"It'll be remembered," she said. "I'll see to it. I'm good at insisting on how stories get told. It's my one vanity."
Chapter 27
Life, Not Death
Chester Finch took the stand in the fifth week, and the courtroom, which had grown accustomed to sensation the way a body grows accustomed to weather, sat up straight anyway β because everyone in Prescott knew what it means when a man's own bookkeeper walks in carrying red-cloth ledgers and does not once look at the defense table.
He testified for three days. He had the bookkeeper's gift, which under oath became a terrible weapon: he remembered everything, in order, with figures. The straw purchases, name by name, mailbox by mailbox, back to 1879. The payments to Judge Webb, disguised as legal retainers, each one followed within a fortnight by a ruling in a Sloan interest β Finch had noted the rulings too, in the margin, in shorthand, a clerk's private habit of cross-referencing that now read like an indictment written in advance by the crime itself. The canyon payroll. The freight for the drilling rig, itemized as agricultural equipment. And on the second day, in answer to a question so quiet the reporter had to lean in, he arrived at the ravine.
"In the autumn of 1881," Finch said, "Mr. Sloan instructed me to set aside five hundred dollars in cash, in an envelope, from the contingency account. The contingency account had no vouchers. That was its purpose. Two days after the money was drawn, I was instructed to pay it to two men who came to the bank after hours β I did not know their names then. I know them now from the canyon payroll. One of them is dead on Mrs. Ellison's porch. The other is in custody in Tucson." He turned, with a clerk's precision, to face the jury. "The day after the payment, Mr. Sloan dictated a memorandum for the contingency file. I took it in shorthand, as I took everything. It said: Ellison matter concluded. The north valley can proceed. That memorandum is in the red ledger, page one hundred and twelve, in my hand, dated October the fourteenth, 1881 β four days after Thomas Ellison's funeral."
Garrett Sloan, at the defense table, did not move. He had not moved much since the photographs of the well. But something had gone out of the room for him β Maren, watching from the second row, could see his lawyers no longer leaning toward him, the small geography of men distancing themselves from a wreck β and she felt no triumph, which surprised her. She felt what you feel at the end of a long, necessary piece of work: a tiredness with clean hands.
The jury was out for two days. They found him guilty of conspiracy. Guilty of fraud upon the land office, on eleven counts. Guilty of stockpiling arms for insurrection. Guilty of arson, and of attempted murder, for the barn and the boy in the rocks. And guilty β the foreman's voice shook on the word, and then steadied β of the murder of Thomas Ellison, by procurement, in the first degree.
Judge Halloran sentenced him in a courtroom so quiet that the scratch of the reporter's pencil sounded like weather. "You have spent a lifetime, Mr. Sloan, converting other men's lives into your property: their land, their water, their courts, their deaths. The territory will now repay you in your own currency. You will spend the remainder of your natural life at hard labor in the territorial prison, and the property you accumulated by these crimes will be disgorged to the people it was taken from, under the direction of this court. You priced a widow at fifty thousand dollars in her own yard. The court declines to set a price on you. You are not worth one. It is a rarer punishment than hanging, sir, and for a man of your habits, I suspect a crueler one: you will simply be worth nothing, for a very long time."
They took him out through a side door, past Beckett, who had risen β with effort, on two canes of pure will β to watch him pass. The old man said nothing at all. He told Maren later that there was nothing left that needed saying; that twenty years of carrying a man ends not with a word but with setting the weight down, and hearing your own spine sing.
Outside, on the courthouse steps, in the bright October light, Micah took off his hat and stood with it in his hands like a man at a graveside that has finally been finished, and Maren stood beside him and thought of Rose Delany's schoolhouse and Thomas's ravine and eleven vanished families, and said: "It's in the record now. All of it. Their names said whole, by men he didn't own."
"Yes," Micah said. "It's in the record." And he put his hat back on, and looked at her, and smiled β the first unguarded smile she had ever seen on him, worth every mile of the road to it.
Chapter 28
Water for Everyone