Chapter 16
They brought her father's chair out into the yard for him, in the end. That was the part June would remember when other memories blurred: Marshal Roland Brandt, legend of the border, seated in Thomas Callahan's chair in Thomas Callahan's yard, with Dane on his knees between two rifles and the ledger on the marshal's knee like a hymnal, explaining himself with the contentment of a man who has waited fifteen years to be properly appreciated.
"You misunderstand the arrangement, both of you," he said. "There is no conspiracy. Conspiracies are for frightened men. There is only administration. The border is a river of money that will flow whether the United States attends to it or not. I attend to it. I take a tithe to keep it orderly โ the smugglers keep to their routes, the violence keeps to its season, the courts convict whom I require convicted. Vane grew greedy, and greedy men make noise, and noise draws auditors. So Vane had to be retired. Youโ" he nodded at Dane, almost warmly, "โwere kind enough to carry the evidence of his excesses out of his own strongbox, where I couldn't reach it, and deliver it into my hands at no cost to the Treasury. I am genuinely obliged to you, boy."
"You set him up," Dane said hoarsely. "You let me steal it. The night watch at the border camp โ thinned. The strongbox key left in the clerk's desk. I thought I was clever."
"You were adequate. There's a difference, and it's the difference between us." Brandt smoothed the ledger's oilcloth with his palm. "And now the last untidy thread. The Sandoval will. A registered copy, a sealed deposition, and an original in a cedar chest โ evidence that the valley over which my entire administration runs belongs, in tedious point of law, to a twenty-one-year-old girl who has never paid a tithe on so much as a fence post. When the original burns and the girl meets with the frontier's well-known dangers, the registry copy becomes a curiosity. Paper without a claimant. I have a land company in Helena that will find the valley's title conveniently clouded, and buy the cloud, cheaply, forever."
"You're going to murder me with witnesses in my own yard," June said. She said it to hear how it sounded. It sounded ordinary. That was the horror of him: it all sounded ordinary, administrative, filed.
"I'm going to accept your tragic decision to flee custody during a federal transport," Brandt said, "in the company of a known smuggler's accomplice, and the territory will grieve and move on. But there's no hurry, child, and I am not a wasteful man. First, the chest." He lifted his chin toward the cabin. "Bring the will. Bring it with your own hands, so there's no question of my men searching a lady's home improperly. The boy stays here, as surety for your good behavior. If you're not back in five minutes, I'll have his opinion on the matter extracted in a way that will make you hurry the next time."
June stood in her burned yard with her throat cut shallow and her barn in embers and her whole life reassembled by strangers into a shape she had never seen, and she looked at Dane on his knees in the dirt. His hands were empty. His face was turned up to hers, and in it she read no plea and no instruction โ only the thing he had said on the porch, with his rifle laid down on the boards: forgive me the week. It was the finest of my life.
She thought of her father, carrying the whole of this alone for twelve years, dying with it locked under her bed, so she could have a quiet life a little longer. She thought of her mother, nineteen years old, in a locked room, signing nothing that mattered because the thing that mattered was in her coat, sewn in with her own hands. She thought: I am the daughter of those two people. Let me act like it.
"Five minutes," she said to Brandt. "I'll need the key. My father kept itโ" she let her voice wobble, just slightly, the frightened girl he required, "โhe kept it sewn in his coat. The grey coat. In the cabin. I'll have to look."
"Four minutes," Brandt said pleasantly. "And Miss Callahan โ" the courthouse eyes rested on her, "โgirls who run, in my experience, run toward someone. There is no one left in this valley to run to. Remember that, and be brisk."
She went into her cabin alone, and closed the door, and stood in the dim, smoke-smelling room with her back against it and her heart kicking like a foal, and looked at the cedar chest under the bed โ the locked heart of her whole childhood โ and at the grey coat on its peg, where no key had ever been sewn, and began, methodically, to be her father's daughter.