"Some things," Miren said, "are safer folded away. Your mother made that shawl for a child who needed warmth. That is all a shawl needs to be."
"But Mrs. Carmichael asked —"
"Mrs. Carmichael," Miren said, and her voice was gentle and final, the way it had always been when a subject was closed, "is a woman who owns cattle and water and half the valley. She does not ask questions without a reason. If she brings you wool, you will look at it, because you are polite. But you will not go looking for the rest of it. Do you understand me, Ana?"
Ana nodded, because she had learned long ago that when Miren spoke in that voice, argument only made the silence longer. But that night, lying in her narrow bed with the yellow shawl folded on the chair beside her, Ana could not sleep. She kept thinking of the way Rosalind had looked at her, and of the question about wool, and of the feeling, strange and certain, that the shawl on her chair and the piece of wool in Rosalind Carmichael's possession were two halves of the same thing, and that someone, somewhere, had been keeping them apart for a very long time. Outside, the wind moved through the dry grass, and far off, a Bar Seven cow lowed in the dark, and Ana lay awake wondering what it was that her aunt was afraid of, and why the name Carmichael, spoken in her aunt's house, always sounded like a door closing.
The next morning, Ana went to the store for chalk and lamp oil, and there she heard something she was not meant to hear. Sam Kearney, the Bar Seven foreman, stood at the counter with his hat in his hands, talking in a low voice to the storekeeper, and though he saw Ana come in, he did not stop, because men talking about cattle do not stop for a schoolteacher.
"Forty head," Sam was saying. "That is what the tally says, and I counted them myself at the roundup, and I am telling you, the book and the herd do not agree. I have worked for Bar Seven twelve years, and I have never known a count to come out forty short without a reason."
The storekeeper glanced at Ana and lowered his voice further, but Ana had already heard enough. Forty head of cattle, missing from a book. She thought of Rosalind at the feast, saying the tally came first, saying she would not sign anything while the tally was in question. She thought of Duncan Pryce speaking of a sale as if it were already settled. And she understood, with the clarity that comes to people who spend their lives listening, that there were two stories being told about Bar Seven in Juniper Creek, and that they did not agree any more than Sam's book and Sam's herd did.
She did not repeat what she had heard. She bought her chalk and her oil, and she walked back to the schoolhouse with the parcels in her arms, and she thought about how little she knew of the ranch that owned so much of the valley, and how much of what she did know had come to her in fragments, the way all knowledge had come to her since she was a child: a shawl, a song, a name half-spoken and then taken back.
That night, by lamplight, she took the yellow shawl from its peg and examined it the way Rosalind had asked her to examine wool — as if it were handwriting. She ran her fingers along the border, feeling the small, repeating diamonds, each one the same size, each one worked with the same patient tension. She held the shawl to the light and saw, near one corner, a place where the wool had been mended with a slightly different yellow, a shade paler, as if someone had repaired it in a hurry, years ago, with whatever yarn was at hand. She wondered who had mended it, and when, and whether the mending had been done before the fire or after it, and she realized, with a small shock, that she had worn this shawl for eight years and had never once looked at it this closely. It had been a thing she wore. Now, suddenly, it was a thing that might mean something.
She took the shawl to Miren, who was sitting by the fire with her mending, and she asked about the repair. Miren looked at the pale patch for a long time, and her face did something Ana had rarely seen it do: it softened, and then it closed, like a hand closing around something small.