Chapter Thirty-One
The South Wall of the Chapel on the North Pasture
The box came up out of the frozen ground with a sound like a root tearing.
It was no bigger than a bread box, the dark wood gone near black from fourteen years in the cold dirt, the iron bands rusted to a flaking orange and the small lock on the front of it red with the same.
Jameson set it at his knee and looked at it a long moment, the pick forgotten, his pale gray eyes gone bright and strange.
Worse, to Zoe’s eyes, than the flatness they had carried a moment before.
She came up on her elbow.
The box had taken the whole of his attention off her.
The fowling piece lay spent and useless six feet off, past the reach of any lunge she had the strength left to make.
The pony cart stood at the gate with the gray pony blowing white in the cold, and the long road home ran out behind it.
Twenty minutes south, at the dry wash, two men she loved were at a hole with little left in it but red rock and a dead man’s lie.
She gathered her feet under her by an inch.
“Sit.” Jameson turned his head a degree and the pistol at his belt turned with it. “I have a hand on the box and an eye on you, Miss Preston. The eye is little slower than the hand. Sit and watch.”
Zoe sat back on the cold snow at the foot of the wall.
She had little choice. Her wrist ached where his grip had closed on it.
The cold had gone up through the wet wool of her skirt and set in at the bone.
Jameson was past any words she had the wit for now—she had watched the greed take him at the garden and the fever take him at the fence, and the thing that had him now, kneeling in the snow, was a thing older and worse than both, a thing she had no name for but the ruin.
He took the pick haft and set the point of it at the rusted lock.
The lock broke on the second strike, the rust scattering on the white snow.
He lifted the lid.
Zoe watched the brightness fall from his face by a small degree at first, and then the whole of it at the once, as a lamp goes dark when turned down at the wick.
He reached into the box and lifted out the thing inside it and held it up in the gray light.
The thing was no bar of gold and no raw nugget from the dry-wash seam.
It was a Bible.
A small one, black, the cover soft with handling and the gilt worn near to nothing at the spine; the twin of the one Zoe had given Wade a cover for a fortnight gone.
Jameson turned it in his hands and a folded paper came loose at the back of it, brown wax cracked across the fold.
He opened the paper at the wind with the box forgotten at his knee and read the faded hand in a silence Zoe had little wish to break.
She had read the twin of the letter the night before. She knew the whole of what it said before he had reached the bottom.
“Caleb Dawson is not wrong about the gold.” Jameson read aloud at last, low.
“I have read the seam the same as he read it. There is gold at the south face. Not a fortune. A hard year’s wage for a hard year’s labor.
” He turned the sheet at his shaking hand.
“I have taken what little the south face gave and spent it whole on the raising of the chapel, and the bell, and the rose at the south wall my wife is fond of. The gold of the dry wash is in the walls of the Lord’s house, where no man can dig it out without pulling the church down. ”
His voice had dwindled to a thread by the last of it. He set the sheet at his knee and reached into the box again.
Under where the Bible had lain there was nothing but a single folded sheet, newer than the first, in the same faded hand. He lifted into the light. He read it. His face came apart in a manner Zoe had little wish to watch and less power to look away from.
“To the man who digs here.” The voice was near gone now.
“If you have come to this box in greed, you have dug up a Bible and a hard truth for your trouble, and I am sorry for the both of us. The fortune you came for went into the Lord’s house in the year fifty-three, the year I came at last to faith in my sixty-first year and learned that a fortune held is a fortune that holds the man in possession of it.
I gave it up. I gave it to the church and the bell and the rose, and I have been the richer for the giving every day of the years since.
There is no gold in this box for you. There is the book that turned me, and these words, and the rose above your head.
Sit at the rose a while before you go. It is the better part of the fortune, and it asks little of you but the sitting. ”
The wind moved through the bare canes of the rose above the both of them.
Jameson knelt in the snow with the broken box at his knee, the Bible in one hand, and the dead man’s word at the other. He made a sound at the back of his throat Zoe had never heard a grown man make.
For the space of a breath, she near pitied him. Then the breath passed.
“No.” Jameson set the Bible down at the snow. “No.”
He took up the pistol at his belt.
“I have buried a father with a debt and a fever, Miss Preston. I have cut a fence and rode a fortnight in the cold and dug the whole of a night on a frozen wash at the word of a dead man, and I will not kneel at a rosebush now and call a Bible the better part of a fortune. The gold is in the walls.” He came up off his knees with the pistol in his hand and the ruin back in the pale gray of his eyes.
“I have a strong back and a long morning ahead and when your Mr. Collins comes at noon he will take the church down board by board with his own two hands, or he will watch me put a bullet in the best thing to come to Bozeman in twenty years. On your feet.”
Zoe stood, the cold snow at her skirts, the bare rose at her back and the box and the Bible at the trampled snow between them.
She had no intention of pulling this church down for him.
She had less intention of dying at the chapel wall with the whole of her own family twenty minutes south at the wrong hole.
She had begun, at the back of her aching, cold head, to turn a thing over—a thing the letter had set there.
If the man would not kneel for the truth, he might yet be led a while by the lie.
And down the long white road from the south, far off and small against the snow but coming hard and growing at the eye with every breath she drew, two riders broke from the cottonwoods at a gallop with the morning sun at their backs.