It was the deepest part of the winter, and the little sod house was warm, and the journal filled page by page — weather, stock, letters sent at last across an ocean — and under all the entries, unrecorded and steady as the well under its ice, ran the thing Erik did not write down: that the farm had been a crossroads once, and might be again, and that he found he did not dread the spring roads opening. He looked for them.
Chapter 28 — The Bottom Land
The spring came up the valley in April with the creek running brown and high and loud enough to hear from the house at night, and it brought the surveyors back — but not to the Red Willow bottom.
He had ridden past that bottom on the Saturday before, out of a curiosity he did not name to himself. Flint's survey stakes still stood there in their straight, arrogant lines, but the flags were gone — weather and birds had taken them — and the grass was coming up green and careless through the plat of a city that would never exist. The bottom lay empty under the spring sky, the band's by treaty, waiting for the band. Erik had sat his horse a while, looking at it, and then ridden on, satisfied in a way that had nothing to do with winning.
Erik saw the stakes first from the road to town, on the Cottonwood bottom two miles east: new flags, a transit on its tripod, and a crew at work in the open. By the time he reached Prairie Center the whole story was in the street, and for once it was a clean story. The railroad had bought the Cottonwood bottom outright from the Widow Aasen — cash down, her price, her lawyer present, her mark and two witnesses on the deed — and the townsite would go there, on land no treaty covered and no widow had been robbed of. The plat was already drawn and the name chosen: not Flint City. Aasen, the town would be, if the railroad kept its habit of naming towns for the people whose land they stood on.
"Flint had the prettier bottom," the storekeeper said, shaking his head over Erik's seed order. "I won't deny it."
"He had a prettier paper," Erik said. "That is all he ever had. The Widow Aasen's deed will hold water. His wouldn't."
Captain Alcott, buying harness leather at the next counter, laughed out loud. "Tell it at the fair, Halvorsen," he said. "Half the county still thinks you conjured them horses out of that coulee by Norwegian witchcraft."
The fair was the agency's spring trade day, a week later — half market, half reunion, held on the agency grounds where the grass was first green. Erik drove down with Nils, a wagon of seed potatoes and two new plowshares to trade, and found the ground already crowded: farm wagons from Prairie Center and beyond, band tipis pitched along the creek in good order, women trading beadwork and dried meat, men trading horses and news, children of both nations running one undifferentiated pack through everyone's legs. Pastor Lindberg moved through it all like a mayor. It did not escape Erik — it escaped no one — that a year ago, or six months ago, this same crowd in one field would have been a thing men took up rifles about.
Mato found him at midday, leading two horses on a single rope.
They were band-bred and it showed: a bay gelding, four years old, deep in the chest and clean in the leg, and a sorrel mare, three, with a bright eye and the Red Willow brand on her hip — the band's own mark, fairly there, never burned over by any man's running iron. Mato held the rope out — not as a gift. That was the point, and both men knew it, and Nils, watching, learned it.
"My father says a man should not have to ride a gift into his work," Mato said. "A gift horse carries a debt every mile. These are for sale, Erik Halvorsen. The bay is strong and a little proud. The mare is smarter than both of us. Ninety dollars for the pair, and the blacksmith's bill for the gelding's shoes, which he got yesterday because I knew you would look at his feet first."
"I would have looked at his teeth first," Erik said.
"Then look," said Mato, and bared them, grinning.
Erik looked — feet, teeth, wind, the set of the mare's ears — and paid the ninety dollars in cash on the wagon seat, and took a bill of sale in Mato's careful agency-school hand, and the two men shook on it while the fair went on around them. Ninety dollars was a fair price, neither friendship-cheap nor stranger-dear, and Erik understood that the fairness itself was the gift, the thing Gray Elk had sent his son to deliver: from now on, between the farm and the band, things would be bought and sold and owed and paid like neighbors, which is a stronger rope than gratitude.
"You will bring them in the spring move?" Erik asked. "Your road goes past my gate."
"Our road has always gone past your gate," Mato said. "It was the world's road that forgot it for a while." He mounted and gathered his rope. "The band moves in nine days, if the grass holds. My sister counts the days by the creek rising. She has an interest in wells, that one. It is a family joke now."
He rode off through the fair crowd, and Nils, holding the new mare's lead and looking ten feet tall about it, said, "Ninety dollars and he throws in the joke for free."
"Band-bred horses," Erik said, running a hand down the bay's cannon bone and finding it good. "We will not be the poorest farmers on the creek this year, Nils. Come — your claim needs a team by June, and this gelding has just volunteered."