"Your mother hid among rocks to live," Jonas said. "You hid behind a veil. I am beginning to understand the women of this family β " He caught himself, hearing it. "Of your family."
"Tomorrow," Nahlin said, "we will settle whose family it is."
Chapter 10
: The Bible Record
Jonas did not sleep that night, and by his wife's breathing β too even, too patient β he knew Willa did not sleep either. They lay like two sentries posted back to back, guarding a question neither would speak aloud: whether the dawn marriage beneath the cottonwood, which a week ago had been a sentence and had become something else entirely, was in the eyes of God and the Territory a crime.
Cousins. He had known men who married cousins and thought no more of it than of the weather, and preachers who thundered otherwise, and in his own breast the matter would not settle by either authority. She was his father's sister's daughter. He rose before light and walked the river path until the camp stirred, turning his father's locket in his pocket like a witness not yet called.
Nahlin sent for him at mid-morning. Grandmother Saba sat in attendance at the chief's left with the gravity of a judge, and on a blanket before Nahlin lay two objects under a folded cloth, which he uncovered with care.
The first was a Bible, large and water-stained, its leather cover cracked into a map of itself. Walter Hale's Bible β the flyleaf announced it in ink gone brown: Walter Hale, his Book, 1838.
"The wagons that burned in fifty-one did not carry everything," Nahlin said. "Clara kept this on her person, for it was her mother's. Open it, son of Amos. The record is at the front, where white families keep their truth."
The family record page was ruled in Walter's iron hand. Births. Marriages. Deaths. Jonas read: Walter Hale, married Margaret Ellison, 1832. A son born, February 1834 β and here the entry broke the pattern of all the others, for the child was given no name at all, only a line: born and died within the week, the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Beneath it: Clara Margaret Hale, born June 1835.
Then, eight years on, a longer entry, written close:
"Amos, a boy of this county, orphaned of his people, taken into this house this day as our son in law and in love, aged eight years, baptized Amos Hale. Let no man hereafter call him by another name in our hearing. He is Clara's brother from this day, by our choosing, which God honors."
Jonas read it three times. The page did not change.
"The letter," Nahlin said, and laid the second object before him: a folded sheet, much handled, in a hand Jonas knew better than his own β the upright, unhurried script of Amos Hale.
It was addressed to Nahlin, and dated in the spring of 1876, the last year of Amos's life.
"Chief β " it began. "You will recall a young man who dug ditches beside your father in the trouble of fifty-one, and who learned that year where a certain girl had been carried by mercy. I have kept your secret as you have kept mine, and Clara's, these twenty-five years. I write now because I am failing, and because my boys are men. If a Hale son ever comes to your valley, show him his grandfather's Book. I am Walter Hale's son by choosing and by law, and no man's blood is truer for being redder. But I carry no Hale blood, and my sons carry none, and whatever joins our houses hereafter joins them clean. Clara was my sister in everything but the one thing God kept for Himself. Your friend, Amos Hale."
Jonas held the letter of a dead man and felt the week's second foundation settle beneath him. No shared blood. The adoption his father had never spoken of β not from shame, he understood now, but because Amos had considered the matter finished in 1843, by the word of a grieving man who had chosen a son and dared the world to call it less than fatherhood.
And yet relief, when it came, did not come clean. It came with its aftershock.
"Then I am not a Hale at all," Jonas said at last. It surprised him, how much of a blow it was. "Not by birth."
"You are Amos's son," Saba said, speaking for the first time, with a healer's impatience for wounds dressed in the wrong cloth. "That is a whole sentence, boy. Do not go cutting it in half and bleeding on the pieces. The Book your grandfather wrote in calls choosing a thing God honors. Who are you to correct his Bible?"
Jonas laughed then β startled, real laughter, the first since the canyon β and Nahlin permitted himself the thin edge of a smile.
"The marriage is lawful," Nahlin said. "In your law and in ours, which agree on this road for once. What it becomes from this day" β he folded the cloth over the Bible with finality, and looked at Jonas the way a chief looks, and a father β "is no longer my command to give. It is yours and my daughter's to choose, with your eyes open, as free people. Choose carefully, Jonas Hale. The name is yours. Your father spent a life making certain of it."