25. Epilogue
Two Months Later…
Mateo's bench had the only good vise on the ranch, so that's where I was before sunup, with the casing clamped in the jaws.
Nobody looking at it would have known what it was.
A stub of brass, dull from two months of weather, small enough to disappear in a fist. It had taken me the better part of yesterday to find it.
I'd walked the pass on foot, put myself where John had braced against the rocks that night, and worked the ground one stone at a time until I found the brass wedged in a crack where the rifle had thrown it.
John had told me where he'd stood without once asking why I wanted to know.
He'd learned not to ask me questions I'd have to answer.
I ran the small bit through by hand, a turn at a time, backed it out, blew the curl of metal off the bench, and cleaned the burr off with a file.
Then I cut a length of rawhide, worked it through the hole, and tested the knot with my teeth.
It held. I'd cut the cord long, to go over a big man's head.
There was exactly one of those on the property.
The barn and the house were still dark. Nimue sat around my neck with her chin on my jaw, asleep or close to it, and I had the whole property to myself except the windmill and the horses shifting in the near pen.
My right hand had come out of its splint two weeks back, and this was the first morning it had done every job I gave it without seizing up. I intended to spend it.
"What's that?"
Cruz. Of course it was Cruz. The kid turned up wherever anything happened, and apparently a man filing brass before dawn qualified. He hung in the doorway of the equipment bay with a feed bucket in one hand.
"Go feed something."
"Weirdo," he said, and hauled his bucket off toward the pens.
I swept the metal curls off Mateo's bench so he wouldn't find them and ask better questions than Cruz had. The cord sat in my pocket with a little weight to it. Not much. A piece of brass weighs nothing. It had still bought me every morning since.
That was the day's whole job, right there against my leg. Get him down to the cave. Alone. Before dark.
Everything else could line up behind it.
At breakfast, Sierra had the ranch books open next to the biscuit pan, running a finger down a column between trips to the stove, and when Rafe came in off the east tank and reached past him for the coffee, Sierra moved the pot out of his reach without looking up.
"Wash your hands. You smell like the east tank."
"It's my coffee."
"It's my kitchen. There's a pump."
Rafe looked at him for a second, then went to the pump and washed his hands.
John sat to my left, close enough that our elbows fought over the same territory.
Mateo and Cruz were already racing each other through the biscuits.
Linc walked in under his own power, which was new that week.
One boot landed harder than the other, the limp heavy enough to track blindfolded, and his face dared anybody at the table to say a word about it.
Fenix drifted in behind him, pale and pleased about something nobody else could see.
Winston sat next to Ransom, out of uniform, and the band on his finger caught the lamp every time he passed something down the table.
Sarah, up from Socorro since the night before, settled in last.
She waited until everybody's mouth was full before she made her announcement. "I signed for a place in town yesterday."
Everyone at the table stopped.
"Two bedrooms," she went on. "Water heater's new. I move in the first of the month."
"Good," Sierra said, and turned a page in the ledger. "Socorro was too far."
"You could've just moved out here," Mateo said. "We've got room."
"No offense," Sarah said, "but I've had enough of this ranch to last a lifetime."
"None taken," Sierra said, and dropped another biscuit on her plate, anyway.
John set his fork down. "Moving day, I'm driving the truck."
"Fine."
"And carrying the furniture."
"You're carrying lamps."
"Sare."
"You had stitches in your ribs. I love you. You get the lamps." She pointed her fork at him. "If I see you under a couch, I'm dropping my end of it."
He picked his fork back up, and his shoulders hung looser than they had when the negotiation started.
He'd have carried her whole house on his back, one room at a time, if she let him.
Now he was bargaining for a couch, and losing, and it looked good on him.
He didn't have to be anybody's doctor at that table.
He got to be her brother, hauling lamps like anybody else's brother.
Chance was on the porch when I stepped out, parked at the rail in his wheelchair.
Ransom's brother had been at Pae Saco a few weeks now, and sour about every one of them.
Ransom said the two of them spent every summer on somebody else's stock, and that Chance sat a horse better at fourteen than most men ever would, and I believed it without needing the stories, because of the way he looked at the horses.
