"Tell the court about the place."
So she told it the way she would tell it at a table, without ornament, walking the court through her life room by room.
Sam Little had come out of the Army with a scout's pay and a notion of water. He had found the spring first, she said — and her people second — and he had the sense to know the spring was the lesser prize. He built the house with his own hands and Levi Hartman's, two rooms the first winter. He filed on the homestead in his name and hers both, because, Sam said, a man who files alone plans to lose alone. The herd began with eleven cows. It was nineteen now, minus two steers the storm took at Christmas.
"Your daughter?"
"Lucy." "Born in that house in 1876. She has slept in one room all her life. She goes to Mrs. Park's school. She sings." "Her father taught her the words wrong on purpose, so she would laugh."
"Now the note, Mrs. Little. Did your husband owe the San Tomas Land and Water Company money?"
"No."
"Did he sign papers?"
"He signed what a man must. The deed. A paper at the bank when he bought the colt in '81. Sam could write his name like a man striking a match — once, and sure." She folded her hands. "He read everything aloud before he signed it. Everything. Bills of sale, the deed, a receipt for nails. He said a paper you will not read aloud is a paper that is ashamed of itself. Judge — if Samuel Little had signed a note for money, I would have heard it read aloud at my own table, and I would know the words of it the way I know the words of his letters. I never heard this note. Sam never spoke the company's name in my house except once, and that was to say he had refused them."
"Refused them what?"
"The spring. They wanted to buy the spring in the spring of the year he died. He told them water was not his to sell out from under his neighbors."
Across the room, Draper's counsel rose, smooth as oil. "Mrs. Little. This note is dated the twelfth of June. Where was your husband on the twelfth of June?"
"Riding scout," Kaya said. "He left on the ninth with Levi Hartman, for the fort, along the Bayard road. I packed his saddlebags myself. He came home on the seventeenth with his beard full of dust and a stone in his pocket for Lucy, because the stone had a white line through it and he said it looked like the creek in winter." Her eyes did not move from the lawyer's face. "On the twelfth of June my husband was not in San Tomas signing your paper. He was forty miles from here being Samuel Little, which is a thing this company never learned how to copy."
The lawyer tried another door. "You are asking this court to take a widow's memory against a filed and witnessed instrument — "
"I am asking this court to take the whole of it," she said. "The register. The journal. The men who rode with him. My memory is only the frame, sir. The picture is other people's paper — yours is the only paper in this room that stands alone."
He sat down. It was not a defeat a man could point to, but the room felt it, the way a room feels a stove door close.
Judge Tully asked the last questions himself, gently. "Tell the court, Mrs. Little, about July."
So she told about July: the green horse Sam was breaking for a neighbor, the fall in the corral, Sam carried into his own house by the men who saw it, and dead before sundown with his boots still on. Levi Hartman had helped dig the grave on the hill above the spring, because Sam had said he wanted to be where he could hear the water. "I put a stone at his head myself," she said. "It is the size of the place he takes up in the ground, and no bigger than the place he takes up in that house, which is all of it."
"Mrs. Little." The judge's voice was quiet. "The company says you are a trespasser in that house. Answer them."
Kaya stood — she had not been told she could, and no one told her to sit. "A trespasser is a person where she does not belong," she said. "I belong in that house the way the spring belongs in its banks. My daughter puts a lantern in the window at Christmas so her father can find the house. The dead do not need a light, Judge. But a house is the place your people can find. Sam found it. Lucy finds it. My mother is found in it. If I am put out of it by a paper no living man saw signed, then it is not the law that puts me out." She sat down. "It is only a lock, changed by strangers."
No one in the courtroom moved. In the back, Elias Little had taken off his hat, and was holding it against his chest like a man in church.
"The court thanks you, Mrs. Little," Judge Tully said at last. "Call Levi Hartman."
Chapter 23 — Levi's Journal
Levi took the oath with his hat still in his hands, until Beckett took the hat from him and set it on the rail. He stood in the witness chair the way he stood in a corral — planted, unhurried — and the judge led him through it stone by stone.
"You knew Samuel Little."
"Twelve years. We were neighbors across the creek. I helped him raise his house. He helped me bury my wife in '80." "In July I helped dig his grave. I am not a man with a hundred friends, Your Honor. He was the one."