later surveyor — any honest later surveyor — could recover the truth of the
ground from under whatever the surface had been persuaded to say.
"Page forty-one," she said. "Corner fourteen, the northeast corner of the
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section that carries the Weiss spring. I'll read it as it stands."
She read it. The figures in her father's hand: the mound raised, the pits at
their bearings, and beneath, in the cramped notation he used for what
mattered most, the witness marks at the corner point — a bottle, green glass,
buried two feet down at the point; the charred ends of two hickory stakes laid
crosswise with it, as was his habit, so that rot would take the wood slow and
leave the charcoal to testify. The distances from the two nearest undisputed
corners stood in the column beside it, in chains and links, in figures any party
to the hearing was welcome to take out onto the ground and run for
themselves.
"That's the thing I most need this room to understand," she said, and let her
hand rest flat on the open page, because her hand wanted to shake and she
had decided it would not. "My father's figures don't ask to be believed. A
chain run from corners nobody disputes will either come out at the point
where this book says the bottle lies, or it won't. If it won't, burn the book and
I'll help you. If it does — then the mound that's standing out there now, the
one the company's survey swears by, is standing in the wrong place, and
every entry that hangs off that corner hangs off a moved stone, and it isn't a
mistake any man makes by accident, because the ground underneath it was
dug and filled by somebody who knew exactly what a corner is supposed to
contain and took care that it contain nothing."
Delancey rose for the cross with his courtesy polished. The witness was the
surveyor's daughter. The witness was, by her own account, an interested
party — her father's reputation, her family's —
"My father is dead, Mr. Delancey," she said. "His reputation is the county's
business now, not mine. Mine is the figures. You'll notice I haven't asked this
room to take my word for anything. I've asked it to take a chain's word, and a
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spade's. When the chain and the spade have spoken, my interest in the matter
will be whatever's left over, and you're welcome to it."
Whitaker, at the government's table, turned a page of his memorandum book
and wrote something down in a hand so small she could not have read it
across the room, and she understood, with a calm that surprised her, that the
writing of it was for her: he wanted her to see that it was going into a record
that did not live in this room and could not be unmade by anything this room
decided. Then the register directed that the statement of Anne Sibley be read
into the record, Anne being unable to travel, and the clerk stood and read it in
the flat voice of a man reading weather, which somehow made it worse to
listen to and harder to argue with. Anne Sibley, widow, of Abilene. Her
statement, sworn and notarized, set out that her husband had died on the
ninth of October, 1876, and the death certificate, attached and certified, said
the same. The relinquishment of his homestead entry — the paper on which
his mark appeared, the paper the company's filing leaned on — bore a date
two weeks after the county had buried him. She had never signed such a
paper. He had never signed such a paper. A dead man, the statement
concluded, in the only flourish it permitted itself, cannot relinquish what the
grave has already taken out of his hands, and Mrs. Sibley desired the record
to show that she had said so under oath while there was still a record being
kept where saying so might count.
Delancey did not cross-examine a sheet of paper. He sat down and wrote for
a while in his own notebook, and Harrow, in the gallery, turned his hat once
more by the brim and then stopped turning it, and held it still.
Johann Weiss testified in the last hour before the recess, standing because he
said a man should stand to speak of his own land, and because the bench's
edge had worn his hands to restlessness. He spoke of his entry in the plain
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sequence of a man accustomed to accounts: the filing made, the fees paid, the
dugout raised the first winter, the spring fenced, the stone house rising course
by course across three summers, his children's graves — two of them, the
small ones the fever took — in the fenced corner of the claim he had buried
them in himself. He spoke of the company's notice arriving like weather from
a clear sky: his entry contested, his corner false, his spring — he said the
word carefully, in his careful English — lying, by the company's survey,
upon company ground. "I break the sod where the paper says," he told the
register. "I build where the paper says. If the paper lies, then I am a thief on
my own land and my boys are buried in another man's field. I am not a thief.
I come to hear the paper corrected." He sat down to a silence that had weight
in it, and Marta, beside him, did not weep, because the Weisses had arranged
between themselves long ago which of them would do that work, and this
was not her hour for it.
They called Rube Halloran after the noon recess.
He came up the room's narrow aisle the way he moved under any load,
unhurried and exact, a big freighter's body gone a little to rope and gristle,
and he took the oath with his hand on the book and his eyes on the register,
and Willa understood that he was looking at the register because the register
was the one man in the room whose job was the record itself, and Rube had