"Paper burns," Delgado said as they led the horses down the far slope in the dark. "Hides rot. Men lie, or get frightened and forget what they said they saw."
"Then we need a witness no one can frighten," Josiah said, and thought, though he did not say it yet, of an old woman who remembered a night of lanterns, and of a cedar trunk he had kept shut for five years like a grave he tended. He rode toward home with the evidence against his ribs, feeling its small weight with every breath, as if the truth were a living thing he had agreed at last to carry.
Chapter 17
: What Old Sowe Remembers
Old Sowe's wickiup stood apart from the others, where the cottonwoods thinned and the ground rose toward stone, and she liked it so, Aiyana said, because she could hear the river think. They rode in at dusk with the canvas-wrapped hides tied behind Josiah's saddle, and the old woman watched them come the whole way without rising, her hands at work on a basket, weaving yucca and devil's claw as if the pattern had been decided before she was born.
She was smaller than Josiah remembered — five years had folded her further into herself — but her eyes, when she lifted them, were not dimmed at all. They went over him slowly, the way a person reads a letter from someone long dead.
"You have come about the fire," she said. It was not a question.
Aiyana spoke to her in Apache, low and unhurried. Delgado stood by the horses, his hat in his hands.
"I was gathering medicine that night," Sowe said. "Roots that must be dug when the moon is thin, because the strength is down in them then. I was on the far side of your arroyo, below the bank, where an old woman can go unseen. Men look through us like water."
"Your house was dark. Your wife had put out the lamp early because the oil was low that month; everyone knew oil was low. I heard her sing once through the wall, a short song, the kind a person sings to work, not to be heard. Then the horses came, not on the road. Through the brush, slow, their hooves wrapped. Men who wrap hooves are men stealing something that is not horses."
Josiah's mouth was dry as the riverbed. He made himself stay still.
"Three men. One stayed with the horses by the cottonwood where your ditch turns. Two went around the house with a lantern that had a shutter, so the light came and went like a hand opening and closing. They were not raiding. A raid is noise and taking. This was quiet, like men doing a chore they had rehearsed. One carried cans. I smelled the oil when the wind turned, stronger than any lamp. Then I saw the long wood."
"Grandmother," Aiyana said softly, and asked something, and Sowe nodded.
"A wagon spoke. A good one, oak, with the iron tire still on its end. The tall man laid it across the door, through the handles your wife's father had fitted, so the door would not open from inside. He wedged it careful, the way a man wedges a gate. Then the shutter opened full, the light went around to the back of the house, and in a little while the flames stood up all at once, in three places, like flowers that had been waiting under the ground."
"I ran," Sowe said, and for the first time her voice altered, not with fear but with an old, unslept shame. "These legs were younger and still they were old. The heat stopped me like a wall, and I heard — " She stopped. Aiyana did not fill the silence. "I heard her. Once. I have carried that sound five years, and I will carry it out of this world, and I tell you now so you carry some of it too, because it belongs with the living who can still do something."
Josiah found his hands had closed into fists against his thighs, and he opened them finger by finger. "Why did you not tell it?" he asked, and heard how rough the question came out, and was sorry.
"To whom?" Sowe said, without anger, which was worse than anger. "The men who came after with ropes and questions had already decided we had done it. Nahlin held my tongue for me that winter. He said: an old Apache woman accusing white men is only a reason for graves. He was not wrong. He was only — " her gaze moved to Aiyana, and softened, "— not finished being wrong. Now my granddaughter stands in your arroyo, and the cattle of the theft wear two brands, and I am too old to carry the sound much farther. So. I have given it to you."
She picked up her basket again. The interview, Josiah understood, was ending the way weather ends, on its own schedule. But as Aiyana rose, the old woman spoke once more, sharp as a needle finding its place.