They had cut the tree that morning, Nashona and Lucy — a small cedar, stood in a bucket of sand by the stove, dressed with paper stars Lucy had cut at school and a string of popcorn she had eaten a third of in the stringing. Before the meal Nashona rose from her chair with the slowness of deep water, and stood before the little tree, and blessed it in her own tongue — words Levi did not know and did not need to. Then, for Lucy, she said it again in English, plain: "Let this house stand in the cold. Let the fire know its people. Let the ones who are gone be gone in peace, and the ones who are here be here in full."
"Amen," said Lucy, who had been raised between two religions and had made one good one out of them.
Supper was roast beef and preserves and bread Kaya had made that morning, and Lucy sang her pageant song at the table because she could not be stopped, high and clear and entirely unconcerned with the day after tomorrow. And when the plates were cleared Levi unwrapped the feed cloth on his knee.
He had begun it weeks ago, out of a pine knot, in the evenings, saying nothing. The mane he had cut in fine, close strokes with the tip of his penknife; the legs stood the way a horse's legs stand, which is harder to carve than it looks; and that afternoon he had rubbed the whole of it with beeswax until it shone like a held breath. He set it in Lucy's two hands.
Lucy looked at it a long time, with the seriousness of a hanging judge. "His legs are right," she announced. "A horse stands just so. Grandmother, look — his legs are right."
"The legs are right," Nashona agreed, from her chair, "and the ears. The carver has seen horses." Which from Nashona was a laurel wreath, and Levi felt it land.
"I will name him Star," Lucy said, "for the star that the wise men followed, because he has come at Christmas." She carried the horse to the mantel and set it between the two papers — the notice and the stay, lying there together — as if a small wooden horse were exactly the garrison that position required, and Levi, watching, thought she might be right.
She set the lantern herself, refilled and trimmed, in the window. "So Papa can find the house," she said, matter-of-fact as a lighthouse keeper, and went to bed with Star under her arm, and the house settled into the particular quiet that only exists in a home where a child has just fallen asleep believing the world is mended.
On the porch, afterward, the cold was the clean, star-pricked kind, and the ice on the creek ticked now and then like a clock thinking. Kaya stood at the rail with a blanket over her shoulders and a cup gone cold in her hands.
"Tomorrow," she said, "Anselmo first. Then Mr. Crane. Then you and your journal. Then me." She recited it like a list of chores, which was how she held fear: by the handle, in order. "Draper's lawyer will be smooth. Judge Tully is an old man who does not like a fuss. I have been rehearsing my words, Levi. They sound very fine in the kitchen. I do not know how they will sound in his room."
"They'll sound like the truth, which travels well enough in any room." He turned his own cup in his hands. "Kaya — about the bond. If it goes wrong tomorrow, I don't want you carrying that into the—"
"If it goes wrong," she said, "it goes wrong with both of us standing up. You said that with your ranch before you said it with your mouth, and I have decided to let a man's actions do his talking, since his mouth is so slow." A pause, in which the creek ticked twice. "You put your ranch under my roof-tree, Levi Hartman. No one has stood between me and the weather since Sam died. I had forgot it was a thing a person could do."
He nearly said it then — the whole of it, the thing itself, standing there in the Christmas cold with it rising in him like water in a well. He got as far as her name. "Kaya—" And she, gently, the way you stop a horse at a gate you are not going through tonight, straightened the collar of his coat against the cold with both hands, and let her hands rest one moment on his chest, and took them away.
"Tomorrow first," she said. "A house is saved before it is — anything else. Go home across your creek, Levi. Sleep. I will see you in the judge's room."
He rode home the long way, by the lane, so that for most of the ride he could see the lantern in her window, small and gold and entirely steady. It burned for Sam Little — for a dead man, finding his way home through the snow. Levi Hartman wished it a long burning, and meant it, and turned his horse at last toward his own dark house, with the whole of the next day waiting on the other side of the night like a held breath.
Chapter 21 — Boxing Day Court
The courtroom at San Tomas had never held so many people before noon.
They came in their Christmas clothes with the snow still on their boots — ranchers from up and down the valley, wives in their good shawls, teamsters, two miners from the diggings above the creek, and a row of townswomen behind Mrs. Park, who had organized them the way she organized a school pageant, with a list and no argument. The stove at the back roared against the cold. The windows ran with melt. Every bench was full by ten o'clock, and Sheriff Beckett had set two deputies at the door and was turning men away into the hall with a patience that wore thinner each time he had to say it.