Chapter 28 — The Herd Comes Home
The strays began coming in before full light, the way good news travels in a valley — on horseback, from several directions at once, and louder than it needed to be.
Kaya stood on her porch with a cup of coffee going cold in her hand and watched her own cattle come down the creek trail in twos and threes, bawling their complaints to the morning. Ben Herrera drove the first bunch, his boy Mateo riding drag on a horse too big for him and sitting it like a little king. Behind them came two of the Whitaker hands with a string of her yearlings strung out along the fence line, and Diego Fuentes — Diego, who had ridden for Hartman for eleven years and asked favors of no man — came last with her brindle cow and the cow's new calf trotting at heel, both of them fat as butter on somebody's sheltered bottom land.
"Sixteen head, señora," Diego said, touching his hat. "All we could find sign of. The two steers from the storm are not among them. The wolves thank you for those." He said it without cruelty, as a fact of the country, and Kaya nodded it down as a fact too. Sixteen of eighteen, after six days in the snow. In July she would have called it ruin. Standing in her own dooryard in the last week of December, with her fence going back up behind her, she called it what it was: enough.
She counted them in at the corral gate with Sam's tally book in her hand, as she had counted everything on the place since she was twenty — aloud, in Sevani, the numbers coming in her mother's language while the pencil moved in English. Mateo appointed himself keeper of the gate and took the duty with a prosecutor's severity, disputing one yearling's identity until its mother settled the matter by claiming it loudly through the rails. The brindle cow, Kaya noted in the margin, had been Sam's last purchase in the spring, bought against her advice at a price she had called a robbery in the hearing of the seller. Beside the entry she wrote, in the small hand she kept for things that were only for herself: He was right about the cow. It was the closest thing to a letter she had written him all winter.
For the fence was the morning's second miracle, if a thing done by twenty neighbors with hammers can be called one. They had started at first light — the Whitakers, the Herreras, two families from the mission road, old Mr. Teague directing from a wagon seat like a general who had lost his army and found a better one. Wire was stretched, posts were plumbed and tamped, and the cut places from Christmas night were spliced so neatly that by noon you had to know where to look. Luisa Herrera and Mrs. Park ran a table in the yard — coffee, tortillas, a ham that had been somebody's Christmas and was now everybody's — and the work had the air of a raising, which is to say the air of a party that happens to involve labor.
"Your mother is holding court," Mrs. Park said, arriving at Kaya's elbow with a plate she was not invited to refuse. Nashona sat wrapped in her good blanket by the gate, accepting the valley's respects in the form of coffee refills and news, dispensing judgments at the rate of about one an hour. "She told Mr. Teague his fence corner would lean by spring. He has been re-tamping it for twenty minutes out of pure spite, which I believe was the intention."
"My mother has run larger campaigns with less," Kaya said.
She walked the new wire at midday while the men ate, running her hand along the top strand, feeling the tension sing back through the leather of her glove. A fence is a sentence a ranch says to the world. For six months hers had said: a widow lives here, and a sick man, and the paper is coming apart. Today, strand by strand, staple by staple, it said something else, and the whole valley had come out in the cold to help her say it.
The school pageant played that evening in the schoolhouse, five days late and none the worse for it — Mrs. Park had held it back rather than play it to a town waiting on a verdict, which the town now agreed had been exactly right. The room was packed to the stove. There were wise men in bathrobes and an angel with one wing higher than the other. And at the end, because Mrs. Park believed a program should finish with the thing itself and not an imitation of it, Lucy stood on the bench in her good dress with her father's watch chain pinned at her collar like a medal, and sang the carol she had been practicing since before the snow — clear, unhurried, and on pitch in a way that made the room go very quiet — while her mother sat in the second row with her hands folded, not weeping, being looked at by no one, which was the town's gift to her and which she accepted as the finest one it had offered all winter.
Walking home under a sky full of stars, Lucy asleep against Diego's shoulder in the wagon bed — for Diego had appointed himself, without discussion, the Little family's driver for all evening occasions — Nashona said, to the night at large:
"The fence will hold now. The wire is new and the people are old. That is the right arrangement."
Kaya, walking beside the wagon with her daughter's watch glinting once in the starlight, found she had no improvement to offer on her mother's theology, and said so, and Nashona received this surrender as her due.
Chapter 29 — An Invitation Returned