Chapter 16 — The Stay
Kaya heard the horse before she saw it, picking its way down the frozen lane in the thin morning light, and she knew the gait of a horse ridden by a man in no hurry to arrive. She was at the door with a shawl over her shoulders when Sheriff Beckett came around the cottonwood, his hat low against the cold, a folded paper in his gloved hand.
"Morning, Mrs. Little," he said, and swung down. "I've carried one paper to this door that I was sorry to carry. This one I'm not sorry."
She took it from him and read it standing in the doorway, with the cold coming around her ankles. An order of stay, in the clerk's cramped hand. The eviction was halted. There would be a hearing — an emergency session, December the twenty-sixth, Judge Ambrose Tully riding in from the county seat to sit on it himself. Bond posted by Levi Hartman of the Hartman ranch, in the sum of his own land, that the widow Little should remain in her house until the court had heard the matter whole.
"You understand what he's done, ma'am," Beckett said, not unkindly. "He's put his ranch under your roof-tree. If the hearing goes against you, Mr. Draper's company can reach for costs against that bond. Mr. Hartman could lose the Hartman place over a house that isn't his."
"He should have told me first," Kaya said.
"He told the court, ma'am. That's where it had to be told." Beckett turned his hat in his hands. "I nailed the other paper up myself. I'm glad to be the one that takes its teeth out."
Lucy came to the doorway in her stockings, hair still loose from sleep, and looked from the sheriff's star to her mother's face. "Does it mean the bad paper is dead, Mama?"
"It means no one puts us out of this house before the judge has heard everything," Kaya said. "Not dead yet, little bird. Held by the scruff, like a dog that's bitten once." She folded the stay once, precisely, and laid it on the mantel beside the eviction notice she had taken down and kept. Let the two papers sit together. She wanted both where she could see them.
Nashona, who had come up behind them silent as weather, looked at the sheriff and said, "Paper that bites and paper that shields. The white man's sky changes fast," and went to put the coffee on, which from Nashona was a welcome.
By afternoon the news had been up and down the valley twice, and the town had begun to sort itself, the way water sorts gravel. Mrs. Park came in the school wagon with Mrs. Calloway from the mercantile and Marta Ibarra, and they did not come empty-handed — a ham, a sack of meal, a jar of preserves, laid on the table without ceremony, as neighbors lay things down. But Kaya understood that the food was the least of the errand.
"The store porch has argued it every day since the notice went up," Mrs. Park said, sitting straight as a yardstick in Kaya's kitchen chair. "The men on company wages are for Mr. Draper — wages argue loud. The ranch families are for you. The church people are for you. And the women of this town, Mrs. Little, have finished arguing." Her eyes were bright and entirely unembarrassed. "We will be at that hearing, every one of us who can walk or be carried, in our Sunday clothes. Let the judge see who keeps a home in this valley, and who only keeps paper on it."
"You are kind," Kaya said.
"I am not kind. I am decided. There is a difference, and the second one holds up better in court."
Then Mrs. Calloway, more gently, said what the others had been circling: that Mr. Hartman would speak well for her, and perhaps a lawyer could be got from the county seat, a man who knew the forms — and Kaya set her cup down.
"Mr. Hartman will tell the judge what he knows. That is his to tell, and he will tell it true. But this house is mine, and Sam's, and Lucy's, and the story of it is mine. When the judge asks about this place, he will not hear it out of another mouth." She looked around the table, level as a plumb line. "I will speak at my own hearing."
Mrs. Park studied her a moment, and then nodded slowly, the way a general approves a plan of battle. "Then we'll be there to hear you, Mrs. Little. Every woman-jack of us."
On their way out, Mrs. Calloway paused at the door and lowered her voice — not in gossip, but in report, the way a scout reports. "Mr. Draper's lawyer came in on the morning stage, Mrs. Little. City coat, city boots, soft hands. He's taken the big room at the hotel and sent for the company's books. And Mr. Draper stood the saloon a barrel of whiskey last night, free to all comers — buying tongues, my husband calls it."
"Let him buy them," Kaya said. "A bought tongue is a cheap thing, and it wears out fast. He'll find the truth isn't in them, and mine isn't for sale at any price."
That night, after the dishes, Kaya stood a while at the window. Lucy had set the lantern on the sill, as she set it every night, and lit it with the care of a priestess, so her papa could find the house. Kaya watched the small flame steady itself against the glass.
"The twenty-sixth, then," she said, to the room, to the papers on the mantel. "Let him come and hear it all."
Chapter 17 — The Register