Kaya folded the notice into the family Bible, between the Psalms and the page where the births were written, and shut the book on it. Then she banked the fire, and checked the spring house, and hung her coat on its nail, and did the hundred small tasks of a woman who intends to be in her house on the twenty-seventh of December, and the twenty-eighth, and every day after that they could name.
Chapter 3 — What Sam Little Built
The spring rose at the foot of the cottonwoods below the house, in a stone-lined pool Sam had built up course by course the first summer, and it had never once frozen over nor run low in any drought the valley could remember. On the coldest mornings it steamed faintly, like something alive breathing in its sleep, and the cattle came down to it in their order — the old lead cow first, the young ones pushing and blowing — and drank water that came up out of the deep ground sweet and iron-cold at once. Kaya had known, even in the first years, even before any company put up a gilt sign in San Tomas, that this water was the true wealth of the Little place. Sam had known it too. "Land's just dirt that stays put," he used to say. "Water's the part that's going somewhere. Mind the water and the rest minds itself."
The house he had built the same way, with his own hands and a patience that looked like slowness until you saw the work last. Stone foundation dug below the frost. Logs squared true. A door he had hung and rehung three times because it swung, he said, like it was apologizing. The roof had gone on the autumn Lucy was born, and Sam had stood below with the baby in the crook of one arm, watching the last shakes go down, saying, "There, little girl. Weather's outside now. It can knock all it wants."
Eight years the weather had knocked, and the house had kept it out, and now a paper on the door said the house was not hers.
Kaya walked the place that morning the way she walked it every morning, notice or no notice, because work does not consult a woman's troubles before it presents itself. Forty-one head of cattle wintering on the meadow hay Sam had cut and stacked in July, a week before the colt threw him — she thought of it plainly, the way you think of a scar. The milk cow. The team. Sam's old mare, too stiff now for anything but dignity. In the barn, Lucy's pony, a hammer-headed little mustang Sam had gentled for her fourth birthday, who followed the child like a dog and would let no grown person but Kaya catch him in the corral.
Nashona was grinding corn at the metate by the stove, in no hurry the apocalypse could improve. "In the old winters," she said, because Lucy was shelling beans into a bowl and listening the way children listen, with their whole faces, "when the snow came down so the world had only one color, the people put a light in the high place of the camp. Not for the lost. For the ones coming home, so they would know the home was still being kept." She nodded at the beans. "A home is a thing you keep, little one. It is not a thing you are given."
Kaya, counting feed sacks in the barn doorway, heard it and stored it away with the other things her mother said that turned out to be instructions.
At noon she did the other counting, the kind with no comfort in it. In the coffee tin on the high shelf: coins, and a few folded bills, and Sam's army discharge folded smaller than all of it. It was winter money. It was seed money and shoeing money and salt money. It was not lawyer money — a lawyer at the county seat cost more to say good morning than the tin held altogether, and the county seat was two days' ride in good weather. She counted her other wealth the way her mother had taught her to count anything: honestly.
She could sell the herd. But the only buyer buying in the valley this winter was the Land & Water Company, and she understood very well that a herd sold to Draper would be counted by Draper's counters and paid in Draper's arithmetic, and she would end with neither herd nor house.
She could go to her mother's people. The Sevani camps in the high country would take them in before the question was finished — Nashona's brother had sent word twice since July. But the moment she walked off this land, the company's paper became true by her own feet, and Sam's spring would water a railroad's engines, and Lucy would grow up a guest in the country her father had built her a house in. Kaya set that thought down the way you set down a coal that has burned your glove. No.
She could beg the town. She turned that one over too, because pride was a luxury and she had a daughter. But begging bought pity, and pity in San Tomas spent like Confederate money — nowhere. What she needed was not pity. What she needed was the truth, written down somewhere the law was obliged to read.
"Then we find where the truth is written," she said aloud, to the empty barn, in her husband's voice in her head as much as her own. "And we put it in front of them."
At dusk Lucy did the thing she had done every dusk since July, with a ceremony no one had taught her. She trimmed the lamp — Kaya let her, watching the small careful hands — and she set the lantern in the front window, on the wide sill Sam had planed flat for a cat that had died before she was born, and she lit it against the early dark.
"So Papa can find the house," Lucy said, "if he's out late."