social restoring his name to the supper list with a thoroughness that would
have been funny if it hadn't cost what it cost, and in the delegation that
followed: the pastor's wife herself at his claim gate with a dried-apple pie in
a cloth and an apology that was mostly crust — we were misled, we prayed
on it, the Lord has shown us our error — every word of it true and none of it
quite touching the thing itself. Wade thanked her gravely. He ate the pie at
his campfire that night and found it good, and he held no more against the
woman than the pie deserved: she had brought what she had, same as
anybody.
But the part he made himself do in the open, where it could not be unsaid,
was Mrs. Della Vance. The blacksmith's wife had fed him through the worst
of it in flour sacks left at the windmill in the dark — meal and salt pork and
once, unforgettably, a jar of preserves with no note — back when bringing
Wade Sutter so much as a crust in daylight would have marked a person in
that town. He had never been able to thank her because she had arranged it so
that thanks were impossible; the gift was built to be anonymous, the way real
kindness often is when the weather turns mean. The Saturday of the
rebuilding, with the whole town on his claim and hammers going, Wade
walked down to the women's table at the noon break and asked, in front of
forty people, whether he might say a word. He said there was a person in this
town who had fed a man the town was starving, at risk to her own name, and
had asked nothing for it but to not be found out — and that he had decided
she was going to have to be found out, because some debts a man pays by
telling. He thanked Mrs. Della Vance by name, plainly, the way you'd name
a person in a deed. The blacksmith put his big hand over his face. Della
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Vance, flour to the elbows, looked at Wade the way you look at a man who
has just paid you in a coin you didn't know you were owed, and said, "You're
skin and bone yet, Wade Sutter. Eat." And the table laughed, and it was the
first time in a year that laughter in a crowd had nothing in it that cut him.
They raised the shack and the barn in two days, because a town that has
decided to work is a hard thing to stop, and because half the men there had
private arithmetic to settle that no apology would have covered. Sheriff
Reilly worked a ladder all the first day in his shirtsleeves with his badge
pinned to his vest under the bib of an apron somebody's wife had forced on
him against the sun, and he set rafters true as any carpenter in the territory.
Foster supplied the nails and the ridge beam and would not hear the word
debt — "on the house," he said, enjoying the pun exactly once and then
forbidding it. Dr. Abigail Hart ran the women's table like a field hospital,
coffee and beans and bread moving down the line of workers in shifts, and
she came out at dusk the first day to inspect the frame with her hands on her
hips and pronounce it sounder than the original — "which," she said, "was a
low fence to clear, Wade."
Enola worked both days, sleeves rolled to the elbow, setting posts with the
men and sighting lines and swinging a hammer with the unshowy
competence of a person who had been raised to useful work and saw no
reason to discuss it. She was not treated as a curiosity, and Wade noted the
exact quality of that with the attention of a man who had once watched the
same people cross a street to avoid her: the men passed her tools without
comment and took her word on a post's plumb the way they'd take any
hand's, and when young Tommy Reyes started to make something of a
remark at the noon table, his father stopped it with one look and the boy ate
the rest of his dinner in a silence that was itself a kind of education. On the
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second evening, with the barn frame standing black against the afterglow and
the shack roofed and smoking from a new-laid chimney, two of Kaya's men
rode in out of the dusk leading six horses — good stock, Apache-bred,
quick-eyed and clean-legged — and with the horses a message that Reilly,
who had some of the language, helped Wade get entire: the band at Ojo
Caliente would winter its remuda at Sutter's Draw this year and every year
the grass allowed, and Wade Sutter would break and gentle the young horses
for a fair share of their increase, the same as any partner. Not a gift. A
partnership — water and work, the valley and the draw, joined the way the
country itself had always intended them to be. Wade walked down the line of
those six horses in the failing light with his hand on each neck in turn,
learning them, and thought that his shack had burned to the ground forty days
ago and he was standing in his own yard richer than Amos Barlow had ever
been with a whole ranch under him.
She rode home to Ojo Caliente at the end of that week, because her place was
there — because her father was there, and her mother’s grave, and a people
who had buried a young man and nearly lost a valley, and a summer of
mending that was hers to do as surely as Wade’s was his. He had known she
would go since the verdict, the way you know weather by the smell of the
wind, and he had made up his mind early and completely that he would not
ask her to stay. A man who had spent a year being told by other people’s