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

He had cut it from her wrists at the fifth post — the last loop, the one he had worked most carefully, because by then his hands had understood — and for reasons he had never examined he had not thrown it in the brush with the rest. He had pocketed it. It had wintered with him: through Calloway's gold, through the sheriff's folded paper, through the cut fence and the dawn and the arrests, a hard little curl of hide in his pocket that his fingers found in idle moments like a tongue finding a sore tooth. Evidence, he had told himself. Then, later: reminder. Then, later than that, he stopped calling it anything, which is how he knew it had become a superstition — a piece of the worst thing, carried in case the worst thing needed answering in kind.

On an evening in May, saddling Pruitt at the forge, he put his hand in the pocket for a nail and found the curl instead, and stood looking at it in his palm while the light went down the cliffs. Sela, passing with the milk pail, stopped.

"How long?" she asked.

"Since the post."

"And you carried it all winter in your pocket, like a stone against a river." She set the pail down. "Eli. When my mother treated a wound that had closed dirty, she opened it, cleaned it, and let it close again clean. She did not carry the dirt around afterward in case the wound missed it. Put it in the forge."

"It isn't mine to burn," he said, which he heard, even as he said it, was the last redoubt of the thing. "It was on your wrists."

"It was on my wrists," she agreed. "And then it was on your conscience, which is a worse place, because wrists heal. I am telling you as your healer, and your—" she searched, briefly, and landed on it with a small dry satisfaction "—your person, that the treatment is finished and the dirt goes in the fire. Together. Now, before the light is gone, because some things should be done in front of witnesses and the cliffs are mine."

So they did it at the forge, in the May dusk, with the pump handle cold from the day and Runner audible in the corral practicing his legs against the ground. Eli laid the curl of rawhide on the coals. It did not flame — rawhide is stubborn stuff, made by its nature to hold — it smoked, and blackened, and curled tighter and tighter in the heat, holding its shape against the fire the way it had held its shape against a woman's wrists, until Sela, beside him, said very quietly, "Now," and he worked the bellows once, twice, and the coals went white and the thing gave up its shape all at once and was only ash, and then not even ash that anyone could have named.

They stood a while.

"It is a small fire for such a long winter," Sela observed.

"It was a small piece of hide for such a long winter," Eli said. "That's the thing nobody tells you. The piece is always small. It's the carrying that makes it heavy."

Pell's letter came the following week, by Delgado's mule, written in a hand so laboriously fair that Eli read it twice before he understood it was the same man. Pell was at the territorial prison, in the blacksmith's shop there, learning the trade at the state's expense — the warden says I have the hands for it, which is a thing no one previously said about my hands in a complimentary direction. He asked for nothing. He reported that he slept through the night now, which he had not done since boyhood, and that a year was a fair price for it, and that if Mr. Crowe's forge ever wanted an unpaid hand for a month after, the offer stood and no answer was required.

"Will you answer it?" Sela asked.

"In the fall," Eli said. "With work, if he still wants it. A man who can hold horses can learn to hold iron." He folded the letter and put it in the wooden box on the shelf — the box made from the fifth post, where it joined the dismissal paper with Sela's full name on it and her mother's beaded band in its winter rest, and it seemed to him, closing the carved lid over all of it together, that the box was doing exactly the work it had been made for: keeping the past where it belonged, in the dark, in good company, neither burned nor brandished.

"There is a fence to build," Sela said from the doorway, against the evening. "The east line has a hole in it the shape of a post, and a gate that wants a second opinion. Tomorrow we start."

"Tomorrow," Eli agreed, and banked the forge, and the last of the rawhide went up the flue with the sparks, unwitnessed by anyone but the whole red valley, which had seen the beginning of the story and was entitled to the end of that part of it.

Chapter 30