San Tomas in January was nine miles of frozen road and a town holding its breath, and Eli felt the change before he'd finished hitching Pruitt at the store rail: the street had the quality of a room where a conversation stops a half-second too late.
He'd come for flour, salt, coffee, lamp oil, powder and ball β the list Sela had written for him in her upright hand, with quantities, because she kept the stores now the way she kept everything, counted β and he transacted it at Ines Aguilar's counter while the widow ran the store and the town's true government simultaneously, out of the same pair of hands.
"You look fed, Elias Crowe," Ines said, weighing his flour with the air of a woman delivering a verdict. "Settled life agrees with you. Or is it the company." She had called Sela "the company" since November β Ines's own coinage, deployed like a flag. "How is the company?"
"She's well, Ines. The mare's in foal."
"A foal!" Ines crossed herself, delighted, and then leaned on the counter and lowered her voice the exact degree that meant the whole store would hear it anyway. "Then hear mine, since we're trading news. Calloway's man Rhee was in here Tuesday, drunk at noon, buying whiskey he didn't need with money he hadn't earned, and telling the room that his employer is done being patient. Done with sheriffs and done with paper. There were two strangers with him β guns, not cattlemen, from the look of their hands. Hired in Three Buttes. The talk at the livery is six, when it's done."
Eli set his money on the counter with care. "And the town's talk, Ines? Since you're its government."
"The town," she said, "is a town. The schoolteacher's husband says the law is the law, which is a thing men say when the law is pointing somewhere else. The Delgados are yours, quietly. The miller is Calloway's, loudly, bought with a note forgiven. Most peopleβ" she wrapped his coffee in paper with savage neatness "βmost people are practicing looking at their boots, Elias. It is the territory's favorite exercise. But I will tell you what I told Rhee, at volume, in front of witnesses, because I am sixty-four years old and own my building: that the last time this town looked at its boots while a woman was tied up by rich men's business, we were all of us smaller afterward, and some of us noticed."
He looked at her a moment. "Is that what happened? Before my time?"
"There is always a before, mijo. She was Apache too. It was '71 β no, before. The town has had practice at its favorite exercise." Her eyes went shrewd and not unkind. "You are doing the other thing. It confuses people. They'll come around or they won't, but they'll remember which one they did. That's the real census."
On the street, a man Eli had traded horses with for four years crossed to the other boardwalk with his eyes front, studying the hardware store window like scripture. Across from the livery, old Tomas Delgado β the mule man's father, eighty if he was a day β touched two fingers to his hat brim in the old way, unhurried, and held Eli's eye while he did it, a whole speech in two fingers.
He bought more powder than the list said, and more ball, and a box of the new cartridges Sela's carbine preferred, and he paid for all of it without haggling, which Ines remarked on as a sign of the end of days.
Coming home in the dark, riding the creek road with the sacks balanced and the cold coming up off the water like a second, invisible creek flowing the other way, he thought about the town practicing its boots, and Ines's census, and two fingers on a hat brim. He thought about how the fight Calloway was assembling was not, underneath the land and the money and the lie, about Sela at all. It was about whether the world got to go on arranging people into prices β and whether a town full of good-enough people would keep paying the small daily tax of looking away that such arrangements require.
At the hollow the windows were lit, and the lit windows stopped his breath for a second the way they still could. Sela came to the door with the lamp and stood in the light in his mended coat, which she had taken to wearing for evening chores.
"News?" she said.
"Town's divided like a cut cake," he said, swinging down. "Six guns coming, Ines says, when it's ripe. And an old man tipped his hat to me like a treaty." He handed down the sacks. "I bought extra powder."
"Then we will not waste the other kind," she said. "Come and eat. News keeps. Stew doesn't."
Chapter 18
Winter deepened the way it does in high country β not in storms, mostly, but in the slow accumulation of cold days, each one a small stone added to a cairn β and the ranch, against all the arithmetic of Three Buttes, was happy.