Naya lay awake a long time, her hand held, thinking: perhaps motherhood was not a thing her body had been asked to approve.
Chapter 16
The Man in the Fine Buggy
Cornelius Brandt did not arrive the way trouble usually arrived in Red Willow Valley, with dust and rifles. He arrived at mid-morning in a black buggy with yellow wheels, drawn by a matched bay team whose harness shone. Behind it came a freight wagon, and behind that, two riders whose rifles were cased β visible enough to be known, polite enough to be denied.
The camp turned out to watch the way it watched weather coming over the ridge: all of it, silently, with the children called in close by hands that did not hurry.
Brandt stepped down himself. He was fifty, perhaps, silver at the temples, his face fleshy and rested in the manner of men a drought could never reach. He took off his hat to Chief Noche before Noche had acknowledged him at all, which was a kind of claiming disguised as respect.
"Chief," he said, in English made slow and warm, "I have come a long way to do honest business with an honorable man."
The gifts came first, because with such men the gifts are the business, wearing its friendly coat. Bolts of red cloth. A sack of white sugar such as the camp had not seen since spring. Coffee. A brass kettle that caught the sun. Two new rifles, laid across a blanket with ceremony, and ammunition in paper boxes tied with string. Brandt named each thing as it was set down, sadly, as a man listing what hard times had forced him to carry so far for friends.
Then the paper, which he produced from a leather case as one produces a family photograph.
It was simple, he explained. So simple. His company wished to buy certain land along the river β land the tribe did not farm, could not farm in such a dry year, and would thank him for relieving them of. For Noche's mark, and the marks of the headmen, there would be money: four thousand dollars in gold coin, counted in this camp, before witnesses. A wagon and team for the chief himself. And relocation land, good land, he swore it, with a well already dug, farther south.
"Four thousand dollars," Brandt said, "is a school. It is cattle. It is your grandchildren eating in a year when this river β " he gestured, gently, at the shrunken San Pedro, as a doctor gestures at a wound " β cannot feed your children."
He let the silence hold the number. Naya watched her father's face. Noche sat wrapped in stillness, hands flat on his knees, an old man who had heard promises from uniforms, from priests, from agents with three different flags, and had buried people beside every one of those promises.
"The land you name," Noche said at last, in Apache, and waited while Brandt's driver β who understood more than his coat suggested β murmured the translation, "is where our dead are. The water your paper drinks from is where our mothers' mothers carried water. You ask me to make a mark that sells the place my daughter will bury me."
"The dead," Brandt said, with real, practiced tenderness, "travel with the heart, Chief. The living need wells."
"The living have wells," Noche said. "You have not found them. That is not the same as their being gone."
Something moved behind Brandt's eyes, quick as a fish under ice. He folded the paper once, precisely, and smiled with all of his face except that part of it.
"Then think," he said. "I am a patient man. Paper keeps. Think a week. Think two. Hungry seasons make many things clear." He rose, set his hat back on, and now, for the first time, he looked around the camp properly β and his looking was different from his talking. It inventoried. The lodges. The drying racks, thin this year. The old people. The children.
It inventoried Luz, standing at Naya's side with a small hand fisted in her skirt, a Mexican child in an Apache camp, a thing that did not fit any column he owned, and Naya felt his interest snag on it. It inventoried Naya herself, the chief's daughter, heir by blood to whatever loyalty this valley still commanded. And it went past the camp, out to the valley mouth, where the fresh pine skeleton of Micah Donovan's house stood pale against the dry hills β a white man's lawful homestead, filed and witnessed and growing walls, planted exactly where a rail cut would need to pass.
Brandt looked at the house a long time.
"A neighbor," he said pleasantly. "How fortunate for everyone."
He climbed into the buggy. The gifts remained on the blanket where they had been laid, because Noche had not touched them, and Brandt, being a man who never wasted a gesture, did not take them back. Left behind, gifts become either a debt or an insult, and both were useful to him.