She lay down upon her blankets with her back to the wall, and Jonas upon his, and the lamp burned down between them, and neither of them, for a long time, truly slept.
Chapter 7
: A Stranger in the Valley
By the third morning Jonas understood that a man in the Valle de las Sombras was weighed the way a horse is weighed at market β not by his words, which were cheap in any language, but by what his hands did before breakfast. So he rose before the light, as he had done all his life, and walked the irrigation ditch that carried water from the river's bend down through the corn and squash fields, and by full sun he had found what the valley's farmers perhaps already knew and had politely left for him to discover.
The ditch was sound in its building and failing in its age. Two sections of bank had slumped where the spring floods had worried them, and a tangle of roots and silt at the second gate let half the water spill useless into the gravel while the lower fields went thirsty in the afternoons.
He did not announce a plan. He borrowed a spade from Grandmother Saba's grandson, who surrendered it with the solemnity of a boy lending a rifle, and he set to work.
By noon he was mud to the knee and a small audience had gathered at the bank's edge, pretending not to be one. An old farmer named Hosteen stood longest, arms folded, watching Jonas cut and pack the clay in layers, tamp it with the flat of the spade, and lay cut willow along the repair as his father had taught him.
"Your father dug ditches among us," Hosteen said at last, in careful English. "In the old trouble. Before you were born in the world."
"So the chief tells me," Jonas said, and kept tamping.
"He dug them straight." The old man considered the work with a craftsman's entire lack of mercy. "Yours is straight."
From an Apache farmer of Hosteen's years, Jonas understood, this was an oration. By evening the second gate ran clear and full, and the lower fields drank in the cool of the day.
His marriage, in those first days, was a stranger country than the valley. Siyane kept the lodge with an order so quiet it seemed to arrange itself. She cooked; he brought wood and water without being asked. She spoke to him freely of the camp, its people, its histories, the planting and the signs of weather off Bell Mountain β and through it all the black veil hung between them like a door she had every right to keep shut and he had given his word, without ever speaking it, not to open.
At meals she ate apart, briefly, turning aside, and he learned not to arrange his face around the fact. Trust, he reflected, was not a thing a man could demand at the pace of his curiosity. It kept its own calendar, like water finding a ditch.
It was Tomaso who tested his patience. Nahlin's nephew was twenty-two, handsome, quick to laugh, and helpful in the manner of a man drawing a map of you while he smiles. He brought Jonas a knife to replace the one Harrow's captors had taken. He brought him tobacco. He brought him, each day, questions.
"When you rode in, friend β which way did the scouts bring you? Through the canyon of the river, or over the shoulder of the mountain?"
"Hooded half the way," Jonas said. "I could not draw that road if my soul depended on it."
"But a man remembers something. The sound of water. A cliff of a certain color. When you left your ranch, did you tell anyone where you were bound β a friend, a priest, a woman in the town?" Tomaso poured him coffee with a generous hand. "Your brother β before his trouble β he spoke of this valley to other white men? He showed you his maps, perhaps? A brother shows a brother such things."
"Micah showed me how to lose at cards and win it back lying," Jonas said. "That is the whole of my inheritance."
Tomaso laughed as if it were the finest answer in the world, and Jonas laughed with him, and noted β the way a man notes weather β that the young man's eyes did not laugh at all, but went on measuring.
He mentioned it that night, lightly, while Siyane mended a strap by lamplight.
"Your cousin is fond of questions."
"Tomaso is fond of Tomaso," she said, "and of being thought clever by whoever is listening." Her needle did not pause. "Answer him as you have been answering. With courtesy and nothing in it."
"You sound," Jonas said, "like a woman giving instructions for handling a snake."
"I sound like a woman describing my cousin," she said, and he could hear the smile she did not show him. "Sleep, husband. The ditch runs clear because you did not talk it clear. Remember that there are those in this valley who reverse the method."