Not all at once, but steadily, singly and in little rafts of two and three, surfacing in the pool below the ford and fetching up against the bank stones where half the valley had camped to catch them. It became, in spite of everything, a kind of festival of salvage. Settlers who had not spoken to each other in a year over a boundary fence stood waist-deep in the Ash together, passing oilcloth bundles hand to hand. The schoolteacher, Miss Prudence Halloran, organized drying racks out of fence rails and turned the operation into a lesson for the six children who had attached themselves to the proceedings. The priest read each recovered copy's first page aloud before it was laid to dry, because, he said, a document read once in public could never afterward be un-read, and he intended the valley to be thoroughly read to.
On the second afternoon an old Apsรกalooke trapper who had traded at the ford since before June was born hauled out a copy, shook it dry like a fish, and read the boundary description through twice โ the river, the twin cottonwoods, the cairns, the iron stake of the Spaniards. Then he whistled, low and long, and said to no one in particular, "All these years I watered my horses in the middle of a kingdom, and the queen was charging me a dollar and a fence-mending." He looked up the hill toward the cabin, and touched his hat in its direction, and half the bank laughed.
June walked the burned ground of her own yard on the second morning and tried to add up what she was now.
The barn was gone โ four charred posts and a smell that would live in the soil until snow. The mare had come back on her own the first night, singed along one flank and furious with everyone, and stood in the corral being apologized to by federal troopers who fed her their own rations. The cabin stood. The chest stood open in the middle of the yard like a piece of furniture at an estate sale, its remaining contents โ surveyor's instruments, letters in a hand she now knew for her mother's, her father's army discharge, a child's drawing of a horse she vaguely remembered drawing โ being inventoried, at her request and under her eye, by the sergeant, who treated every item as if it might be a relic or a land mine.
She picked up the letters last. Her mother's handwriting was nothing like she would have imagined: quick, slanted, impatient, full of crossings-out โ a woman writing at speed, against time. My dearest Thomas, the first began, without date, if you are reading this in the circumstance we discussed, then burn nothing, hide nothing, and tell her everything in the order I would have told it. She has my temper. Give her the facts before the feelings, or she will throw the feelings out with the bathwaterโ
June sat down in the dirt of her yard and laughed, with tears running through the soot on her face, because a woman dead twelve years had just reached out of a cedar chest and correctly insulted her, and it was the first ordinary thing that had happened to her in days.
Later, the sergeant brought her the pendant. Both halves now โ hers from the chest, Dane's from around his neck, surrendered with a reluctance he'd tried to hide. The sergeant laid them in her palm and closed her fingers over them with a rough tenderness.
"Evidence, ma'am, for the time being โ the matching proves identity and intent, the lawyers say. You'll have them back by summer. The court was particular that I tell you that. Both halves, back by summer, into your hand." He hesitated. "For what it's worth from a man who wore Brandt's badge eleven years โ I'm sorry it wore as long as it did."
"It wore until it mattered, Sergeant," June said, and found she meant it. "That's the only apology the frontier usually manages."
That evening she climbed the knoll for the first time since the riders came, and stood at her father's grave with her mother's letters in her apron pocket, and told him โ out loud, in the wind, like a fool and his daughter both โ everything. The book. The tunnel. The river full of paper. The marshal in her corral. She told him his fence had held. She told him his arithmetic had been exact to the last copy. She told him she was angry with him for the silence, and would be, probably, in some measure, forever โ and that she understood it now as the most expensive gift anyone had ever given her, eleven years of garden and river bought with one man's whole heart held closed like a fist.
The wind took it all where wind takes things. Below, lanterns were moving on the riverbank, and somebody โ the trappers' woman, she thought โ was singing, low, the way people sing when the work is done and the dead are named and the living are fed.
Chapter 22
The law took the valley the way a river takes a valley in spring: thoroughly, and with debris.