The map on the schoolhouse wall was wrong, and Willa Cade had drawn it
herself, which was the worst part of it. She had drawn it in September, with
the county atlas open on her desk, and she had drawn Alder Creek where the
atlas said the creek ran, and the section lines where the atlas said the sections
lay, square upon square. The children had learned their letters off the names
of the townships. And it was wrong in the way a fence built in the night is
wrong — not sloppy, not mistaken, but deliberate, every line of it argued for
by somebody with an interest in where the line fell.
She stood before it that morning with the chalk in her hand and did not
correct it. Some days she wanted to take the slate rag and wipe the whole
eastern half of the township clean and draw it as her father had surveyed it,
corner by corner, out of the true book she kept where no child would ever see
it. But the children would go home and talk, and talk traveled in Alder Creek
the way weather did, fast and from the west, and there were men in town
who would be very interested to hear that the schoolteacher taught a different
geography than the one filed at the land office. So the map stayed as the
county had printed it. She taught arithmetic under it, and spelling, and the
rivers of Europe, which at least had the decency to move only by water.
"Miss Cade." Hettie Parker, nine years old and solemn as a judge, had her
hand up before the question was even formed. "Miss Cade, is it true the
company is putting a fence across the ford?"
The room went the particular quiet that rooms of children go when an adult
subject has wandered in wearing muddy boots. Nineteen of them, on benches
her father had helped plane the winter the schoolhouse was raised, and she
could feel every pair of eyes weighing her answer against what had been said
at their own supper tables. The Miller twins, whose father's claim sat square
2
on Miller's Ford crossing, looked at each other. Little Anna Ortiz, whose
English was still newer than her braids, understood the tone before the
words.
"A fence can be put anywhere a man has posts and wire, Hettie," Willa said.
"Whether it has a right to be there is a different question, and it's a question
for the land office, not for a schoolroom." She set the chalk down in the tray
with care. "Open your readers. Page forty-one. Samuel, you'll begin, since
you were so eager to practice in the yard that I could hear you through the
wall."
It was the answer she had prepared, and she hated it as she said it, the way
she hated all the answers she had prepared since the winter. Her father would
not have answered so. Josiah Cade had been a government contract surveyor,
a man who had run lines across half of Kansas with a compass and a chain
and a conviction, amounting to religion, that a corner was a corner and a lie
about land was the worst kind of lie there was, because it outlived the liar
and went on stealing from the grandchildren. He had taught her to read
survey notation the way other fathers taught their daughters hymns — at the
kitchen table, by lamplight, his big hand flat on the page beside the figures,
talking her through the calls: North eighty-nine degrees forty minutes west,
fourteen chains, to a stone mound. To a cottonwood, blazed. To the spring.
She had been eleven the summer she first held the rear of his chain on a
township line, and the men on his crew had called her Little Chainman and
fed her jerky and sworn in a lower register around her, and she had been
happier than she had been at any time before or since.
Josiah Cade had been dead since December. The official word, which had
come down from Sheriff Wilkes with the body, was that his horse had fallen
with him on the ice at Miller's Ford crossing and broken his neck against the
3
frozen bank, and there was no reason on God's earth to doubt it except for
every reason Willa carried around inside her ribs like a second, smaller
skeleton. Her father had ridden that crossing a thousand times. Her father did
not fall off horses. And that autumn he had come home later and later from
his resurvey work with his mouth set in a line she had never seen on him, and
had taken to keeping his newest field notebook not in the satchel by the door
but wrapped in oilskin, in the drawer of her desk at the schoolhouse —
where, he said lightly, too lightly, a schoolhouse was the one building in
Alder Creek nobody had yet thought to steal from.
The brass compass sat on her desk now, its needle trembling faintly toward a
north it could not see through the wall. It had been her father's before it was
hers. She was touching it when the schoolhouse door came open without a
knock and Jonah Beck stood in it, bareheaded, his cap in his fist, breathing
like a boy who has run a half mile to be in time.
"Miss Cade." He was twelve and the oldest of the Beck children and not
given to excitement; his father broke horses for the livery and had bred the
drama out of the whole line. "Miss Cade, there's two men in the
schoolhouse."
The room took a breath. Willa set her hand flat on the desk to keep it from
showing anything. "We are in the schoolhouse, Jonah."
"I mean — before. This morning, early, when I come past to fetch the milk."
The words came over each other now. "The door was open and the latch
broke — it is broke, I seen it hang — and there was two men inside, and
they'd had your desk out, drawers on the floor. One of 'em had the wall