The Fifth Post: A Rancher, an Apache Woman, and the Home They Refused to Surrender

Chapter 16

They prepared the ground the way they did everything else that winter — without drama, and in the course of the ordinary work, so that the ranch went on looking like a ranch and not a fort, because Sela said a fort invites a siege and a ranch only invites supper.

Eli re-hung the corral gate on doubled hinges and put a bar on the stable that could be dropped from inside or out. He sighted the rifle — his old Springfield, war-issue, older than his scars — and set it by the cabin door in a notch he cut into the frame for the purpose, where a man's hand would find it in the dark without thinking. He laid in powder and ball where they would stay dry, and dug, with a practicality that surprised even him, a second cache under the forge floor where Calloway's men, if it came to searching, would find only coal. He repaired the east fence entire, every strand singing tight — and left the fifth post exactly as it stood, unrepaired, its weathered cedar face toward the creek, because neither of them had said to touch it, and both of them knew it was waiting for its own chapter and not a workday's errand.

Sela practiced at the creek bank in the afternoons, at bottles set on the far rocks, with Eli's second rifle, the carbine, which she had claimed in the unarguable way she claimed kitchen implements and weather opinions, and her shooting was a revelation he received standing behind her with his arms folded, saying nothing, for the whole first session.

She was better than him. Not a little better. She shot the way she stitched and poulticed and read a horse — as if the task were a conversation she had been fluent in since childhood and merely had to slow down for the rest of the world's benefit. Six bottles, six shots, at a distance Eli would have called optimistic, and the glass fell in bright pieces into the creek gravel without a single wasted motion anywhere in her — no flinch, no hurry, the rifle coming up like something recalled rather than aimed.

"Your father," Eli said at last.

"My father," she agreed, lowering the carbine. "He said a rifle is a tool for making distance honest. Most people shoot to be loud. He taught me to shoot to be finished." She ejected the spent cases into her palm, out of the old economy of people who reload their own. "He would have said you stand too tall when you shoot, Eli. You present yourself like a fence post."

"Seven years of men aiming at me in Virginia suggests you're right about the general principle."

"It is not a criticism. It is why you were tied to one." She said it without cruelty, as diagnosis — a healer naming the old injury under the new one. "You stand tall and say no and let the world do what it does to a man who will not duck. It is a brave way to live and an expensive one. When it comes —" she nodded north, toward Three Buttes, toward the whole unfinished business of Ward Calloway "— I will need you to duck. Not from fear. From arithmetic. A dead man who was right is still dead, and I have buried enough right men."

He considered this with the seriousness it deserved, there on the creek bank with the broken glass shining. "I'll take it under advisement."

"Take it under the other thing," she said. "The thing where you live."

Driving home the lesson, she made him practice beside her until the light went — the crouch behind the pump trough, the shot from the stable door frame, the discipline of firing once and moving instead of standing to admire the work. He was a good student the way he was good at everything solitary: thoroughly, and with complaints filed silently. By dusk his shoulder ached from the war wound and the carbine both, and she poulticed it without being asked, with the willow-and-clay, and her hands were as impersonal and kind as a surgeon's and neither of them remarked on the fact that six months ago she would not have let a man's hands near her own wounds, and now hers were on his, daily, and the world had not ended.

"You are preparing for a war," she said, tying off the cloth, "in a house that has decided not to have one. I like the contradiction. It is very much you."

"The house isn't preparing for a war," Eli said. "The house is preparing for weather. Whatever weather comes."

"Then let us hope," Sela said, "for a dry season."

They walked back up from the creek together in the failing light, unhurried, the way people cross their own ground when they are not yet willing to call the day finished.

Chapter 17