sweet and fresh as a grave, and the tracks of the wagon that had done it
blown half away by morning. "I've buried better men than Edwin Harrow
under worse dirt," Pryce said, "and I signed their papers too, some of them. A
grave you can find again, miss. That's the difference between a grave and a
theft. A theft moves." She wrote that down too, all of it, though Rube stirred
at the door; but Willa had come to believe a register reads a man's voice in a
document the way he reads a brand on a steer, and Pryce's voice — flat,
unadorned, furious under the flatness like a river under ice — was worth the
ink.
The widow with twins, Sarah Hennessey, kept her copy of the company's
notice folded in her apron pocket where she could reach it and hate it in
private. Her husband had died of the lung fever in February with his final
proof half made. The company's paper said the claim stood abandoned.
Sarah's dictation said what abandonment looked like from inside a sod house:
a woman with two babies and a coffin to pay for, working the claim with a
borrowed team, within the letter of every continuance the law allowed. "I am
not abandoned," she said, and Willa's pen stopped, because the woman had
not been dictating; she had been talking to the room. "Write that too. I am not
abandoned. The claim isn't either. We're both right here." Willa wrote it.
Not all of them signed.
She would remember Pete Lindqvist's table longest — not because of what
was said there but because of what was burned. Lindqvist was a Swede with
a good claim and a better spring than his neighbors knew, and he had agreed
to the meeting, and listened to the whole of it with his hands folded and his
pipe gone cold, and dictated six full paragraphs while Willa wrote with her
heart knocking — for his place sat at the hinge of the western sections, and
39
his testimony would have tied the moved corners into a pattern no register
could lay aside as coincidence. He read the affidavit over standing by the
stove. He read it twice. Then he folded it once, carefully, along its middle,
and laid it in the firebox, and watched it take.
"I have three girls," he said at last, not to Willa, but to the fire. "The company
has a hundred riders and a sheriff. You have a pen." He was not unkind. He
put coffee in front of her with his own hand, and sugar, which was a dear
thing that year and which he stirred in for her himself. "When my girls are
grown I will tell them I was a coward in the spring of '78, and they will
forgive me, because they will be alive to do it. That is my arithmetic, Miss
Cade. I am sorry for yours."
Willa thanked him for the coffee. She meant it — the thanking and the coffee
both — and she rode home in the dark with the unsigned shape of his
paragraphs still perfect in her memory, understanding that fear was not an
absence in these people. It was a crop they harvested and ate and lived on,
the way they lived on last year's corn. Rube, when she told him, was silent a
long mile, and then said, "We'll file around him. A pattern with a hole in it is
still a pattern." It was the closest thing to mercy she ever heard him offer the
company's arithmetic, and she let it stand.
The affidavit that mattered most, though, was not in the township at all. It
was in Abilene, in a small house with a white fence, where a woman kept her
husband's death in a drawer.
The need for it had come out of Rube's own mouth one night at Nora
Grange's office, over the Clarion's cold stove, with her father's notebook
open to the page where the land filings ran in Josiah Cade's cramped, certain
hand. Three entries Rube had already named as filed under dead men's names
— claims entered by men who were in their graves before the ink was mixed,
40
worked on paper by the company until the patents ripened. Of the three, one
could be proved down to the bone, and Rube put his finger on it with the
reluctance of a man spending his last coin.
"Thomas Sibley," he said. "Entered his claim in '74, proved up honest, died
of a fever in Abilene in October of '76 — I know the month because I was
still riding for Harrow then and we kept a book of deaths, for tidiness. The
relinquishment in the land file is dated two weeks after the man was in the
ground. Dated, witnessed, and signed." His mouth twisted. "I watched
Lindgren's clerk file it. I didn't copy it, because I wasn't the man then that I'm
trying to be now. But I remember his name, and I remember the widow. He
has one. Anne. She kept house for him and she keeps his papers, and if she
kept the death certificate — and women like her keep everything — then the
company's whole row of houses has one card in it that's marked."
Willa had already seen the name in her father's notebook, in the margin of
the relinquishment entry, where Josiah had written a single penciled word
and underlined it twice: ask. She understood now that her father, who had
known exactly whose door the question lived behind, had left the asking to
whoever came after him, and that there had never been a moment when it
could be asked safely. There was not one now. There was only a moment
when it could no longer be left unasked.
They rode to Abilene as freight and family. Rube had arranged it through a
teamster he knew from the old days — her passage bought as the teamster's
sister-in-law, traveling to sit with a sick aunt, her trunk a flour sack and a
carpetbag with the oilskin notebook sewn into the lining of her spare dress
and her good pen wrapped in a stocking like a jewel. Rube rode as outrider