Chapter 28 — The First Fence of Her Own
By spring the ground had been waiting politely long enough, and on the first Saturday of April the valley came up the lane to the Marlowe place in wagons, on horseback, and afoot, with hammers in their tool rolls and their wives' dinners in the beds of the wagons, to raise Etta Marlowe's barn.
She had the site ready — she had been ready since February, if the truth were told, with the footings dug to her father's old lines and the timbers squared and stacked by her own hands through the last of the winter, working the hours the Lazy J could spare her and some it couldn't. Jasper, from the chair they had carried out and set in the shade of the single cottonwood like a throne, surveyed the stacks and pronounced them true. "Your father seasoned lumber the same way," he told her. "Slow, and right the first time. It's why the chimney's still standing. A Marlowe never built anything twice."
They raised the bents by hand and rope and song, the way barns had been raised in that valley since there was a valley, with Dan calling the heave from the top plate and Old Man Teague — who was too old to lift anything heavier than an opinion — keeping the count and the coffee and the standard of both. By noon four bents stood against the spring sky, and by the middle of the afternoon the frame of the barn stood complete on the old footprint, square as a promise, and the women had the long tables groaning in the shade, and nobody had said the words range war, or Association, or eight years, because the work said all of it better.
Etta set the first fence post herself, because some posts a person sets alone or not at all. It was the corner post of the new corral, dug to the depth her father had taught her when she was ten and furious at the slowness of doing things properly — deep enough to hold, he'd said, is deeper than you want to dig, that's how you know. She dug it. She set the post, plumbed it twice, and tamped the earth home with the heel of her boot and the flat of the spade, and the men who might have offered to do it for her stood off at a respectful distance and found the moment entirely ordinary, which was the truest compliment the valley knew how to pay. She had set a thousand posts in eight years of other people's country, for other people's cattle, under other people's brands. This one she set in her own ground, and her hands knew the difference before her heart caught up.
The colt was watching all of it from the pen by the well, where he had wintered fat and curious on Lazy J hay and Mateo Herrera's devotion. He was a yearling now and leggy with it, red roan darkening toward his sire's color, and up his left hind leg the Marlowe splash ran white as spilled milk, plain as a signature. Mateo had been coming out to the pen three days a week all winter with pockets full of oats and a patience that grown men half a century older than the boy had never managed with a horse in their lives — and this spring day, with the barn frame up and the hammers quiet for dinner, Etta called the boy over and put her rope in his hands.
"Your turn to teach," she said. "I'll watch. He's gentled to your hand, Mateo. Now show him the rope means nothing to fear."
The boy went into the pen the way she had taught him all winter without either of them naming it teaching: slow, sideways, talking the whole time in the low, unhurried murmur her father had used, as if the colt were a person whose opinion mattered in the conversation. The colt blew once through his nose and considered the rope laid over his neck — and stood. Considered the loop drawn patiently up toward his head, the way Etta had shown the boy to let a horse decide into a thing rather than be decided for — and stood again, and then let the halter come over his ears with no more fuss than a sigh, and followed Mateo out of the pen gate at the end of the rope like a young gentleman being shown the grounds.
A sound went through the watching crowd that wasn't quite a cheer, being mostly grandmothers by that hour, but it carried. Luisa Herrera had both hands pressed over her mouth. Ben was looking at his son the way men look at the future when it has the decency to show up early. And Etta stood with her rope-calloused hands quiet at her sides and felt something in her chest unknot that had been knotted since a night of torches eight years before — because this was the whole of it, wasn't it. Not the court. Not the hearing. This: the horses coming home to hands that knew them, and the hands being young ones, taught right, in a yard that was hers.
By sundown the fence line ran straight from her corner post down the lane side, three wires' worth of posts standing in a row like the first line of a letter, and the barn frame stood black against the red west, and the colt stood in his pen wearing his halter with Mateo asleep in the straw beside him, one small hand still resting on the rope.