Levi got the word at his own gate, from a neighbor boy Kaya had sent across the creek: Father Anselmo was coming to the Little house at noon, and Mrs. Little would be glad of Mr. Hartman there. Levi washed his face in water that skinned over with ice while he watched it, put on his least-mended shirt, and rode across with his hat in his hand more than on his head.
The priest arrived in the mission's old buggy with the register wrapped in oilcloth and then in a blanket, carried on the seat beside him like a child or a corpse. He was a small man, sixty and more, with hands that had buried half the valley and married the other half, and he brought the book into Kaya's kitchen and set it in the middle of the cleared table with a care that made Levi, without thinking, take off his hat indoors.
"It is not a book to hurry," Anselmo said. "Forty years it has ridden with me — in saddlebags, in a wagon, once in a flour sack when the roof went. Open it gently, and it will tell you the truth the way an old man does. Slowly, and all at once."
The pages were thick as cloth, the ink gone the brown of old river water. Anselmo's finger traveled down the entries of 1875 — baptisms, two burials, a marriage — and stopped.
"Here." He read first in the Latin he had written, then again in English, translating as he went, his voice unhurried. "Samuel Little, of Kansas, scout in the service of the Army, and Kaya, daughter of Nashona of the Sevani — were joined in marriage by me, Anselmo, priest of this mission, on this day, in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-five. Witnesses: Domingo Rey, mayordomo of the mission. Elena Vásquez, of this parish."
Kaya's hand had come out, slow as a deer at a fence, and her fingertips rested on the edge of the page, not on the writing, as if the writing were hot.
"I remember the day better than the entry," Anselmo said, and smiled at her, and the smile had eight years of dust on it and was young anyway. "You stood there—" he nodded toward the window, toward nothing and everything, "—in a dress your mother made, with your hair down because you would not have it up, and Samuel stood beside you straight as a flagpole and asked me three times — three times, Levi Hartman — whether the words were written down right. 'Father,' he says to me, 'a man's promises ought to live somewhere besides his mouth. Write it big.'" The old priest's eyes shone. "I wrote it big."
The priest turned the leaves forward a year, careful as a man handling moth wings. "And here," he said, "the baptism of a daughter, the spring after. Lucy Little, daughter of Samuel and Kaya. I wrote that one big too, at your husband's instruction." Kaya bent over the book and her fingertip hovered above the small entry without touching it, and Levi saw that her eyes were wet and that she was not in the least ashamed of it.
"Everything we were is in this book," she said. "Our names. Our days. Sam used to say a family's life ought to be written somewhere it couldn't be blown off a door. And Mr. Draper calls it no marriage at all — because the paper that says otherwise was in a drawer he hadn't opened."
"Then the marriage lie is dead," Levi said. "On the territory's own paper."
"On God's paper, which the territory keeps in a drawer — yes." Anselmo closed his hand flat on the cover, gently, the way a man quiets a horse. "But hear an old priest, both of you, and do not be angry at the hearing of it. This book kills the lie it was aimed at. The note is another beast. The note is about money, and money-paper must be killed with money-paper — with the journal, with witnesses to the hand, with every true thing laid beside the false one where the judge can see both at once. If the court thinks this register answers everything, the court may answer carelessly."
"It answers what it answers," Kaya said quietly. "That is enough for one book to do."
"This book will be in San Tomas on the twenty-sixth," Anselmo said. "I will carry it myself, and I will swear to it on the stand, and Mr. Draper's lawyer may ask an old man any question he likes." He rose, stiff in the knees, and at the door he stopped and blessed the house — not largely, not for show, a small cross traced in the cold air of the doorway — and then he bent to Lucy, who had been watching the great book the way other children watch a bear.
"Is my name in it, Father?" Lucy asked.
"Not yet, little one," he said. "That book is for beginnings. Yours is still being lived."
Levi walked him out to the buggy and handed him up. The priest gathered the reins, then looked down at him with the register safe under its blanket between his feet.
"You have put your ranch between this woman and the road, Levi Hartman," he said. "I have seen you do it, and I am too old to pretend I haven't. See that you put the truth there too. All of it — a man can post a bond for a house, but the truth is the only bond that holds in that courtroom."
Levi stood in the lane and watched the buggy go, and thought about a roster in a county drawer, and a page that a helpful clerk had been helpful about everything except.
"All of it," he said, to the empty lane. "Then I'd best go and fetch the rest of it."
Chapter 18 — Elias Reads a Letter