He mounted and rode east with Killion behind him, unhurried as they had come, and Josiah stood on the porch after the dust settled, looking at his own door and at the stout bar beside it, which he had not touched in five years and could not now stop seeing.
Chapter 7
: A Cold Shoulder at the Store
The ride into Cienega Wells took Josiah past country that had forgotten the color green. Mesquite stood gray in the fields, and the riverbed showed its stones like knuckles. He rode with his list folded in his shirt pocket โ flour, salt, coffee, lamp oil, a sack of beans โ and with the small, certain hope a man carries into a friend's store, that the tally book would open as it had opened for eight years, through good seasons and bad, and close again on a handshake and a promise of the fall.
The bell over Micah Trent's door rang bright as ever. The store smelled of leather and kerosene and dried apples, a good smell, unchanged. What had changed was behind the counter. Micah looked up from his ledger and the welcome that had lived in his face for eight years went out of it, not into anger, but into something worse, a careful blankness, the look of a man reading a notice posted on his own wall.
"Josiah," he said.
"Micah." Josiah laid his list on the counter and smoothed it flat, giving them both the business to look at. "Usual, if you have it. The well pump wants oil worst of all. I can settle after I sell the two steers, same as always."
Micah's hand rested on the ledger and did not open it. His fingers were ink-stained and they trembled slightly, and he hid the trembling by pressing them flat. "I cannot carry it," he said to the list. "Not this time. Cash, Josiah. I am sorry to say it, but cash is what I must ask."
The store was empty except for the two of them and the heat lying thick under the tin roof. Josiah waited, because Micah had never in eight years finished a hard sentence in one breath. Sure enough the man tried again, and his eyes came up as far as Josiah's shoulder and no farther. "It is not โ" he began. "You must understand, there are notes held over me that โ" He stopped. Something crossed his face, quick and frightened, as if he had heard his own voice from another room.
"I understand a man has debts," Josiah said quietly. "I have them myself. What I do not understand is why my friend will not look at me while he tells me of them."
Micah looked then, all at once, and the look was worse than the avoidance. There was love in it, and shame, and a warning that had no words attached to it. He leaned a fraction across the counter. "There are things being said that โ" His jaw worked. He glanced at the door, at the bright square of street beyond it, where a horse stood switching flies and no one at all was passing, and the glance itself seemed to frighten him into silence. He straightened. He took up a cloth and began to polish the counter where no dirt was.
Josiah folded his list once, twice, and put it back in his pocket. From his purse he counted out what coin he had, enough for the lamp oil and the salt and nothing more, and laid it down coin by coin without hurry, so that neither of them would have to fill the quiet with talk. Micah swept the money into the drawer without counting it, which told Josiah more than the refusal had. A man who does not count your money is a man who cannot bear to be seen doing business with you at all.
"Clara Rawlins is down with fever," Micah said suddenly, to the drawer, to the wall, to anything. "Ben was in yesterday. He looked like a ghost wearing a hat." It was offered sideways, the way a man offers what kindness he still owns, in a currency that cannot be traced to him.
"I heard. I will ride out that way."
"Take care on the road," Micah said, and now the double meaning stood between them fully dressed, and both men pretended not to see it. "There is talk. About the herd. About โ other things. Men who were steady in June are not steady now." He opened his mouth a third time, and Josiah saw the sentence form in him entire, saw it rise, and saw fear close over it like water over a stone. Micah turned away to the shelves and began moving jars that did not need moving. "Cash for the oil," he said to the jars. "Salt is in the bin. You know where."