the party obeyed in inverse order. The keeper's wife fed them at a long table
in the front room — beans, salt pork, coffee strong enough to stand a spoon
in — and then the back room was given over to the work of repair, and the
work, as it usually did, fell to Willa's hands.
Rube sat on a bench against the sod wall with his shirt open and his jaw set,
and she bound his ribs with strips torn from a flour sack the keeper's wife
produced without being asked, because the country over, in 1878, a woman
tearing cloth in a back room was an institution older than any land office.
The ribs were broken — two, she thought, maybe three, on the left side
where he had struck the wagon iron — and they were not displaced, and that
was the whole of the mercy. She had done this before. She had done it for her
father, years back, after a mule threw him against a corner post he was
setting, and she had done it for a Grange boy who fell from a hayloft the
summer she was seventeen, and her hands remembered the work the way
they remembered the piano fingering of hymns: snug on the exhale, never on
the inhale, the strips laid one over the next like shingles, and the patient
talking, if he could talk, to give her the breath to time the binding by. Rube
talked. It was, she understood, his contribution to the procedure, and he made
it the way he made everything, with the handle sticking out. "You bind a man
like you already know how he's put together," he said, on a held breath. "It's
a disrespectful level of competence, Miss Cade."
"It's a schoolteacher's competence, Mr. Halloran. I've been keeping boys in
one piece for six years."
"Boys." He winced as the strip went round, and the wince became, with
effort, a grin that cost him visibly. "I am a freight contractor of some
standing."
"You are freight," she said, "by your own testimony, offered not one hour
68
ago." She tied off the last strip and sat back on her heels, and the room was
very quiet except for the rain still working at the roof and Johann, at the
table, quietly and methodically eating the last of Marta's bread with his
coffee, saving the one loaf, she noticed, even here, even now — setting it
apart from the meal like a thing under discipline. The nearness of the work
stayed in the room after the work was done. She was aware of it in the way
she had been aware of it at the ford, when he had come between her and the
reaching hand without a word spent on deciding; it was a thing the road had
been building between them out of dust and lantern light and unspoken
arithmetic, and neither of them named it, because there was a hearing ten
days out and a notebook drying by the stove, and naming things was a luxury
for people whose evidence was not still wet.
Whitaker dried the notebook the way a banker dries currency — leaf by leaf,
at a distance from the stove, with the oilskin spread beneath — and then,
when the keeper's wife had gone and the front room had gone dark and quiet,
he sat down at the back-room table with the book open under the lantern and
read it entire, page by page, the way Willa had read it on the road. Only it
was not the way she had read it. She had read it as a daughter reads, for the
voice. Whitaker read it as a surveyor reads, and his reading had a sound to it:
a small grunt at a bearing checked against an entry, a pencil — his own
pencil, produced from the carpetbag with the entry files — tapping twice
against the table at a distance he was re-chaining in his head, a long silence at
the marginal entries where Josiah Cade's shorthand ran like a fuse through
the figures. Twice he asked questions, and the questions were in her father's
grammar, the grammar of chains and witness trees and the memory of stones,
and Willa sat across the table with her hands around a coffee cup gone cold
and felt something loosen in her chest that had been tight since February —
because she understood that this dry, unimpressive man was the first living
69
soul since her father who could actually read what Josiah Cade had written,
all of it, the figures and the fury both. It had not died with its author after all.
It had only been waiting for its reader to ride out from Washington with a
carpetbag.
"Your father re-ran this line in October," Whitaker said, without looking up.
"After the official survey was filed. At his own expense."
"He said a line you haven't walked is just a rumor with stakes in it," Willa
said.
"A philosopher." Whitaker turned a page with a care that was almost
tenderness, in a man with none of it anywhere else. "A philosopher with a
chain. That is the most dangerous combination this Department encounters,
Miss Cade. We are not staffed for it."
He read to the end. Outside, the rain had thinned to a dripping from the eaves
and the river going down in the dark, and Johann slept upright in a chair with
his hat over his face, and Rube lay along the bench with his strapped ribs and
his eyes open to the ceiling beams, listening. Whitaker closed the notebook
and set his palm flat on its cover, the way a man rests his hand on a plow at
the end of a field he has finished, and he was quiet for a moment with the
whole township arranged behind his eyes.
"Miss Cade," he said, "your father didn't just survey this township. He left us
a map of the whole fraud — including which corner they moved first."
From the bench, Rube, through his teeth with the pain: "Corner fourteen."
Whitaker looked at him. "You know it?"
"I moved it, Agent," Rube said. "Write that down too — in the front, where I