Chapter 30 — The Roan Mare
A year on, the place on the creek had the settled look of a thing that had been decided. The house stood where the old house had stood — smaller, and built by degrees the way honest houses are, with a porch across the front that caught the evening — and the chimney rose from the hearth where Etta had once slept in the open ruin, and the irises her mother had planted ran riot and purple along the kitchen wall under windows that had glass in them. The barn stood square. The fence ran straight. And the lintel over the door, the charred old timber with her mother's letters cut deep across its face — HANDS AND HORSES — hung above her doorway again, where every soul who entered read it whether they meant to or not.
She and Dan had been married in the spring, quietly, at the place, the way the bible of their lives seemed to require — no church fuss, no crowd, though half the valley would have come if invited and the other half forgave them by summer. Mrs. Fenn had stood witness with her hands folded and her day book long since given into the record, and Jasper had sat in his chair in the cottonwood shade, failing a little further and entirely content, and given the bride away in the stead of the man whose saddle stood on the porch rail — and had wept, unashamed, at the part about forsaking all others, because it had seemed to him that the whole valley was being married back to itself. Mateo had held the horses. Petra, with flowers braided into her mane by Luisa Herrera and strong private opinions about the flowers, had behaved like a lady for the entire eleven minutes and then eaten half the bouquet.
They ran the place together the way they had run the roundup together, without either of them much discussing the arrangement. Dan kept a string at the Lazy J still — Jasper would not hear of the segundo leaving while there was breath in him — and rode over the ridge four evenings out of seven, and oftener than that was found at Etta's table with his boots by her door, while the valley, which had strong views on everything, decided by acclamation that the marriage was a practical one and said no more about it, practical being the highest praise it owned. The recovered herd bred on. The colt that Mateo had gentled — a two-year-old now, and the image of his dam's line with the splash running white up his left hind — was started under saddle by the boy himself, under Etta's eye, her father's way: slow, and right the first time.
On the last evening of that first full year, with the hay in and the herd counted and the light going down the color of held breath, Etta sat on her own porch with a cup of coffee cooling in her hands and watched the home pasture do its evening business. Dan had ridden in an hour before and gone to wash at the well, whistling. Jasper's buggy stood by the barn where he'd left it at dinner, the old man napping in the house with a quilt over his knees. The valley hummed its small, restored hum — a dog, a gate, somebody's child calling somewhere down the creek — and out in the pasture Petra stood with the colt in the long grass, heads down, tails switching at the flies in the unhurried rhythm of horses with nowhere they are required to be.
The mare was nine years old and in her prime and had outlasted, by Etta's count, four attempts on her freedom and one on her life, and she wore on her left hip — where the hair had shed in the summer coat and the marks showed plain to anyone who knew how to read a horse — the old Rocking M with the Flying S burned across it, the whole true story of her written in her own hide: stolen, and marked over, and never for one day anything but a Marlowe horse underneath it. She lifted her head at the sound of the well bucket and looked toward the porch, ears pricked, and Etta raised her cup to her like a toast, the way she did most evenings, private as a prayer.
"You can rest now, old girl," she said, too low to carry. "We're home. Both of us."
Petra considered this with the gravity it deserved, then put her head down and went back to her grass, and the colt moved in close against her side as the dark came down, and the last light went off the creek. Dan came up the porch steps smelling of soap and well water and sat down beside his wife with the ease of a man who has stopped having to arrive anywhere, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all, because there was nothing left that required saying before morning. The stranger had ridden into Cedar Valley on a roan mare with a stolen brand and a dead man's name folded in her pocket, and the valley had tried, in its time, to bury both of them. The valley had failed. She was Etta Marlowe Whitaker now, of the Marlowe place on the creek, and her horse was in her pasture, and her father's saddle hung by her door, and the dark that came down over Cedar Valley came down on a home.
The End