Chapter 2
: Ashes
In the evenings, when the work was done and the light went copper over the western hills, Josiah often found himself standing by the ruin without having decided to go there. The house had burned in October of 1872, five years past, and he had never rebuilt it. He lived in the lean-to against the barn, slept on a cot under a canvas that snapped in the wind, cooked on a stove set on flat stones, and told anyone who asked that a man alone did not need more. That was true enough to say aloud. It was not the whole reason.
The walls that remained stood to the height of a man's waist in places, adobe melted and hardened again by the fire into something like poor brick. Charred vigas lay where they had fallen, gray now, working slowly back into the earth. Weeds grew in the room that had been their kitchen. In the room where Miriam had kept her loom, a pack rat had built a nest of sticks and bright scraps, and Josiah, who shot pack rats in the barn without a thought, had never disturbed this one.
Miriam Merritt had been dead five years, and the grave was on the rise behind the house, under a mesquite that gave it shade in the afternoon. He had cut her name into a cedar board himself because stone had to be freighted and money had been short that winter, and every spring he sanded the board and cut the letters deeper where the weather had softened them. MIRIAM MERRITT. Below it, the dates. He had not trusted himself to add more. She had laughed easily and kept accounts in a fair hand, and after her death the ranch seemed to lose not a person only but its way of opening to the world.
The official story was simple, and it was told the same way wherever Josiah heard it. Apache raiders had come in the night while he was out with cattle on the far pasture. They had fired the house. Miriam, alone, had not got out. It was a bad year, people said, and such things happened on the edge of settlement, and there was even a kind of relief in a story that had a shape a man could hate cleanly. Josiah had repeated it himself in the first months, because grief makes a man grip any rail that is offered.
Only one detail had never fit, and it had worked in him for five years like a splinter under a nail.
He had come home at first light to smoke still rising and the yard silent in the way a place is silent after violence. He remembered the smell, which he still could not abide in a campfire left to smolder. And he remembered the door.
The front door had fallen outward into the yard, hinges torn, and across its outer face, low, were the blackened ends of a stout cottonwood bar set into the iron brackets on the outside of the frame. The bar had been in place the night of the fire. He had lifted it himself, burned through at the middle, its ends still seated. The door had been barred from outside.
A woman alone inside a house, with raiders about her, bars her door from within if she bars it at all. She does not go out into the dark among them, set the bar against her own escape, and go back inside to die by fire. Josiah had turned that over in the small hours more nights than he could count. A raider might bar a door to keep help from reaching her. But raiders who fired a house in the night did their work and rode; the terror was the point of it. To bar the door was the act of a man who wanted it certain that no one came out, and who had time, and who knew the brackets were there.
He had spoken of it once, that first winter, to a deputy who had ridden out to look at the ruin. The deputy had listened kindly and said fire does strange things to timber, that a falling beam might look like a bar to a husband in his state. After that Josiah had kept the detail to himself, the way a man keeps a bad tooth from the tongue and cannot keep from it.
The cedar trunk stood in the lean-to at the foot of his cot. It had sat in the smokehouse the night of the fire, which was why it survived: Miriam's good dress, her mother's shawl, letters tied with twine. Josiah had never opened it. The hasp was bright where his hand had rested on it, in the dark, a hundred times, and fallen away.
That evening he stood by the blackened doorway a long while, while the light failed and the first stars showed. Then he went back across the yard, and did not look at the trunk, and set about his supper with the care of a man who has learned that some doors, too, are barred from outside, and by his own hand.