"Your mother mended it herself," Miren said at last. "She was not a woman who threw things away. She mended what she loved, and she loved that shawl, because she made it for the child she was carrying. She wore it when she was with child, and then she wrapped the child in it, after. That is all I know, Ana. That is all I will say."
Ana wanted to ask more. She wanted to ask who the child was, and whether the child was her, and why her aunt's voice shook when she said the word child. But Miren had picked up her mending again, and her hands were moving with a speed that meant the conversation was over, and Ana knew better than to press her. She folded the shawl and put it back on its peg, and she went to bed with the image of the pale patch in her mind, a small, pale mend in a field of yellow, like a secret stitched into the border of a life.
The next day at school, one of the children — a ranch hand's boy with a freckled face and a gap where a tooth had been — asked her, in the blunt way children ask things, why Mrs. Carmichael had stared at her at the feast.
"Because she had never seen my shawl before," Ana said, and it was true enough, and it was not true at all, and she knew it even as she said it.
"My pa says Mrs. Carmichael is going to sell the waterhole," the boy said. "He says then the sheep will have nowhere to drink, and neither will we."
Ana looked at the boy, and at the other children bent over their slates, and she felt a sudden, fierce protectiveness for all of them, for the schoolroom and the town and the valley itself, as if she were a shepherd and they were her flock. She did not know what Rosalind Carmichael intended, or what Duncan Pryce intended, or what her own shawl intended. But she knew that a waterhole was not a thing to be sold the way a man sells a horse, and she knew that the children of shepherds and the children of cattlemen drank from the same creek, and that any story that divided them was a story someone was telling for a reason.
When the school day ended, Edith Marlow came to the schoolhouse door with a folded note. It was from Rosalind Carmichael, written in a firm, upright hand. It said only that Mrs. Carmichael would call at the school on Sunday afternoon, and that she would bring the piece of yellow wool with her, and that Miss Zubizarreta's kindness in looking at it would be remembered.
Ana folded the note and put it in her pocket, and she stood in the doorway of the schoolhouse as the evening light fell across the yard, and she thought about the shawl on its peg, and the pale mend in its corner, and the baby wrapped in yellow wool in a story no one had ever finished telling her. And she understood, for the first time, that the past was not something that had happened and ended. It was something that was still happening, quietly, in the houses of Juniper Creek, waiting for someone to pick up the thread. She thought of her mother, whose hands had made the shawl and mended it and wrapped a child in it, and she thought of the child, whoever it had been, and she wondered — as she had never quite dared to wonder before — whether the child in her mother's arms had been herself, and whether the yellow wool had been waiting all these years, not to be worn, but to be recognized. On Sunday, she told herself, she would look at Rosalind Carmichael's wool with a teacher's eyes and a daughter's hands, and whatever it told her, she would not look away from it — not this time, and not for anyone, not even for the aunt who had loved her enough to keep her safe by keeping her silent.
Sam Kearney came to the ranch house on a Tuesday, in the hour after breakfast, with his hat in his hands and his tally book under his arm, and Rosalind knew before he spoke that he had not come to tell her anything easy. Sam had worked for Bar Seven for twelve years, and he was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, and the fact that he stood in her study doorway shifting his weight from one foot to the other told her more than any report could have.