her father's rule, and of pencil weathering out of a shingle in a creek-bottom
graveyard, and of all the names this country was so quick to forget when
forgetting paid.
"Then we remind it," she said.
The affidavits began the way all true things began in the township that
spring: after dark, at a kitchen table, with the lamp turned low so the light
would not carry across the section lines to any rider on the road.
Willa had not understood, when Rube first laid her father's notebook open on
the Weisses' table and asked her to write, what her hand was worth. She
understood by the third night. A man's claim was his life rendered in paper
— entry, filing, proof, patent — and the paper had been turned against the
township by men who understood that a farmer with a plow in his hands at
dusk has no hand left for a pen. What the settlers had was memory. What
Willa had was a fair round hand, schoolteacher's copperplate, the kind of
writing a register in Hays City could not pretend to misread. Memory, set
down in her hand, became testimony. That was the whole of her usefulness,
and she bent herself to it the way she had once bent to a room of children
sounding out their letters: patiently, and without hurry, and night after night.
Marta Weiss set a plate of bread at her elbow the first evening and then
forgot it there, both she and Johann leaning in over the table while Johann
dictated. He spoke slowly, in the order a man walks his own land. The spring
at Miller's Ford. The cottonwood his father-in-law had marked before there
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was a ford with a name. The corner as the government survey had set it — a
stone, a pit, a mound, witnessed by two bearing trees — and the corner as it
now stood, forty rods west of true, close enough to the spring to put the water
on company paper and far enough from it to put the Weisses' cattle on the
walk to another man's creek. "Write it as I say it," Johann said. "Not as it
sounds fine. As it is." She wrote it as it was. At the bottom, below his mark,
she set out the legal spine Rube had taught her, the same bones under every
affidavit they would take that spring: the true corner, the moved corner, the
water taken. Three facts, plain as fence posts. Johann read it back with his
lips moving, twice, and then he blew on the ink though it was already dry, an
old man's habit, and Marta crossed herself at the signature line like it was an
altar rail.
"Now," Rube said from the door, where he stood with his hat in his hands the
way other men stood in church, "we get it to the county seat before Otto
Lindgren gets wind of whose name is on it."
Willa had pictured the filing done in daylight, at a clerk's window, with the
ordinary boredom of government. Rube corrected her without malice.
Lindgren's office hours were watched — not by men with badges, which
would have been a kind of honesty, but by idlers at the rail outside the land
office who noted who went in and how long they stayed and what they
carried. A contest filing from Johann Weiss, reaching the register before the
company's counter-paper could be got ready, was worth a week of law. So
Rube rode it himself, that night, by the back road along the creek bottom
where the cottonwoods broke the moonlight into pieces, the affidavit in an
oilcloth wrap inside his shirt, and Willa lay awake in the Weisses' loft
counting the hours it would take a horse to cover the ground. He was back by
the second evening, grey with tiredness, and would say only that the stamp
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had come down on it while a clerk Lindgren did not control was minding the
desk, and that the register's own docket book now held a number the
company could not unwrite. A number, Willa wrote in the margin of her own
day-book, is a nail. Drive enough of them and the wall stands.
From the Weisses' table the work spread the way news of rain spreads —
quietly, from door to door, and never once by the road in daylight.
The Dvořák family, Bohemians off a claim two sections north, received her
in a dugout that smelled of earth and sausage and lamp oil. The old mother
dictated through her son, who rendered her Czech into careful English while
his wife held the baby and the twins slept in a box bed behind a curtain of
flour sacking. What the company's paper said: that the Dvořáks had
relinquished the north forty for a consideration of forty dollars, receipted.
What had happened: a man had come in the fall with a paper already written,
and a pen already inked, and had set a coin on the table — a single coin,
bright as a lure — and the old man, who could not read English and whose
son was at the railroad grade camp earning the tax money, had made his
mark where the finger pointed. The consideration had been one silver dollar
and the understanding that he was signing for a seed loan. Willa wrote it
down. The son signed with his whole arm, the way men sign who are not
used to being believed. His wife, rising to bank the stove, put her other hand
flat on the page a moment as she passed — steadying it, or blessing it, or
simply keeping the paper where the truth was.
The one-armed veteran — Alonzo Pryce, who had left the arm at Missionary
Ridge and farmed one-handed fifteen years without asking the county for so
much as a fence post — dictated his affidavit standing up, because he said a
man should stand to accuse. His was the plainest of them all. Corner moved
in the night, the week of the big wind in March, when a man could hear
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nothing and see less; he had found the stone rolled and the new mound raised