Chapter 29
: North Goes the Railroad
Arthur Bellamy broke the news himself, three days later, riding out to the Wren ranch in a clean shirt with his survey cases strapped behind his saddle and an expression that was half apology and half a man relieved to be carrying honest tidings for once. The Continental Pacific had made its decision. The line would go north, through the high pass above Paloma, on ground whose title no clerk had forged and no company had watered with threats. It would cost the railroad a longer grade and a winter's more work, Bellamy said, and the directors in their far-off office had used language about it that he would not repeat at a family table, but a railroad that laid its iron on stolen land would spend fifty years buying back its reputation, and reputations, unlike grades, could not be surveyed around. He shook Caleb's hand on the porch and then, to Tess's open astonishment, asked leave to take tea like a civilized caller, and stayed an hour.
The Voss Consolidated Water and Land Company unraveled in the weeks after with the sad, ordinary speed of such things, which is to say not with an explosion but with clerks carrying boxes out of an office, creditors arriving in buggies and leaving unsatisfied, and a receiver in a Paloma storefront selling off water pipe, fencing wire, office furniture, and great optimistic maps of a valley that had never been Voss's to map. The company's good acres, the few honestly bought, went to pay its honest debts, and its grand paper claims were worth, in the end, the price of the paper. Harlan Voss himself was taken north to the territorial capital in irons, under guard, to stand trial for forgery, bribery, conspiracy, and for an order given in the autumn of 1883 that had made a widow of a barn roof and orphans of its beams. He passed the Wren ranch road in the prison wagon without looking up, Caleb was told.
Ike Sorrell testified, as he had promised, in a courtroom Caleb did not attend because Tess said, sensibly, that the family had given the law everything it needed and owed it no more of their spring. Deputy Odell and the land clerk stood their own trials in the summer and took their sentences without the valley troubling itself much over the details. Bragg, who had made his statement and kept his word in it, found work by autumn driving freight on the northern road, and once, passing through Paloma, left word at the hotel for Caleb that his horses had never once wanted for water on the new route β a message Caleb understood exactly, and valued accordingly, as the nearest thing to thanks and apology that such a man could decently send.
But the thing Caleb would have chosen, if the spring of 1885 could have kept only one of its doings, happened at home, on Coyote Creek, on a Saturday when the cottonwoods were fully leafed. The barn had stood since April as a blackened skeleton, ribs of charred timber over the ash of Samuel Wren's last morning's work. Then, before sunup, the neighbors began to arrive: the Delgado family with a wagon of milled lumber, old Mrs. Hart with her sons and a keg of nails and more opinions about framing than any three men, ranchers from up and down the creek whom Caleb had known all his life and some he had not known cared whether the Wrens stood or fell. And behind them, unannounced and entirely unsurprised at themselves, came Tasin's people, with poles and rawhide and tools, and Tasin himself on a led horse, his shoulder still stiff, come not to watch but to direct, which he did, from a seat in the shade, with the authority of a man who had raised lodges before any barn in the valley was dreamed of.
They raised the new barn in a day, as barns were raised in that country when a valley decided a thing β frame by noon, roof by evening, the great beams going up on ropes with twenty hands on each line and a rhythm to the hauling that was half work-song and half argument. Dulcie and Pet and Rooster watched from the corral with the philosophical calm of horses who had been stolen, recovered, and fed through all of it. Tess kept the tally of lumber on the back of an envelope and bossed men twice her age without raising her voice. When the last beam was pinned, Mrs. Hart's eldest set the ridgepole, and there was a moment of the old ceremony in which someone should have spoken, and the hands on the ropes looked, without any arrangement, toward Caleb. He found he had only one true thing to say. "My father built the first barn mostly alone, because he was stubborn," he said. "This one is better built." And the laughter and the hammering that answered him sounded, for the first time in three weeks, like the valley at peace with itself.
Chapter 30
: What Still Stands