Elias Little rode out to his brother's house the next day with his hat in his hands before he was even off the horse, because the house stopped him the way a grave stops a man — not by its sorrow but by its finishedness. Sam had built it to be looked at by people who understood wood: the joints true, the lintel carved with a patient hand, the spring house roofed and solid, smoke rising from the chimney at exactly the angle a well-drafted chimney gives it. This was not a squatter's camp. It never had been. Elias had known that from the first hour and had been walking around the knowledge for two days, and the walk had tired him out.
Kaya received him on the porch without warmth and without rancor, which was worse than either. "You have come to see what you're claiming," she said. "Come in and see it, then."
Inside, she did not offer him the tour he half expected and wholly dreaded. She went into the back room and came out with a japanned tin box, worn bright at the corners, the kind a man keeps his life in when his life is mostly carried. She set it on the table between them.
"He kept the things that mattered in this," she said. "You are his brother. It is more yours to open than mine. Open it."
The letters were on top, folded in thirds, gone soft as cloth at the creases, addressed in a scout's cramped, careful hand. Father. Elias. One, older, Mother. Beneath them lay a compass with its glass cracked, a clasp knife, a tintype of Sam at twenty squinting into some long-dead sun — and Sam's pocket watch, stopped at ten past four.
Elias sat down at his dead brother's table, in his dead brother's house, and read the first letter by the light of the window, because his hands were not steady enough to be trusted near a lamp.
Spring, 1877. Father — I take up my pen to say what I would say at your table if the road were shorter. I have married. Her name is Kaya, of the Sevani, and if you could stand at our spring in the morning and see her laugh at my cooking — which she does daily, and is right to do — you would understand in one minute what this letter will fail to say in an hour. She is my wife. I am not sorry, and I will not be made sorry—
He read the second with the tears standing in his eyes and making no apology for them. A daughter, Father. Born with the light, so we have named her Lucy, for the light she came with. Kaya says she has my temper and her mother's sense, and God help the Territory when both are grown...
And the third, dated 1882, in a hand that had slowed and strengthened: Elias — I do not write to beg, and I will not. A man's family should not need paper to prove it exists. But if you ever ask after me, ask as a brother and not as a jury, and I will answer with both hands open—
He never sent them. Elias sat with that a long time, the letter slack in his fingers, while the light went down the wall. He thought of Sam at fourteen, following him to the creek with a pole too long for him. He thought of his father's cold, principled silence. He thought of Draper's letters arriving in Kansas, smooth as oil — the widow, a squatter, cheating the family of its own — and how easy he had found them to believe, because the hard version asked something of him, and the easy one asked nothing at all.
"Why did he keep them, if he never sent them?" he asked at last.
Kaya stood at the stove with her back to him, giving him the mercy of not being watched. "He said a letter that has to beg to be believed has lost before it is read," she said. "He kept them against the day his family asked about him, instead of deciding about him."
"I decided," Elias said. The words came out of him like a stone out of a shoe. "God forgive me. I decided, and I never asked."
Nashona, in her corner by the fire, said nothing at all, and her nothing had the quality of a held door.
He asked leave to take the box to the hotel for the night — to read the rest slowly, as a brother should. Kaya considered him the way she considered weather, and nodded once. "Bring it back to his daughter when you are done."
That night, in his hotel room, with the letters read and re-read and laid in order like accounts, Elias Little took out his storekeeper's fair hand and wrote, on the hotel's paper, in ink that did not blot once:
San Tomas, Arizona Territory, December 24, 1883. I, Elias Little of Kansas, elder brother of Samuel Little, deceased, do hereby withdraw any and all claim, right, or interest in the homestead and lands of my late brother, and I affirm before any court that asks me that the said homestead belongs in justice and in law to his widow, Kaya Little, and to his daughter, Lucy Little, and to no other person living. — Elias Little.
He signed it, and blotted it, and sat a long while with his brother's stopped watch in his palm. Then, almost without deciding to, he wound it. It ticked — hesitant, then steady — and Elias Little listened to his brother's watch keeping time in the quiet room, and wept without shame, and did not stop it.
Chapter 19 — The Scout Roster
Levi rode into San Tomas in the early morning with the courthouse not yet warm, his journal in his saddlebag and a question in him that had hardened, over two days, into something with an edge on it. The journal proved Sam's hand. Crane's memory proved Sam's habits. What neither proved, to a judge's satisfaction, was where Sam's body had been on the twelfth of June — and for that there was exactly one paper in the world: the scout roster of the Fort Bayard detachment, which recorded, name by name and day by day, who had ridden out and who had come back.