morning would come, she had to stay. Lucy had stayed that time. The fever
had broken by dawn and she'd asked for pancakes.
He had told himself, kneeling by Saya's bunk, that the universe owed him
nothing β it had made that clear eight years ago. But he asked anyway. He
asked the dark, the stove's ticking, the two stones under the cottonwood. Let
me be good for something once. Just this once. Let me keep one person.
And then her forehead had cooled under his hand, and her breathing had
deepened, and he had shaken apart in Martha's rocking chair like a man
coming undone β and being, stitch by stitch, put back together.
She woke asking for food.
"You're awake," he said stupidly, scrambling up.
"I'm starving. Your broth is thin enough to read through." She pushed herself
up on one elbow, color in her cheeks, eyes clear. "And your coffee β I
smelled it yesterday through the fever. It smells like punishment."
Silas laughed β actually laughed, a sound so rusty it startled them both. "My
coffee kept mule teams alive for fifteen years."
"Your mule teams had no choice." Her smile was the first real one he'd seen,
and it changed her whole face, the sharp pride in it softening into something
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mischievous. "Teach me where everything is. If I'm going to survive your
cooking, I'll need to take over."
The days that followed had a rhythm Silas hadn't known in eight years.
Saya moved about on a crutch he'd cut and shaped for her, cursing it roundly
in two languages, and took command of the cabin the way a captain takes a
ship. His beans, she declared, were "a punishment," his biscuits "rocks with
ambition," and his coffee β she took one sip, closed her eyes, and said,
"No." Within a week she was cooking over his stove with his meager stores
and somehow producing meals that made him close his eyes and chew
slowly, tasting things he'd forgotten food could do.
In return, she found his shoulder.
He'd been favoring it for years β an old freight injury, a snapped trace chain
that had nearly taken his arm off outside Santa Fe. He'd never mentioned it.
She noticed anyway, the way she noticed everything: the hitch when he lifted
the water bucket, the way he rolled it in the morning.
"Take off your shirt," she ordered one evening.
"I beg your pardon."
"Your shoulder. Sit." She had her pouch open, her bundles sorted. "A healer
sees what a man hides. You hid a trap victim in a canyon for two days β you
can survive me looking at your shoulder."
He sat. She worked the knotted muscle with strong fingers and hot cloths and
a poultice that smelled of pine and something bitter, and she talked while she
worked β about her brother Dokan, who'd taught her to track by making her
find him blindfolded; about her mother's laugh; about the first time she'd set
a bone, shaking so hard the patient had to hold her steady.
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"Does it hurt less?" she asked.
Silas rotated the shoulder, slowly. The grinding ache that had been his
constant companion for a decade had dulled to something distant. "Some."
"Some is a beginning." She tied off the bandage with a sharp tug. "You
freight men. You'd carry a broken axle for a hundred miles before admitting
the wagon was damaged."
Their teasing had become easy β the natural sparring of two people who'd
decided, without discussing it, to trust each other. Slate, who'd tolerated Silas
for years with the weary patience of a much-put-upon saint, took to
following Saya around the yard like a dog, nuzzling her pockets for the dried
apple she always seemed to have. The homestead, which had been a waiting
room for death, started feeling like something else. Silas caught himself
humming while he split wood. Humming. He hadn't hummed in eight years,
and when he realized it, he stopped dead with the axe in his hands, unsettled
and β he was honest enough to admit it β a little bit glad.
On the fourth morning, she asked about the graves.
They had walked as far as the corral fence β she insisted on walking, crutch
thumping β and she stood looking past it to the cottonwood, where the two
stones stood level and tended. He had weeded around them that spring out of
habit, the way a man tends a thing without deciding to.
"Will you tell me their names?" she asked.
He was quiet a long time. Slate nuzzled Saya's shoulder, and she scratched
his forehead without looking away from Silas.
"Martha," he said at last. "My wife. And Lucy. She was six." The words
came out flat, the way they always did. "Piedra Creek took the farm. I was
34
downstream warning neighbors. I got there three days too late for them, and
just in time for everyone else."
Saya nodded slowly. Then she did something he did not expect β she took
two flat stones from the corral's edge, walked with great deliberation to the
graves, and set one on each marker.
"For remembrance," she said, coming back. "My people do this. So the dead
know they are visited." She looked at him steadily. "You visit them every
day in your head, Silas. Now the stones will know it too."
He could not speak. He just nodded, and turned away to fuss with Slate's
bridle until his eyes behaved. When he looked back, she was gathering
yarrow from the creek bank, naming each plant under her breath β for him,
he realized. Teaching him. As if he were someone with a future worth
teaching.
It was Saya who found Dokan's sign.
She'd taken to walking the creek in the mornings, crutch and all, testing her
leg, gathering the plants she recognized. She came back just past noon,
moving fast, her face alight.
"Silas." She grabbed his arm. "Come. Look."