Chapter 1 — Three Days Before Christmas
The cold came down off the peaks before the light did, and Levi Hartman woke to the sound of his own house ticking in it, timber shrinking on timber, the way it had every winter morning since he built the place. He lay a moment in the dark and listened to the wind worry the eaves. Then he got up because the stock did not care what day it almost was.
He built the fire with the care of a man who had cooked for one a long time and no longer thought about it. Coffee. A pan of salt pork. Boots by the door, frost feathering the seams where the leather had cracked. Through the window the yard was blue with early snow, the corral fence wearing a white spine along every rail, and beyond the creek the whole valley lay quiet under a sky the color of old tin.
Diego Fuentes was already in the barn, fork in hand, moving with the unhurried grace of a man who had decided long ago that hurry was a young man's tax. "Cold enough to freeze the devil's opinions," Diego said.
"Cold enough," Levi said, and took up the other fork.
They worked the morning through the way they worked every morning, and the sameness of it was a kind of mercy. Levi had made a religion of sameness after Mary died. Fever had taken her in the autumn of 1880, quick as a door closing, and in the three winters since he had arranged his life the way a man arranges tools on a wall: everything in its place, nothing reached for that he did not need. Christmas he kept at arm's length, which was to say he did not keep it at all. No wreath. No candle in the window. He bought his winter supplies before the town could hang its greenery, and if the day itself found him anywhere, it found him working.
This morning, though, the calendar had its own plans. He needed meal and coffee from San Tomas, and the ride in would take him past the mission churchyard, and there was a thing he did on the twenty-second of December whether he admitted it to himself or not.
The snow had come early that year and stayed, which the old men at the store said meant a hard January. Levi rode in under a low white sky, his horse's breath smoking, the road empty except for a freight wagon creaking the other way, its driver muffled to the eyes. San Tomas was dressing itself for the feast despite the cold. Paper flowers in the windows of the cantina. A piñon tree dragged to the plaza, waiting for its candles. And above the door of the old assay office, where the paint was not yet dry, a new sign in gilt letters: SAN TOMAS LAND & WATER COMPANY.
Levi looked at it a moment longer than the sign deserved, then tied his horse and went about his business.
He saved the churchyard for last, the way a man saves the hard part of a chore. The graves lay on the mission's north side, where the wind had scoured the snow thin. Mary's stone stood plain and square, with her name and the dates and nothing else, because she had asked for nothing else. He cleared the drift from its base with his boot and stood bareheaded in the cold, and said the few words he said every year, which were no words at all, only her name in his mind, spoken carefully, like something carried in both hands.
Six paces off, in newer ground, lay Sam Little.
That grave he had helped to dig himself, in July, in earth so dry and hard the pick rang on it like a bell. Sam Little — scout, neighbor, the best hand with a frightened horse Levi had ever known — thrown from a green colt he had no business mounting at his age and every business mounting, because gentling broncs was Sam's trade and Sam never once sent another man up in his place. Kaya had stood at the graveside straight as a fence post, her mother's hand in hers, the little girl between them, and she had not wept where the town could see. Levi had thought then, and thought now, that he had never seen a person pay for dignity at a higher price.
"Well," he said to the snow over Sam, because the dead were owed conversation even if it was poor stuff. "Your creek's froze. First time in three years the ford's got a skin on it." He stood a while longer. "I'll look in on them. You know that."
The storekeeper, wrapping his meal, wanted to talk about the Land & Water Company, the way the whole town wanted to talk about it. The railroad was coming — maybe. A water contract was gold — certain. The company was buying springs and creek rights up and down the valley, cash money, and a man named Draper was doing the buying, a pleasant man, a patient man, the storekeeper said, and then, with the particular pleasure of a man repeating a thing he has heard, "They say he's got his eye on the Little place next. Best spring in the valley, that one. Never freezes, never fails."
Levi paid for his goods and said nothing at all.
He rode home through the blue dusk with the sacks across his saddle, and the cold deepened as the light failed, and the wind came up with its smell of far snow. At the ford he reined in a moment. Across the creek, in the window of the Little house, a lamp was lit, small and amber and steady, the only light in that whole white quarter of the valley. Behind him his own house stood dark on its rise, the way he had left it, the way he would find it.