telegram in beside it, government paper against settler paper, the moved date
against the true corners, and tied the thongs with the care of a woman
packing for a journey she had not chosen and would not be excused from.
"Then we ride light, and we ride at night, and we get there early enough to
surprise the surprise," she said.
Nora looked at her for a moment — the schoolteacher with the ashes of her
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schoolhouse still grey in the seams of her boots, folding a land office's
ambush into her father's book like a pressed flower — and then she nodded,
once, and turned back to her press, and set the boy to feeding sheets with a
briskness that meant the Clarion would be printing the hearing's new date,
and the names, and the corners, twice over, before the idlers at the depot had
finished inventing what the telegram said.
The dust was the first mercy of the road, and Willa learned to be grateful for
it by the second morning. It rose off the freight wagons in a slow, breathing
curtain, brown as river water, and it hung behind the outfit for a quarter of a
mile, so that a rider watching the road from any rise saw only a smear of
Kansas weather moving west at walking pace, and could not have said
whether the wagons carried salt pork or a schoolteacher. She rode in the bed
of the second wagon for the watched stretches, down among the freight
where Rube's partner had cleared a space the length of her body between the
flour barrels and a crate of plowshares, a tarp drawn over a bent willow
frame so that she lay in a kind of canvas cave with the light coming through
the weave. She could smell the flour and the iron and, faintly, the oilskin
inside her coat where the notebook rode against her ribs, and through the
slats of the wagon bed she could see the road unwinding behind them, the
two ruts and the grass between, going back toward Alder Creek as if the
earth were unspooling it.
Rube had arranged it all the night before they left, in the Grange hall, with
the practical tenderness of a man laying out tools. His wagons — his own
two freighters, hired for the season by a Hays City merchant to haul
provisions east and trade goods west — were leaving on schedule regardless
of any hearing, and a schedule, Rube said, was the best kind of lie because it
54
was true. His partner, a broad silent man named Oyler who owed Rube
eleven years of loyalty and asked no questions of anybody's cargo, drove the
lead wagon. Johann Weiss rode as a claimant-witness for his own
quarter-section, which was his right and his ruin both if the hearing went
against him, and Willa rode as freight. It was undignified and it was perfect,
and she had not argued, because she had learned in the last month that
dignity was a currency she could spend only once and she meant to spend it
in a hearing room.
When the road bent through empty country and Rube judged the rises
unwatched, she climbed out and walked beside the oxen with her hat low,
stretching the ache out of her back, and Johann walked on the other side of
his horse, leading it, saving it, he said, for the miles when a horse would
matter more than a man's legs. He had not left his claim in four years. She
learned this on the first afternoon, not as a complaint — Johann did not
complain; he reported, the way a man reads out the weather — but as a fact
he set down between them because the silence of the road had begun to
require facts. Four years. The claim had walls of sod and a roof that leaked in
one corner he had mapped the way other men mapped stars, and a field his
wife Marta had broken the first furrows of beside him, and a well he had dug
eleven feet through limestone with his brother's help before the brother went
back to Ohio and the letters stopped. To leave it for ten days, for two weeks,
felt to him not like a journey but like the loss itself happening early, by his
own hand. If men came while he was gone — and men had come before, in
the night, and taken down a fence and driven his two cows into the draws and
left a paper nailed to his door that he could not read — then there would be
nothing to return to that a hearing could restore.
"You have left it before," Willa said. "For church. For the Grange meetings."
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"For hours," Johann said. "A claim forgives hours. It does not forgive a man
who rides away from it toward a courthouse." He walked a while with his
hand on the horse's neck. "Marta put bread in my saddlebag. She said, eat it
slow, it is the house, you are carrying the house with you." He said it without
smiling, and she understood that the bread — three loaves, dark and dense,
wrapped in a flour sack — was not provisions. It was evidence of a different
kind. It was what the quarter-section weighed.
At night stops she read her father's notebook by lantern light in whatever
room or lean-to the way stations gave them, and the reading had become,
without her deciding it should, a kind of office. Josiah Cade's hand filled the
pages in a surveyor's disciplined slant, each entry dated, each bearing noted,
each distance chained and re-chained, and beneath the figures, in the
margins, his private shorthand — the small hard sentences of a man who had
understood what he was measuring long before he could prove it. Corner 14
set true, buried stone, witnessed. Corner 14 found disturbed, stone raised a
hand's breadth, earth unweathered beneath. She read the entries the way other
women read Scripture on the road, for the instruction and for the company,
and some nights her finger stopped on a page and she sat still with the lantern
burning down, because the voice in the margins was so plainly her father's