— found at first light cropping grass along the creek with her saddle twisted
and an expression of entire innocence, as if the storm that had nearly erased
her rider had been a rumor other horses told — and Rube on his big freight
gelding, with the wagon and the mules left cached in the draw under his
partner's eye. The prairie opened around them the way it always did once a
rider stopped fighting it: grass to the stirrups, meadowlarks going up like
sparks struck off the earth, the whole world arranged in only two colors and
24
both of them honest. It was riding that made the talking possible. Willa had
known that since girlhood. A thing that cannot be said across a table can be
said across ten feet of moving grass, to the horizon instead of to a face.
"He found it in November," she said, "of this last year. I have never let
myself put his winter in order before. It comes in order whether I let it or not,
riding."
Rube said nothing, which was a kind of courtesy she was learning to
recognize in him.
"Two claimants along the Saline got to quarreling over a line — kin by
marriage, which is the bitterest kind — and they hired Father to re-run it,
because his was the only survey either side would take as gospel. He chained
it twice, the way he always did when other men's tempers were in the figures.
The second chaining is where it came up. One of his own corners stood forty
rods off his field notes. His own mound. His own stones, his own charcoal
under them, and all of it moved as neat as if the earth had walked. He did not
tell the claimants. He rode three more of his corners before he told anyone
anything, and two of those were wrong too, and all three were wrong the
same way — leaning off the dry ground and down toward the water, like the
whole map had been tilted by a hand that wanted the creeks."
She could see him doing it as she said it, because she had watched him do
versions of it all her life: the stillness, the notebook out, the figures compared
with the slowness of a man who would rather be wrong slowly than right in a
hurry.
"In December the company summoned him — summoned is the word
Lindgren used in the letter, as if the Harrow Land and Cattle Company were
a court — to certify their resurvey for the land office. Sign that the new lines
25
were true. He went into that office in Alder Creek with his notebooks under
his arm and he refused, Mr. Halloran, in a voice I gather carried through the
door, with Ellis Ward from the feed store and young Tom Priest from the
bank standing in the outer room with their hats in their hands and every word
arriving clear. He said: I will not sign a map of a theft. Then he came home
and ate his supper and told me, at this very pitch of ordinary, that his
notebooks were going to Hays City when the roads dried. The register there
was new that fall and not yet bought — that is what he said, not yet bought,
the way a man speaks of weather that hasn't arrived. When the roads dried,
he said. Two days later his horse came home."
The mare tossed her head at a grasshopper and settled. Willa's hands were
steady on the reins by an effort she disguised as adjusting them.
"The horse came home at dusk with the saddle empty and a rein broken and
snow dried on the blanket. We found Father at first light at the foot of the
cutbank on Cottonwood Creek, where the trail drops — his skull broken
against a stone, his compass in his coat pocket with the glass cracked, and the
ground all around him iron-hard and bare. It had not snowed in nine days.
The south bank where he lay takes the sun all afternoon in December; there
was no ice on that bank, Mr. Halloran. There was no ice anywhere a horse
could reach. Sheriff Wilkes empaneled the coroner's jury off the boardwalk
outside the saloon — six men, three of them drawing company wages in
season — and they looked at the stone and the skull and the hard bare ground
and they found, in under an hour, death by a fall on icy ground. I have kept
that verdict in my head the way you keep a splinter. It works its way toward
the heart a fraction at a time."
"Miss Cade." Rube's voice had gone rough at the edges. "There is a thing I
heard that winter after, freighting through, in the saloon at Alder Creek. I
26
have gone back and forth about whether telling it is a service or a cruelty,
and I expect I'll go to my grave still going back and forth. But you've put
your father's winter in order in front of me, and I won't be the man who edits
the record."
"Say it."
"Ward Coulter was drunk — the only time I ever saw him the whole way
drunk. He was holding forth to men who were paid to laugh. He said the
company ought to pension that horse. He said the old surveyor's horse knew
the way home even if the old man forgot." Rube rode a while with his eyes
on the gelding's ears. "I did not laugh. I want the record to show the whole
size of my courage in them years, Miss Cade. It was exactly that big. I stood
at a bar with a glass in my hand and did not laugh, and I have been ashamed
of the size of it every day since, which I suppose is why I'm telling you —
shame's the only coin I've got that spends."
Neither of them said the word that had been walking alongside the horses
since Cottonwood Creek. It did not need saying. The prairie said it, in the
way the wind flattened the grass in waves, in the way a hawk slid sideways
off the air and was gone.