They feasted until the light went. There was meat roasted in the ground pits and corn and the traders' coffee, strong enough to stand a spoon in, and the old ones were served first, and the children were served constantly, and somebody's uncle sang a song that Wade did not know the words to and enjoyed down to the ground anyway.
At the end of it he walked with Tali through the camp in the blue dusk, past fires settling to coals, and Weshka's lodge stood open for them — her fire kept, her place by it kept, as the terms had said. The household was beginning exactly as it had been arranged: with the grandmother's lodge at its heart, and nobody displaced, and the door hide held wide.
"Your father growled less than I expected," Wade said.
"He is saving it," Tali said. "In case you ever give him cause." She took his hand in the dark, matter-of-fact as counting. "Come in, husband. The day has been long enough to be respectable."
Chapter 28 — The First Season
The first season of the marriage was mostly work, which suited both of them down to the ground.
Wade's horse business stopped being a white man's business at the edge of the valley and became a thing the valley did. The Bar M horses ran with the band's herd on band grass, and the counting was joint, and the tally was kept by Tali, whose figures no man in the camp — including Wade — had ever caught in an error. The young men who rode for him rode at Army wages and were paid at the fire in front of witnesses, and the first time a trader tried to underpay a band rider through Wade's hands, Wade sent the man up-canyon with empty pack saddles and the whole camp heard of it by supper. A reputation, he had learned in the valley, is a fence you build once and mend forever.
There was smaller work too, and it taught him more. He learned to read sign at Tali's shoulder on the morning rides — the difference between a horse trail going somewhere and a horse trail wandering, between old scat and new — and to keep his mouth shut while he learned, which she informed him was the advanced part of the study. He mended harness in the lodge through the long evenings and listened to the camp news arrive at Weshka's fire like weather, and understood that he had not married into a camp the way a man joins a crew. He had been absorbed, the way a river absorbs a creek, and the creek does not thereafter ask where the river is going.
In the spring they took the first contracted remuda out to the fort — forty head counted at the canyon gate and counted again at the fort's corral, six band riders strung along the herd, and Lt. Callum walking the string with his list in the dust and the heat, checking brands with his own thumb.
"Forty," the lieutenant said at the end of it, and looked up with the air of a man pleasantly surprised by other men's honesty. "The Army is accustomed to buying forty and receiving thirty-six, Mr. Mercer. The difference is usually described as shrinkage."
"The difference is usually described as theft where I was raised," Wade said. "The tally's joint, Lieutenant. Her figures" — he nodded toward Tali, who sat her horse at the gate with the slate — "have never once come out in my favor or against it. They come out true."
"Then the Army will do business at this gate again." Callum signed the payment order for the full count, and the riders' wages in full beside it, and asked after the spring the way a man asks after a person — and after the chief, and after the old woman who had fed a drowning man and started all of it — and Tali answered for the valley with the gravity of an ambassador.
But it was the lodge door that told the season's real story, and Wade watched it the way he had once watched it in his fever and his deciding.
In the bad time — and the camp no longer called it that where Tali could hear — the sick had come to her lodge the way shame moves: at dusk, sideways, with a cloth over the basket and no name spoken aloud. Now, in the first summer of the marriage, a woman of the camp carried her coughing boy across the open ground at full noon, in sight of every fire in the valley, and called at Weshka's door in a clear voice, asking for Tali by name. Not the returned one. Not the chief's daughter, even. Just her name, the way you call for the person in the camp who knows what to do.
Wade held the door hide while Tali took the boy in, and he saw the camp see it, and settle, the way a herd settles. Standing, he thought, is not a thing a person is given back. It is a thing other people stop taking, one ordinary noon at a time.
The letter came late in the season, folded hard and much traveled, with the mail rider's dust still on it. Callum's hand, brief as a tally. Vane had been tried at the territorial court. The count that had held was the fraud — the backdated claim, the drained spring, the dozen branded horses held as salvage that was never his. The false report they had folded into the same rope, and Hobbs with him, and both men were convicted and sentenced, and the claim in the upper canyon was voided and its stakes pulled up by Army order, and the ground returned in the Army's paper to the people who had never left it in any paper that mattered.
Wade read it aloud at the fire, because it belonged to the whole valley and not to his coat pocket.