Chapter 9
The Night at Ellery's
The Ellery boy was seven years old, burning like a coal in his mother's bed, and the room smelled of camphor and fear. Naya set her medicine bag on the floor and rolled her sleeves past the elbow, and the household of Cedar Flats storekeepers arranged itself around an Apache woman's competence with the desperate, wordless trust of people who have run out of other options.
"Bring me cool water," she said. "Not cold. And every clean cloth in the house."
She worked as she always worked, from the outside inward: first the heat, drawn down degree by degree with wet cloths and willow-bark tea measured in drops; then the listening, her ear against the thin chest, counting, her face giving away nothing; then the quiet orders, and the making of a poultice for the boy's feet that her grandmother had sworn by and Miss Hale's Latin could not explain and which worked anyway, as it had worked for four generations of San Pedro children, whatever their color.
It was past midnight when Lydia Ellery, who had sat all evening twisting her apron into rope, finally spoke β not about the boy at all.
"I repeated it," she said, in the voice of a woman unburdening herself at a deathbed. "What Garrett Sloane said about you. In the store. I laughed. I want you to know I laughed, so the shame of it is exact." Her eyes were swollen. "And now my son is in your hands and you came anyway, and I don't β I don't understand the world I thought I lived in."
Naya wrung out a cloth. The water pinked faintly from the herbs.
"You do not have to understand it tonight," she said. "Hold his head while I give him this."
"But won't you β shouldn't I say it properly? I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"Then it is said." Naya lifted the boy's head with hands so gentle the child did not stir. "Sorry is a door, Mrs. Ellery. You have opened it. Walk through it some morning when my boy β when a child β is well, and we will see what is on the other side. Tonight we work."
Outside, Micah waited with the horses. He waited all night.
He had unsaddled Naya's mare and his own borrowed mount and rubbed them down with the Ellerys' straw, asking Tom Ellery's permission for the use of the corral and the lantern. He had been offered the porch, then the kitchen, then a bed in the lean-to, and had declined each in turn with thanks, because Naya had not asked him to come in, and the threshold of that sickroom was hers to guard or open, not his to drift across on the tide of folks' gratitude.
So he stood the night in the yard, walking the horses at intervals, watching the lamplight move behind the curtains, and said nothing on her behalf to the neighbors who began, toward two in the morning, to gather at the Ellery fence in the way of small towns, drawn by the oldest news there is.
"That the scout?" old Henricks said. "The one the chief gave till the rains?"
"I am," Micah said.
"Fancy notion, a white man waiting leave to court."
Micah considered the dark yard, the lit window. "Ain't fancy," he said. "Just hers."
"She's in there with Lydia's boy," Mrs. Henricks allowed, after a silence in which the whole fence line seemed to be reappraising a great many things at once. "Purdy couldn't have done better. Purdy couldn't have done as well, and I pay his bills."
"Then you'll want to tell her so yourself," Micah said. "She hears praise poorly secondhand. Most folks worth praising do."
He spoke for her not once. That was the discipline of it, and it cost him more than silence usually costs a man, because praise of Naya was rising in him all night like water in a well and every neighborly opening invited him to let it out and be admired for the depth of his devotion. Instead he held his post, and held his tongue, and let the window tell its own story.
Toward dawn the boy's fever broke in a drenching sweat, and Lydia Ellery's cry of joy woke half of Cedar Flats. Naya came out onto the porch gray-faced with exhaustion, her bag banging her knee, and found Micah asleep standing against the corral gate in the manner of cavalrymen and horses, one hand still resting on her mare's lead rope.
She stood looking at him for a moment that she would not have wanted witnessed.
"He'll live," she said, when his eyes opened. "He asked for water and complained about the taste of the tea. Complaining is a healthy sign."
"Yes, ma'am," Micah said, and brought her horse, and held nothing β not the stirrup, not her elbow, not the moment β that she had not asked him to hold.
Behind them, in doorways up and down the street, Cedar Flats was quietly revising its opinion of Chief Noche's daughter, and would never again be able to pretend the revision had not happened.