"End to end, then," she said. "Tomorrow at first light."
Chapter 6
Under the Oak
They rode the ranch end to end for three days, and the ground, as Stanton promised, talked plenty. It said that riders had crossed the north pasture not once but many times, in twos and threes, always by the driest ground where tracks aged fast and sign went faint. It said someone had watered horses at her far trough in the night at least twice that spring. It said, in a scattering of cigarette ends and one dropped cartridge near the Cerros trail, that the men who passed through her land were not drifters or rustlers but employees, regular as mail carriers, going somewhere on a schedule.
On the third evening, with the light going gold, Tomás came up from the old live oak by the springhouse at a pace that for him amounted to a run, carrying his spade and an expression Maren had never seen on him in nine years.
"Señora. Señor Stanton. You must come. Now, please."
The old oak stood where the ranch house's first version had stood, before Thomas rebuilt closer to the well; its roots had heaved the earth of the old yard into slow green waves. Tomás had been digging postholes for a shade fence for the milk cow when his spade struck iron — not a horseshoe, not a plow point. A box. He had dug around it with his hands, the way a man uncovers something sleeping that he does not want to startle.
It was a strongbox of black japanned iron, a foot and a half long, its lid sealed with wax and its lock long rusted shut. Thomas's brand — the Rocking E — had been punched into the lid by hand, letter by letter, with a nail, she would have known that work anywhere. Her hands began to shake before her mind had finished knowing why.
"Maren," Stanton said quietly. "Let me."
"No." She got her fingers under the lid where the rust had eaten the hasp, and pulled, and the box opened with a small scream of metal, and inside, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff as bark, lay her dead husband's final year, folded flat.
There was a map — a proper surveyor's map, drawn in Thomas's own meticulous hand, of the whole north valley, with the ranch boundaries inked in and something else inked beneath them in blue: a long, branching shape under the Cerros, like a river drawn by a man who had never seen it flow. There were documents — copies of deeds, water filings, a surveyor's certificate from Prescott with an official seal. And there was a list, in Thomas's hand, of names: ranch families of the north valley, twenty-three of them, with dates and marks beside some, and at the very top of the list, in letters he had gone over twice with the pen, as if to make sure she would see it first:
Ellison, T. & M. — Rocking E.
Under the oilcloth, weighted with a river stone, was a single sheet in the hurried version of his handwriting, the one he used for notes to himself.
Maren read it standing in the dusk under the oak, with Stanton holding the lantern and Tomás praying in Spanish under his breath, and when she finished she read it again, because the first time through she had only understood that it was Thomas's voice, and not yet what the voice was saying.
If this is found by the wrong hands it is worth nothing and if by the right ones everything. The water is real. I have walked it. What is under the Cerros would run this valley a hundred years. Men are buying around it in the dark and I mean to have it in the light or know the reason why. — T.E., March 1881.
March of 1881. Seven months before the ravine. Seven months before the gentle horse and the broken neck and the whole town lowering its voice.
Stanton took the sheet from her fingers as gently as if it were a bird. "Maren," he said. "Breathe."
"I am breathing," she said, and discovered it was almost true. "Mr. Stanton. Tomás. Nobody speaks of this box. Not in town, not at church, not in their sleep. Whoever killed—" She stopped, and made herself say it all, because she was done with lowered voices. "Whoever killed my husband for this — and it stands to reason now that somebody did — believes it died with him. As of this minute, that is the only armor we own. We keep it polished."
She looked at the list again before she closed the box: twenty-three names, and beside four of them Thomas had written one word — gone. She knew two of those families. The Pruetts, who had sold in the winter of '81 and left for California. Old Man Ivers, whose place was auctioned off the courthouse steps while he was still in the ground a month. In Dry Fork the word for those families was unlucky, the way the word for Thomas was accident. Her valley had a whole vocabulary for not looking at things.