"You built it for one man," she said. "Listen to it."
"I hear it," Micah said.
"It doesn't sound like one man." She turned her face up to him in the doorway light, and her voice, which had moved a courtroom and a valley, did the simplest work of its life. "Micah. It already sounds like a family."
Chapter 25
The Breath Before the Verdict
For three days after the hearing, Red Willow Valley lived as if it were holding its breath. In Cedar Flats the judge had shut his ledger and said he needed time to examine the original survey and the mission register, and no man in the valley, Apache or settler, argued with time. They waited the way people waited for rain.
At the house at the valley mouth, waiting looked like ordinary life, and ordinary life, Naya thought, was its own kind of courage. In the morning she taught Luz her letters at the kitchen table, guiding the small hand through A and B while the kettle sang. Luz was six and solemn about schooling, her tongue caught at the corner of her mouth. Beside her Tomas, nine, sounded out words from a borrowed primer, impatient to be done and out to the horses. His sister Elena, four, was supposed to be practicing her name and was instead feeding crumbs to an invisible dog beneath the table.
"You have students," Micah said from the doorway, "and one deserter."
"Elena is learning generosity," Naya said. "Letters can wait until after breakfast."
He set down an armful of wood and crouched to be bitten, very gently, by the invisible dog, which made Elena shriek with laughter and forget to be shy. Naya watched, and was quietly grateful.
In the afternoons the work turned to the house itself. Micah showed Tomas how to whittle, sitting with him on the step with two knives and a length of soft pine. "Away from you, always," he said. "The blade wants to go somewhere. You decide where before it does." The boy's first horse had no legs and a head like a potato, and Micah praised it as if it were bound for a fair. When Tomas ran to show Naya, she held it with both hands and said it needed a name, and Tomas, grave as a judge, named it Verdict, because everyone was waiting for one.
Naya mended Luz's doll in the evenings, the cloth doll that had come through the flood with one arm torn and its painted face half washed away. She stitched a new arm from a scrap of her own old skirt and embroidered a small red flower where the heart would be. "There," she said. "Now she is not fixed. She is more."
"More?" Luz asked.
"A thing that has been mended knows how to hold on," Naya said, and was surprised to hear her grandmother's voice come out of her own mouth.
Micah repaired harnesses and did not speak much of the court. But on the second evening, when the children were abed and the lamp burned low, he said what both of them had been carrying. "If the judge rules for Brandt, we will appeal. If he rules for us, there will still be men angry about it. Either way, I am not going anywhere." He turned his cup in his hands. "And I want you to hear this plain, because I have held it long enough to say it right. My asking will wait. Not because I am unsure β I have never been unsure. It will wait until you are ready to be asked. A month, a year. The choice has to be yours all the way down, or it is not the choice I want."
She looked at him across the table, this man who had refused her father's ultimatum in front of the whole camp, who had said he would not take a wife handed to him like a treaty clause. He had kept that vow through suitors' mockery and a speculator's war. He was keeping it still, even now, when keeping it cost him.
"I am nearly ready," she said, so quietly she almost did not hear herself.
He did not reach for her hand. He smiled, slow and wondering, and let the words be enough. "Nearly is a fine place," he said. "I will be here when nearly becomes ready."
On the third day the air changed. Heat lay on the valley like a hand, the cottonwoods hung still, and by afternoon a wall of cloud was building over the mountains, purple-black at its heart, smelling of dust and distant lightning. Micah stood on the porch a long time, watching the river run the color of slate. The horses were restless in the corral. Tomas's carved horse sat on the windowsill, waiting with the rest of them.