Outside, the Herreras were already leading their returned cows down the street toward home water, with Mateo running ahead. Mrs. Fenn stood on the courthouse steps in the sun, holding the day book against her breast like a hymnal — Ford had returned it to her keeping until the trial — and when Etta came down the steps she took the old woman's hand in both of hers.
"You kept it all," she said.
"Your mother carved the words over the door," said Mrs. Fenn. "Hands and horses. I kept the book the same way. It was the work that was given me."
That night the Lazy J bunkhouse talked until the lamp burned down, and Jasper Whitaker, from his chair by the fire, raised his cup to the empty room and to a name restored, and drank.
Chapter 25 — The Fire Night
She told it on the gallery of the Lazy J, three nights after the hearing, with the dark coming down over the valley and Dan beside her saying nothing at all — because there were things she had carried eight years in front of every other thing, and it was time, and he had earned the whole of it.
"We were at supper," she said. "Mother had been dead two years. It was Father and me and the hired girl, Rosa, and the two boys from the Fenn place who worked summers. Forty horses in the home pasture. It was October, like this, and the grass was dry as paper, and Father had been saying all week that the Association meant to move before snow — he just thought they'd move with lawyers."
The riders came without a word, she said. That was the thing she had never stopped hearing — not shouting, not whooping like a war party in a story. Quiet men, with torches already lit, riding the fence line in a half-circle, and the fire going up in a wall in the dry grass before anyone in the house had finished standing up. Her father had gone out into the yard in his shirtsleeves with his hands open and empty, the way you walk toward frightened horses, and spoken to them — to Stanton's men, men he knew by name — as though reason were a thing that could still be reached.
"He said, 'These are my horses and my grass, and there are women in the house.' And the man in charge—" she stopped. "It was Salazar, even then. Younger. He said, 'Not after tonight, Tom.' And he put his torch to the barn himself."
The horses screamed, she said — that was the other thing. Forty horses in smoke and firelight, and she and Rosa and the boys cutting them out of the burning corral and turning them — toward the Association's riders, because there was no other way left open, every other gate shut with men and fire. That was the trick of it, and the cruelty: the Marlowes themselves drove their own herd into the thieves' hands to keep it from burning alive, and afterward the record called it a sale.
They were put on the road at daylight — father, daughter, the girl, the boys sent home. No guns, no wagon to speak of, her father's coat over her shoulders because hers had burned. They walked out of Cedar Valley past neighbors' doors that did not open. Past, she said — and here her voice changed, and Dan's hand tightened on the rail — past Jasper Whitaker's gate, where the lamps were lit, and no one came out.
"He never blamed Jasper," she said quickly. "I want that known. He said Jasper had a wife living then, and forty men against one old man would only have made two fires. He blamed himself for not seeing the size of it sooner. He was—" She looked out at the dark pasture where Petra stood, a pale ghost of a horse in the starlight. "He was the gentlest man I ever knew, and the strongest, and it killed him by inches all that winter.
"We got as far as the kin in Wyoming — cousins of my mother's, people named Proctor who took us in without a question, which I will remember to my own grave. He coughed from the smoke until Christmas. He read the Bible through twice, cover to cover, at the kitchen table. He mended harness for half the county for people who didn't know his name, and when they paid him he'd ask after their horses by name after one seeing, the way he always did. In February the cough turned, and there were three days of it, and then he died with his hands folded, quiet, like a man lying down after a long day's work. We dug his grave in frozen ground, Dan. It took the Proctor boys a day and a half with picks. I stood there thinking that a man who had dug post holes for forty miles of fence deserved softer dirt than that.
"Not in the fire. I want the record to have that right too. The fire took everything except him. The winter took him, because the fire had already done the work."
Dan was quiet a long time. "Why didn't you come back with a gun, Etta?" he asked at last. "Eight years. Most would have."
"Because a gun makes one grave," she said, "and I wanted forty witnesses." She turned her hand over under his on the rail, palm to palm. "And because my father walked into that yard with his hands open. I wasn't going to be the one to close them."