He sat his horse and looked from one to the other, and did not care for the arithmetic of it, and rode on home to build his fire in the dark.
Chapter 2 — The Paper on the Door
Kaya Little heard the hammering before she understood it, and for one foolish moment, with her hands in the wash water and Lucy humming over her letters at the table, she thought it was Sam.
Five months dead and the foolishness still came on her like that, uninvited, in the middle of ordinary mornings. She dried her hands on her apron and went to the door, and the hammering stopped as she reached it, and she opened it on Sheriff Thomas Beckett standing on her porch with a tack hammer in his hand and his hat coming off his head in the same motion, and a white paper nailed fresh to her door at the height of her eyes.
"Sheriff," she said.
"Mrs. Little." He did not look at the paper. He looked at her boots, at the snow, at anything that was not her face. "I'm sorry for this. I want you to know I'm sorry for it before you read a word."
"What does it say, Thomas?" She had known him since he was a deputy with more hair than sense, and she used his name the way she used any tool, exactly.
He told her, because reading it cold off her own door was a cruelty he would not add to the morning. There was a promissory note, signed by Samuel Little in June, gone unpaid. There was a claim by the San Tomas Land & Water Company that her marriage to Sam had never been a lawful marriage at all, and that the homestead was therefore not a widow's homestead but an abandoned claim, and that the company's paper covered it now. There was a date. The twenty-sixth of December. Out by the twenty-sixth of December — house, spring, barn, and all — or the law would put her out.
"The day after Christmas," Kaya said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"That was chosen," she said. "That was not an accident of the calendar."
"No, ma'am," Beckett said. "I don't believe it was."
He rode away down the lane with his shoulders up around his ears against more than the cold, and Kaya stood in her doorway and read the paper through twice, standing straight, while the wind worried its corner where his nail had gone in crooked. It was all there in the clerk's clean hand: the note, the June date, the word unlawful, the word vacate. Her name was spelled right. Sam's was spelled right. Whoever had written it had taken care with everything except the truth.
The road past the Little place was the stage road, and December twenty-third was a traveling day. The morning stage out of San Tomas slowed at the sight of a sheriff's leavings on a door — travelers read what the road gives them to read — and a freight wagon after it, and two riders from the Parker ranch who reined in openly and read the whole thing with their lips moving. News in a valley does not travel at the speed of horses. It travels at the speed of shame, which is faster. By the time Nashona came out with a shawl over her shoulders, half the town knew the paper by heart, and Kaya had decided that she would take it down when she chose, and not one minute before, because a woman who snatches a paper off her door looks like a woman hiding from it.
"Let them read," Nashona said, in the tone of a woman commenting on weather. "Paper is patient. It will say the same lies this afternoon."
"It says your granddaughter's father owed money he never borrowed," Kaya said. "It says I was never his wife."
"It says," Nashona said, "what a man in an office needed it to say. That is a different kind of paper from the kind the priest keeps." She looked at the notice with an elder's flat contempt. "The priest's book has your name in it too, daughter. In ink. Older ink."
Inside, Lucy had left her letters and was standing in the middle of the room in the way of a child who has heard a door in adults' voices. "Mama," she said. "Why did the sheriff nail our door?"
Kaya took the notice down then, because she chose to, and folded it once, carefully, along its own crease. She crouched so her eyes were level with her daughter's, and she gave Lucy the truth in the size a seven-year-old can carry. "A man in town says Papa owed him money, and that this house is his. It is a lie, but it is a lie written on the law's paper, so we must answer it with better paper. We are not going anywhere. Do you hear me? We are not going anywhere."
"Will they make us?"
"They will try on the day after Christmas," Kaya said. "Trying is not doing."
That night, after Lucy slept, Kaya read the notice a third time by lamplight, all the way down to the June date, and her hands went still on the table. June. On the twelfth of June — the date marching at the head of the company's clean handwriting — Sam Little had not been in San Tomas at all, nor anywhere near a bank or a desk. He had been out on the Fort Bayard road with Levi Hartman, nine days in the saddle, scouting a road crew's safe passage, and he had come home on the seventeenth with his beard full of dust and a colt's promise in his pocket. She knew that the way she knew the shape of her own hands.
Whatever else the paper was, it was a lie told in a hurry, by a man who had not known where Sam Little was in June.