Word came to Red Hollow in pieces through the spring, the way news travels in a territory: by Delgado's mule runs, by Ines's letters (formidable documents, sealed with wax and opinions), and once by Tully himself, riding out in April with his hat in his hands and an expression like a man delivering eggs. The grand jury at the capital had indicted Ward Calloway on eleven counts. His bank had called two of the April notes early, having read the newspapers. The cattlemen's association, which had dined on his money for a decade, discovered pressing business elsewhere and a sudden institutional belief in due process. The false complaint against Sela'na of Red Hollow had been dismissed with a phrase Tully read aloud twice, savoring it like tobacco: void ab initio — void from the beginning, Your Honor's compliments, as if it had never existed at all.
"Pell pled guilty to the fence and the mare," Tully said, accepting coffee on the porch. "He'll do a year, maybe less, and the court took notice of the order in which he stood up, same as I promised. He'll come out of it with a trade if he wants one. Rhee got two years and the distinction of being the only man in the territory who confessed to everything except the one thing that would have shortened it. As for Calloway—" Tully turned his cup in his hands "—Calloway's got lawyers enough to keep the sun out, but the brand business has its own arithmetic, and the association men who changed those brands for him are trading testimony like baseball cards. He won't hang. Men like that mostly don't. But he'll be poor in a courtroom for a long time, Crowe, and then he'll just be poor. It's not justice the way the hymn means it. It's the kind we keep in stock."
"It'll do," Eli said.
"It'll have to," Tully agreed. "It's the only size we carry." He stood to go, and stopped, and looked at Sela where she stood at the porch rail. "Ma'am. The dismissal paper has your name on it — your full name, spelled the way you gave it. First government document in this territory, near as I can tell, that ever did. I thought you'd want to hear it from the man who folded the other one."
"I will keep it," Sela said, "next to nothing. I keep very few papers, Sheriff. Paper waits, you told us. I intend to make this one wait in good company — in the dark, in a drawer, doing nothing at all. Like a retired soldier."
Tully laughed all the way to his horse.
Spring worked its way into the hollow. The creek ran high and brown and then high and clear. Duchess was vast now, and slow, and ruled the corral like a queen in the last month of a reign, and Sela slept some nights in the stable on a blanket roll, over Eli's protests and her own superior knowledge, because the mare was restless and first foals come when they come. Eli took to leaving a lantern burning low in the stable those nights, and coffee on the forge's edge in a tin cup, and saying nothing whatsoever about any of it, which she received in the spirit in which it was offered, which was: entirely.
And in the evenings they walked the fence sometimes — checking the wire, the water gaps, the spring work — and every walk ended, by a route neither of them planned, at the east stretch where the wire ran new and bright past a post that did not match the others: older, grayer, weathered like a face. The fifth post. They never stopped at it. They never didn't notice it. It stood in its hole with the patience of an unpaid debt, and the wire ran through its staples, and the whole line held because of it and in spite of it.
"He's still working," Sela said one dusk, stopping at last, and laying her palm flat against the cedar the way Eli had, months before, in the dark. "Feel it. The whole fence leans on him a little. He is a good post. He does his work honestly. The work is the problem."
"What do you want done with it?" Eli asked.
"I have told you since January. It comes out of the ground." She looked at the post a while longer, her hand still flat on it, without hatred — that was the thing he would remember later, the absence of hatred, like a healer pronouncing a limb past saving. "But not in anger, and not yet. When the foal is on the ground and the ground is soft from the spring. Then we will take him out together, and decide what an honest piece of cedar is for, once it is finished being a post."
Chapter 27
They took the post out on a morning in late spring, with the ground soft from meltwater and Duchess watching from the corral rail in the manner of a duchess indeed — supervising, skeptical, and too round to assist.