He stayed where he was until the first stars. The ranch around him was not healed. It was something better and more frightening than healed. It was awake.
Chapter 8
The Same Weave
The bracelet had been at his feet since the first day, and for three days Amos had contrived not to think about it.
It lay where Nascha had placed it when the women first drank at his well — on the flat stone by the trough, neither gift nor payment, but a token a man would have to choose, eventually, to pick up or step around forever. He had stepped around it while he opened his barn and his house. On the fourth day, at midday, when the heat lay white and still over Dry Creek, Nascha picked it up herself and brought it to him in the barn door.
“Look at it properly now,” she said. It was the nearest she had come to giving him an order.
He took it. The weave was close work, horsehair and dyed yucca fiber braided tight as a secret: turquoise strands and black strands running together like water and shadow, and at the center, worked in with a precision that made his thick fingers feel clumsy just holding it, a single red diamond.
His mouth went dry. He had seen this weave before.
Four years gone, Ruth had come home late from Fortuna one evening with her dress dusty and her eyes lit in a way that had half frightened him. On her wrist sat a bracelet she had not owned that morning. Horsehair and yucca fiber. Turquoise and black. A red diamond at its heart. When he asked where it came from she had only said, Some friends I made in the spring, and refused — playfully, then firmly — to say more. She had worn it every day until the fever took her strength for small things. Afterward he had put it away in a place he had since refused to go: her desk.
He had entered the house now. He had not yet entered that.
“This is the same,” he said. It was not a question.
“It is the same weave,” Nascha said. “My mother made both. She made one for herself, and one for the woman of this house.”
They sat on the bench in the cottonwood’s shade, in sight of the graves, though Amos did not look at the graves. And Nascha told it plainly, in the order it had happened, the way you lay out tools before work.
Four winters ago — the winter of 1879, when the washes ran sudden and mean — Ruth had been riding home alone when her horse shied at Redbank Wash and threw her hard against the rocks. Amos remembered her coming home near dark, pale, her arm bound in a stranger’s cloth, saying she had fallen and travelers had helped her. He had accepted the little she offered, because she had asked him to ask for no more. He remembered being privately angry at travelers he never saw.
“She could not walk,” Nascha said. “The bone was not broken, but the leg was bad, and the cold was coming. My mother and two others were traveling to kin. They found her. They made a fire. They splinted the leg. They stayed the night in that wash with a woman they did not know, and shared their food, and in the morning they got her onto her horse and walked beside her five miles before they turned back.”
Amos closed his eyes. Five miles. He had never known there had been five miles of it.
“The following summer,” Nascha said, “when soldiers and company men began troubling our families, my mother brought people here. Your wife gave them water at that well. She gave them food. She hid them two nights in this barn, when men rode the creek road looking. And before they left, she told them — my mother carried these words the rest of her life — if trouble ever comes, come to this ranch, and you will be received.”
The wind moved in the cottonwood. Somewhere a woman laughed once, softly, in the yard, and the sound proved the world had not stopped at grief.
“My mother is dead two years now,” Nascha said. “She died believing that promise was a living thing in this place. When the company burned our homes at the wash, I did not bring these women here on a hope, Amos Delaney. I brought them on her word, and on your wife’s.”
Amos turned the bracelet over in his hands. The red diamond caught the light.
“Why put it at my feet?” he asked at last. “Why not just tell me?”
“Because a man should remember before he is told,” Nascha said. “And because it was hers to leave, and yours to pick up.”
He held it a long time. Then, awkward as a boy, he slipped it over his own broad wrist, where it sat tight and strange and right, and he went on sitting under the tree beside his wife’s promise, wearing it.
Chapter 9
The Locked Drawer