Three years is long enough for a fence line to stop looking new, for a roof to learn where it leaks, and for a marriage made twice to settle into the deep, unremarkable happiness that no ballad bothers with and no life should be without. Jonas built his ranch on the recovered Hale land beside the valley, close enough to the valley mouth that Willa could ride to her father's fire in an hour, far enough that the house stood in its own weather. He raised the walls with Tomaso's help and Renner's careful carpentry, the clerk proving to have a surveyor's eye and a poet's patience with a plumb line. The two willow trees by the old house shaded their yard before the new cottonwoods Jonas planted had fairly taken hold, as if the place itself approved of being lived in again.
Willa planted orchards on the south slope where the frost drained away, rows of young apple and peach trees in ground that old men from the settlements shook their heads over and that she irrigated from the spring branch with a patience that amounted to prophecy. She grafted stock her mother's people had carried through three removals onto hardy settler root, and when the first blossoms came, white and improbable against the red hills, riders stopped on the road just to look. Nahlin rode out, walked the rows in silence, tasted nothing, touched one blossom with a fingertip as gently as a man touches a sleeping child's face, and pronounced the single word by which his daughter knew she had been praised beyond argument. Good, he said, and rode home, and told the council the orchards would feed the valley when everyone at the fire was dust.
The two worlds learned each other's seasons the way neighbors do, by borrowing and returning. The valley's calendar said when the water would rise and when the cranes would pass; the ranch's calendar said when to brand, when to cut hay, when the territorial fair made prices worth the drive to Cinnabar. They kept both. Willa's cousins learned to mend harness in Jonas's barn and taught his hired boys to read sign in the arroyos. Jonas learned enough of Willa's mother's tongue to follow a story at the fire and lose only the jokes, which Willa translated afterward, deadpan, in bed, so that his laughter arrived a day late and entirely hers. Saba instructed them both in which roots cured and which merely punished the overconfident, and examined Jonas's hands each spring for the arthritis she insisted was coming, and each spring declared it postponed out of respect for his character.
Renner settled in Cinnabar with a small clerk's office and a large garden, and kept the valley's trust accounts in a hand so fair that Nahlin, who trusted paper the way cats trust water, accepted his ledgers without a countersign. Tomaso kept the gate and the guest book, married a schoolteacher from the settlements in the second year, and grew, almost without noticing it, into a man strangers described as steady. Twice, parties of speculators arrived with maps and offers, and twice Tomaso wrote their names in the guest book, offered them water, and sent them back down the road poorer by nothing but their hopes, while the proclamation did its quiet work in a drawer in the capital.
The word about Harrow came in the third autumn, in a plain envelope from Marshal Park, who wrote the way he spoke, without decoration. Ezekiel Harrow would die in prison. The territorial physician had found the sickness in his chest that no appeal reaches, and his lawyers, having billed their last billable hour, had withdrawn from the field like an army that smells rain. He had asked, the marshal wrote, whether the Hale land was truly lost to him, and had been told that it was, and had received the news in silence. Jonas read the letter twice at the kitchen table and then put it in the stove, not in anger and not in triumph, but the way a man disposes of a thing that has finished being his business. Willa watched the paper catch. Neither of them spoke the dead man's name that evening, and the omission was not a wound. It was a door, closed at last, in a house with many better rooms.
That same week, Saba confirmed what Willa had already told Jonas in the orchard at dusk, standing between the young trees with her hands folded over a belly still flat as a board. A child was on the way, due when the blossoms came again. Jonas, who had faced rifles, courts, and one wedding ultimatum with composure, sat down abruptly on an irrigation ditch bank and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, while Willa informed him, with great dignity, that the ditch was wet and his trousers were taking the news personally. They walked home through the rows as the light failed, naming no names yet, arguing gently about whether the child would prefer the valley or the ranch, and agreeing at last that the child, being theirs, would insist on both.
Chapter 30
: The Third Option