her hands in her apron and no tremor anywhere: a lantern, past midnight,
where no lantern had business; a voice at the door — not threatening, that
was the hell of it, Marta said, reasonable as a tax man — suggesting that
Johann come out and talk about the spring, and how a signature could be
unmade as peaceably as it had been made, and how the company's memory
was long but its gratitude could be longer.
50
Rube had been sleeping in the Weisses' barn those nights, on a parole of his
own choosing, with his rifle across two hay bales and his boots on. What
happened, by Marta's account, was almost nothing, which was exactly the
size of it: a second lantern, lit in the barn doorway, and Rube's voice out of
the dark behind it, unhurried, naming the odds the way a man reads a tally —
one voice at the door, two more by the sound of the horses, and on his side a
man awake and a township full of farmsteads within earshot of a single shot,
every one of them a witness the company would have to buy or burn by
Friday. A silence followed in which the reasonable voice considered the
arithmetic. Then the first lantern went out, the way a held breath is let go,
and the hoofbeats went away up the creek bottom at a walk — at a walk,
Marta repeated, with her chin up, because men who are beaten run, and men
who are merely postponed do not.
"They will come at the paper next time, not the people," Rube said at
breakfast, with the notebook between them on the table like a third party to
the conversation. "People make noise. Paper is quiet. They've tried the
schoolhouse, and the buying, and the sheriff's manners. Ward Coulter is a
patient man, Willa, but patience is just time he spends learning." He turned
his cup in its saucer. "The hearing is three weeks off. That's a lot of
learning."
The telegram came on a Friday, in the middle of the Clarion's press run,
when the office smelled of ink and hot iron and the boy was up to his elbows
in the afternoon edition.
Nora took it from the telegraph agent's runner at the door — for the wire
office, like the land office, had its idlers, and a telegram for Willa Cade was
by then a piece of the township's public property, chewed over at the depot
before it was ever opened. It had been forwarded twice: from the land office
51
at Hays City to the county seat, from the county seat to Alder Creek,
accumulating clerks' initials like burrs. Nora read it standing at the stone, and
then she read it again, and the press boy, who had worked for her four years
and knew her weather, found something urgent to do at the back of the
office.
The contest hearing — the Weisses' filing, and with it the joined contests of
the township, the whole woven rope of affidavits and corners and water —
had been moved up. On the register's own motion, the paper said, for the
convenience of the docket: not three weeks hence, as every party had been
notified, but ten days from the date of the wire. Contestants to appear with all
evidence or forfeit. The register regretted any inconvenience. The register's
regret was printed in the telegram's flattest official hand, and it fooled none
of them.
"Somebody in that office works for Harrow, Willa," Nora said at last, and
laid the flimsy down on the stone with a care that told its worth. "Not the
register, maybe — the register's a political animal and they don't dirty their
own hands before an election. A clerk. A docket-keeper. Somebody who can
reach a date the way a man reaches a survey stone in the night, and move it
while nobody's watching. They mean to have the hearing before your paper
is ready — or before you are. Ten days to get Anne Sibley's name read into a
record ninety miles from her door. Ten days to move a township of witnesses
who farm by daylight and are afraid by dark. And the road watched the
whole way, now that Ward Coulter knows to the inch which miles are
empty."
She did not say the rest of it. She did not have to. The witnesses were
scattered; Pryce would ride, and the Dvořáks would ride, and Sarah
Hennessey would leave the twins with Marta and ride, but Lindqvist would
52
not, and the hole in the pattern would sit in the hearing room like a missing
tooth. The schoolhouse copy of the record was ash. The book against Willa's
ribs was the only whole account the township would ever have, and between
Alder Creek and Hays City there were three days of road, and on the road,
men measuring.
Willa looked at the calendar nailed by the press — Nora kept it there to cuss
at deadlines by — with its squares running out like a fence line into country
she could not see. Ten days. She did the arithmetic the way her father had
taught her: in public, on paper, without flinching. Two days to finish the
swearing of the last affidavits. A day to make an index of the notebook —
names and dates — that Nora could hold and print from if the road took the
rest. Three days of road, ridden in the hours when the road belonged to
nobody. A day in hand at Hays City, to arrive early, with the witnesses fed
and the papers ordered and Thomas Sibley's name practised aloud until it sat
steady in her mouth. It could be done. It could exactly, precisely, with
nothing to spare, be done.
She took the telegram off the stone and folded it once, along its middle, the
way Pete Lindqvist had folded his affidavit — and then, deliberately, she
unfolded the comparison in her mind and put the paper where a burned thing
could never go. The oilskin wrap came out of her coat. The notebook lay in
its folds, smelling of leather and her father's hand, and she slipped the