hand that was new to the pen
and did not shake, and Wade, standing against the wall of the office he had
once been jailed in, watched a thing get written down that bullets had been
fired to keep unwritten.
A month after the verdict, the Territory sold the B-Bar on the courthouse
steps, and Wade rode into town for windmill parts and stayed, against his
intention, to watch some of it from the shade across the square. He told
himself he had no feeling about it either way, and mostly that was true,
which surprised him; he had expected the fall of the house of Barlow to taste
like something, and it tasted like dust and other men's business. The home
section went to a cattle company out of Las Cruces whose agent bid without
once raising his voice, a man in a clean hat who had never heard Amos
Barlow's name before the notices went up. The outlying parcels went
piecemeal to neighbors โ one of them, Wade noted, to a rancher who had
left a stack of pine boards at his claim a week before the rebuilding and never
knocked โ and the brand itself, the judge's clerk announced, was retired by
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order of the court and would not be issued again. A brand is a man's name
burned into the world, and the Territory had struck this one out of the book
like a word it was ashamed of having printed.
Reilly stood with him a while in the shade, watching the clerk's hammer fall
and fall. "You could've bid the water section," the sheriff said. "It'd have
gone cheap. Nobody'd have blamed you."
"It ain't water I need, Tom. I got water." Wade watched the agent in the clean
hat write his company's name in the book. "And I didn't spend a year getting
shut of Amos Barlow to go live in his house."
"No," Reilly said. "I don't suppose you did." They stood there until the last
parcel went, and Wade found that what he felt, watching it end, was not
triumph and not pity either, but something quieter and more like weather: a
ranch is grass and water and work, and it had never been the ranch that was
wicked โ only the hand on it โ and the grass, at least, was going to outlast
the hand and be grazed by somebody's cattle under somebody's honest mark,
and that was the whole of the justice the land itself had ever asked for.
The Gazette printed its retraction the following week, above the fold, in type
as large as the type it had used to call Wade Sutter a squaw-man and a horse
thief in everything but the outright words. RETRACTION, it said, and under
it a plain confession that the paper had printed Barlow's story as fact because
Barlow had told it loud and early, and that the man this paper had helped the
town to shun was owed an apology the Gazette was not too proud to print.
Wade read it twice through at the store counter, and then he folded it once
and put it in his pocket, and he found his hands were steadier than the editor's
probably had been.
It was at that same counter, with half the town contriving to be buying
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something at the same hour, that Hiram Foster came out from behind his
books with Wade's notes in his hand โ the called-in notes, the full of what
Wade owed on the windmill iron and the winter feed and the wagon repair,
the paper Barlow's pressure had made sure would fall due all at once like a
cut rope. Foster laid them on the counter. He looked at them a moment, and
then he tore them across, and across again, and dropped the pieces in the
stove with the unhurried air of a man feeding it kindling.
"Foster โ" Wade started.
"Paper's worth what a man's word is," Foster said, still not looking up,
arranging his counter goods the way a man does when his hands need
employment. "Yours was good when nobody in this town would take it. I'm
not making a speech of it. Don't you make one either." He pushed a sack of
nails across the counter that Wade had not asked for. "For the rebuilding.
There'll be a crew Saturday. I expect you'd rather work than be talked about,
so we'll do that instead."
Wade took the nails because refusing them would have been a speech of its
own, and he understood, walking out into the street with the sack heavy in
his hand, that the town was paying him back in the only currency it had ever
really dealt in โ not words, which it had spent freely and falsely, but goods,
and labor, and room made on a boardwalk for an old man to shake his hand.
The reckoning did not come all at once, and it did not come clean, and Wade
thought afterward that he preferred it that way โ a town that could reverse
itself in a day would be a town that had never believed anything in the first
place. It came the way weather changes in the draw, by degrees and from
several directions at once. It came in the Gazette's retraction and in Foster's
stove. It came in pine boards left stacked at his claim on two separate
mornings by men who did not knock, tight-grained lumber, better than he
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could have bought, with no name on it โ and Wade, who knew every wagon
track in the draw the way other men knew handwriting, recognized the tracks
both times and made a point of never once saying so. It came in the church