"The tall one. When the fire lit his face, I saw he had no beard, and a scar here โ " she drew a line with one finger from her own left ear toward the jaw, "โ and I would know him in any crowd on earth. He is dead, cowboy. I heard it two winters after, and I was glad, and I am not sorry for being glad. But the man who sent him is not dead. He sits in his house and eats from a plate. Remember that I said the door was barred with a wagon spoke, and that the light came before the flames. Whoever asks me, I will say it the same."
Chapter 18
: Miriam's Trunk
The trunk sat where it had always sat, at the foot of the bed he no longer slept in, under a folded quilt gray with five years of dust. Josiah stood in the doorway of the back room with the lamp in his hand and understood he had been walking around this piece of furniture the way a man walks around a grave in his own yard โ respectfully, daily, and without ever once kneeling down.
Aiyana waited in the kitchen. She had not offered to come in, and he was grateful in a way that hurt. The salted hides lay wrapped on the table like a verdict nobody had yet read aloud.
He set the lamp on the floor and knelt. The trunk was cedar, made by Miriam's father in the year of her birth, the lid fitted so true it had never needed more than the small iron hasp Josiah now lifted. The smell came up at him all at once โ cedar oil, dried lavender, the faint ghost of camphor โ and under it, impossibly, the smell of the life that had been interrupted.
On top lay her wedding dress, folded in tissue gone the color of weak tea. He set it aside without unfolding it. Beneath were letters tied with twine, his own among them, written from army camps in a hand younger than the one he owned now. And beneath all that, squared away at the bottom, the journal.
It was bound in oilcloth, its pages crowded with her small, upright hand. Miriam had recorded the ranch the way other women recorded scripture: rainfall, the well's depth measured by a knotted rope, which cow had calved, Josiah turned the pages slowly, breathing like a man crossing thin ice.
Then, in the last week of the month, the entries changed their weather.
October 19. Col. Voss rode out with a new man, Doyle, who says little and looks at everything twice. The Colonel was all courtesy. He offers four thousand dollars for the well parcel and water rights, which he calls a generous price for dirt. I do not believe him. A man does not offer four thousand for a thing he expects to be worthless.
October 21. Voss again, alone. Less courtesy in him today. He spoke of hard times coming for small ranches, of fires and raids, and how a widow โ he used the word widow, Josiah, though you are alive and were only in town โ how a widow alone might not hold this place. I told him the well was my father's gift and not merchandise, and that we had refused in the spring and refused still. He smiled and said some refusals cost more than others.
Josiah read the last entry twice. It was dated the twenty-third of October, two days before the fire, and it was short.
Doyle came at dusk, not to the door but to the well, and stood looking down into it a long time, like a man memorizing the way. I watched from the window and did not call out, and I am ashamed of my prudence. Tomorrow I will ride to town and ask Micah to send word to the marshal at Prescott that we are being pressed in a way that frightens me. Tonight I will bar the door early, for all the good a bar inside does.
For all the good a bar inside does. The door had been barred from outside, with a wagon spoke, by men carrying lantern oil in cans.
He sat back on his heels with the journal open on his knees, and the grief came โ but differently than it had for five years, the way a river is different once it has found its course. It had somewhere to go now. It had names, dates, a handwriting. Miriam had not died as the territory told it, a careless victim of raiders and chance. She had seen them coming. She had refused them, in writing, in this room, and she had meant to ride for help the morning after the night they killed her.
He closed the journal gently and held it a moment against his chest, where the brand sketches had ridden the day before. He wept briefly at the foot of his own bed, then wiped his face on his sleeve and stood up straighter than he had stood in five years.