The Name Her Father Feared: A Girl Alone on the Ash River, a Stranger With Half a Silver Pendant, and the Inheritance That Brought an Empire Down

Chapter 26

June hosted the valley on the first Sunday of July, and informed Dane of it on the Saturday, in the tone of a woman announcing a military campaign.

"Church," she said, "has been held in this valley exactly never. The priest rides a circuit of six settlements and preaches in a tent. I have written to him — he will preach under the cottonwoods at eleven, and after, there will be a dinner on the grass, and everyone within a day's ride is invited, and the Lindqvists are bringing their fiddle, and I am going to need that barn roofed by God's grace or at least tarped, Mr. Mercer, because a hostess cannot receive under a ruin."

The barn was not roofed by Sunday. But it was tarped, and swept, and strung with the lanterns Whitlock's clerk had mysteriously contributed, and by eleven o'clock the valley road was a parade: the Lindqvists with their wagonload of children and herring, the trapper families, Miss Prudence Halloran with a cake iced in sugar like a snowfield, the sergeant on leave in a clean shirt, the priest arriving last and fastest like a man outrunning his own circuit. Forty-one people, by Dane's count at the gate. He counted everything that day, at first, the way a sentry counts; June watched the counting slow, over the hours, and stop.

The priest preached under the cottonwoods from the Psalms — thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies — with a shamelessness about local application that made the congregation murmur like a field in wind. Then there was dinner, and the valley ate June's beef and Prudence's cake and the trappers' trout, and the talk — after the first careful hour — loosened into the ordinary music of people who intend to go on living near each other.

It was Lindqvist who stood, somewhere between the beef and the cake, with his cup raised and his immigrant's English going careful with emotion. "I am eleven years on this land," he announced, "and I learn this spring whose it is, and I learn her name from a paper in a river, like a heathen." "Aurelia," he said, with the syllables of a man handling glass. "We drink to the one who run. And to the one who kept. And to the one who—" he found June down the length of the grass, and his voice gentled, "—to the one who opens the doors." Forty-one cups went up in the lantern light, settlers and trappers and troopers and one astonished priest, and June sat in the middle of her mother's name spoken aloud in company for the first time in twelve years, and drank to it with everyone, and did not disgrace the occasion by weeping until much later, in the kitchen, over the washing-up, where Dane found her and dried the plates.

It was old Lindqvist who did it, in the end, with his fiddle under his chin and his wife's hand on his shoulder: he played the first dance tune the valley had heard since before the war between the states, standing in June's yard with the lanterns coming on. And because nobody quite knew how to begin a thing that big, nobody did — until little Marta Lindqvist, age seven, seized Dane Mercer by his good hand and towed him, protesting and crimson, into the cleared space by the tarped barn, where she instructed him in a dance step of her own invention that consisted largely of being swung.

June watched from the porch with her coffee, and felt twenty-one years of quiet life rearrange themselves around a noise she had never expected to hear in her own yard: her neighbors laughing, and the tallest of the laughter belonging to the man who had ridden out of the smoke in April with a stolen book and a borrowed name for an occupation.

"You don't dance, Miss Callahan?" The sergeant, beside her, with a plate like a platter.

"I never learned," June said. "There was nobody to—" She stopped, and laughed at herself, a small surprised laugh. "Listen to me. There was nobody. Sergeant, there are forty-one people in my yard. It appears my information is out of date."

"Then I'd say the valley owes you lessons," the sergeant said, "and collects its debts regular." He went off to claim Miss Halloran for the next tune with the air of a man storming a modest hill, and June stood on her porch in the lantern light, mistress of a principality, hostess of a multitude, and thought of her mother — nineteen, imprisoned, signing nothing, sewing pages into a coat — and of her father at this same rail with his coffee, keeping the whole of it silent and safe for a day he would never see.

It's seen, Papa, she thought at the knoll, where the dark had gathered first. She's here in it. So am I. You can put the watch down now.