He was watching the corral, where the horses stood nose to tail in the morning sun, and he had the stillness of a man looking through a window into a room he used to live in.
I knew that stillness.
I sat down on the rail near him.
"Come to take your shift?" He kept his eyes on the corral. "Somebody's always got a reason to be on this porch lately. You all think you're subtle."
His words came slower than they wanted to, and every so often one went missing and he had to go around it. He hated that worse than the chair.
Ransom came out with two cups. He set one on the rail inside his brother's reach, close enough for Chance to find without looking, and didn't say a word about it, and didn't leave. He'd been doing that every morning for weeks. The cup sat there, steaming.
"You know what the joke is?" Chance said.
"It's not the chair. It's that." He tipped his chin at the corral, at all of it.
The horses, the dust, the tack shed, the whole horse-shaped world he'd woken up inside.
"A working ranch. Horses in every direction.
And me." His hands flexed on the armrests.
"They said I was dead for six minutes. I should've stayed dead. "
"No, you shouldn't have." I leaned in until he had to look at me.
"Why? All I'm doing is taking up space and resources that should go to whole men."
"You are whole, idiot." I kicked his shin and poked him in the forehead. "You're up here. In there. That's your prison. Not the chair. Who you are was never legs, or a man in a saddle. It's you. Your body just carries you around. The rest is the part that matters."
He shoved my hand away. "Fuck you."
Chance stared at the horses. Ransom leaned on the post beside him, and the coffee cooled in easy reach. He wasn't ready to hear it. He would be. I'd say it again as many times as it took.
By midday I'd run out of legitimate reasons to be anywhere, so I ended up in the doorway of the clinic, watching John work.
The outbuilding past the bunkhouse used to hold broken equipment.
Now it had shelves to the ceiling, every tin and roll and bottle squared away and labeled in John's hand, a cot with the blanket folded army-flat, and the best lamp on the property.
He'd signed his house away the month before, and between the sale and Rafe's ledger, the room wanted for nothing.
Cruz sat on the cot with his hand out while John splinted a finger. A story came with it, something about the hay elevator, and it changed every time he told it, and he was telling it again now. John taped the finger to its neighbor, snug and square.
"Will it scar?" Cruz asked, hopeful.
"No."
"Damn."
"Come back when you do something worse," John said. "Knowing you, I'd start stretching now."
He was easy in there. That was the word for it. Easy. A big man moving around a small room he'd built to fit himself, everything within reach because he'd hung every shelf.
I thumbed the cord in my pocket and thought about giving it to him right then. But the timing was wrong. I didn't want an audience.
There was one place I could be sure we'd be alone, and I'd known it from the start. I put the cord back in my pocket.
"You're loitering," John said without turning around.
"I'm supervising."
"Mm." He tied off the tape. "Whatever it is you've been sitting on all day, you'll tell me when you tell me. I know how you work."
"After supper," I said. "Bring your horse. You're coming with me."
"Where?"
"You'll see."
We rode out after dinner, with maybe two hours of light left. Nimue curled around my collar and tasted the air more than usual, which meant she knew where we were headed before he did.
We dismounted when the terrain got too rocky, tied the horses off in the shade, and started up toward the cave.
"Been a while since we've been out here," he said.
"We've been busy getting shot at, and then healing."
The little bones turned on their wire at the mouth of the cave, ticking in the evening wind.
Nimue slid off my shoulders at the entrance and went in ahead of us.
By the time I'd built the fire small, she'd claimed her warm flat rock at the back, coiled where she pleased, officially done with both of us.
John had to fold himself nearly in half to clear the entrance. All that man, bent down to fit through a hole in a rock, grumbling about his back. I almost laughed.
He sat where I pointed, on the bedroll, his head brushing the rock, firelight moving on him. "Nice to get away for a while," he said. "I forget I have a home until I'm out of it."
I took the cord out of my pocket.
He froze when he saw it. He looked from the brass to my face and worked out where it had to have come from, because there was only one shot anybody on this ranch would string on rawhide.
I stepped between his knees and looped the cord over his bowed head. The casing settled flat against his chest.