In the kitchen Aiyana looked up from the hides. He laid the journal on the table between them, open at the final page, and watched her read what Miriam had written about the man at the well at dusk. "She knew," he said. "She knew, and she wrote it down for whoever would finally open the trunk. I am five years late."
"You are here now," Aiyana said. "Late is not the same as never." Josiah wrapped the journal in oilcloth, apart from the hides, with the care of a man packing ammunition. Miriam had given him the last of her courage in her own hand. What remained was to find a witness who had stood in the firelight too — and Micah Trent had been his friend for eight years, and had not met his eyes in five.
Chapter 19
: Trent's Confession
Trent's store smelled of coffee, harness leather, and the kerosene that sat in cans along the back wall, and Josiah had never entered it in eight years without his friend calling out his name before the bell over the door had finished ringing. This morning Micah Trent looked up from his ledger, saw who it was, and said nothing at all. His face did what a man's face does when a debt he has outrun for years walks in wearing boots.
"Close the sign, Micah," Josiah said quietly. "What I have come for is not buying or selling."
Trent's hand shook as he turned the card in the window. He had been Josiah's friend through Miriam's burial and the winters after, bringing credit when there was no money.
Josiah laid the oilcloth bundle on the counter and opened Miriam's journal at the last pages. He watched Trent read, saw him reach the entry about Doyle at the well, and saw his friend's hand stop moving altogether, resting flat on the page like a thing that had been shot.
"She wrote she would ride in the next morning," Josiah said. "She meant to ask you to send to Prescott. I think you have known that for five years, Micah. I think that is what has been eating the meat off you."
He came around the counter slowly and sat down, all at once, on a crate of dried apples, with his face in his hands, and the store was very quiet except for the flies and the clock.
"Voss holds my note," he said at last, to his hands. "You knew some of it. Not the rest. Eight years ago I borrowed against the store to buy the freight wagon and the team, and the paper passed through two banks and came to rest with him, like everything in this valley comes to rest with him. After the fire, he called the note due in a letter, then rode in himself and burned the letter in my own stove and told me the debt was forgiven in exchange for my memory staying poor. He said a storekeeper who talks about that night is a storekeeper whose family learns what accidents are. My Sarah. The children."
"Tell me the night, then," Josiah said. "Not the years. Just the night. Tell it once, the way it happened, and we will carry the rest together whatever it weighs."
So Trent told it, halting at first, then in a rush like water through a broken gate. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, near closing, Pete Doyle had come in the back way with two horses blown and lathered, needing them watered and grained and kept out of sight of the street, and Trent — who owed Doyle a favor and feared him besides — had done it without asking, almost. Almost, because while he worked he had seen, lashed behind Doyle's saddle on the pack horse, two flat cans of lantern oil, and a third already empty by the smell of it, and Doyle's hands had reeked of oil under the horse sweat. And Doyle, who drank when he was pleased with himself, had laughed and said the Merritt place would be warm that night whether the stove was lit or not, and that Trent should keep his doors shut and his ears likewise if he valued the roof over his store.
"I told myself it was talk," Trent whispered. "Drunk talk. I was still telling myself it when the sky lit up over your arroyo, and Sarah ran out into the yard in her nightdress. By the time I got there with the bucket line the roof was falling. I have bought and sold across that counter five years with your grief coming in the door most weeks. I have weighed out your coffee and your nails and held my tongue with both hands. Doyle died in seventy-four, falling off a horse he had no business riding drunk, and I went to his burying and felt glad, and I have been rotting from the gladness and the silence both."
He lifted his head then. His eyes were red and his voice, when it came, was the steadiest thing about him. "I will testify," he said. "To the marshal, to a judge, to the whole territory standing in the street. The note, the threat, the horses, the oil — all of it, with my name on it. Voss can take the store. Sarah's brother has a farm near Tucson; she will not starve, though she may never forgive me. But I am done being the lock on that door, Josiah. That is what he made me. A lock on a burning door."