He folded the copy into the journal at the page of the colt, and put the journal in the pocket of his good coat, where it would ride with him to the mission in the morning. Then he blew out the lamp. The last light left in the valley was hers.
Chapter 9 — Christmas Morning
The mission bell rang over a world washed white and silent, and San Tomas came to Christmas morning service the way it came to everything that mattered — in its best clothes, by wagon and saddle, shaking the snow off its boots on the steps and carrying its opinions in with it like hymnals.
Sheriff Beckett stood just inside the door with his hat in his hands, wishing people well with the air of a man who would rather have been anywhere else. It had been his hand that carried the notice out to the Little place two days before, and his hand that had steadied the paper while the nail went in, and the town knew it, and he knew the town knew it. He greeted the widow's party when it came up the steps — Kaya in a dark dress with her mother's shawl over it, Lucy between them in a clean white pinafore — with a correctness so complete it was almost an apology, and held the door wide himself.
Cornelius Draper arrived in a black coat brushed to a shine, with a word for every man and a compliment for every wife, as genial as a bank holiday. He stopped on the steps to wish Kaya Little a merry Christmas, in a voice pitched to carry, and she answered him — "And to you, Mr. Draper" — as level as a plumb line, and went in past him with her daughter's hand in hers and her chin at the height God had given it. An old woman behind Levi in the crowd said afterward that it was like watching weather refuse to move for a fence.
They took the third pew from the front, where Sam had always sat. There was a moment — nobody in the church would have admitted to seeing it — when the congregation arranged itself around that fact: heads turned, a young usher half rose and sat again, and two ladies of the town were seen to make the small, significant decision to look at their hymnals. Then Mrs. Eugenia Park came down the aisle with the schoolchildren marshaled behind her like ducklings, wished Kaya a loud merry Christmas by name, and seated herself at the end of the Littles' pew with her spine like a ramrod, in a position that commanded the whole aisle. The congregation, thus instructed, remembered its manners.
Levi Hartman came in last, with the snow still on his shoulders, and sat in his own pew across the aisle. That too was noticed, and in its way it was the larger news. Hartman had not kept Christmas in that church since the winter his wife died. He did not look around him. He looked once, briefly, at the small girl between her mother and her grandmother, and then at his hands, and then he gave his attention to the altar like a man who had come a long way to do exactly that and nothing else.
Father Anselmo said the mass in his old, unhurried Latin, and then he preached in English, standing below the altar rail with his hands folded, on the subject of doors. He spoke of a town that had no room, and a door shut in a traveler's face, and a stable door that somebody — some name the Gospel does not keep — had left unbarred. He spoke of the doors men shut against each other in this world and called it law, and of the doors God opens and calls it mercy, and he said that a door was a testimony: that any man could read, by watching what another man shut and what he held open, the whole of what that man believed. He did not look at the third pew. He did not look at the black coat. He did not have to.
Then the children sang. Lucy stood in the front row with her hands clasped and sang the carol she had sung the night before in a kitchen, and her voice went up into the cold rafters of the mission clear and unafraid, and more than one person in that church was observed to be studying the ceiling with sudden interest.
Nashona sat through the Latin with her hands folded and her eyes on the carved altar, a woman who had prayers of her own and lent them, for her daughter's sake, to any house that would take her family in out of the cold. When the plate came down the pew she put in a coin with the air of a person paying a debt she acknowledged, whatever she thought of the currency.
Afterward the congregation spilled out into a churchyard so bright with new snow that it hurt the eyes, and broke — the way a congregation will — into its true and smaller congregations. In one knot they were saying that paper was paper and a debt was a debt. In another, by the mission wall, they were saying other things, and saying them to Mrs. Park, who received opinions the way she received late homework, with an expression that suggested the valley would be kept after school. And hand to hand, along with the Christmas wishes, went the freshest piece of news the morning had: that the stage from the east had got through the pass despite the storm and would be in before noon — and that word ahead of it said there was a gentleman aboard who had been asking, at every stop since the border, after the widow Little's place and the man who had owned it.
Chapter 10 — The Brother