Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Collins Parlor and Kitchen
“You are at that book again, Zoe.”
Wade said it from the parlor doorway at half past eight with his shoulders heavy and the day’s ride in his eyes.
Sadie had been an hour in bed. Supper had been cleared.
He had carried the third scrap of dark wool across the creek to Ben at and ridden the south line a second time at dusk, and the whole of it sat on him now at the parlor door in the manner of a coat too long unhung.
Zoe sat at the writing table with the small dark book open in her lap.
“I am.” She turned a worn page at the lamp.
“Your father turned a great many of these corners down. He marked the road to Jerusalem in pencil gone near to nothing, and he put a small cross in the margin every place the writer set foot at a thing out of the Scripture. I have been an hour following his pencil across the Holy Land, and I have little wish to stop at the halfway point.”
“Follow it in the warm of the bed, then.” The corner of his mouth pulled, tired. “The fire is down and the lamp oil is near gone, and I have little left in me past the climbing of the stairs.”
“A moment more, Wade. The back board has a stiffness I have been turning over the whole of the evening, and I have a notion at last what the stiffness is.”
Wade came an inch into the parlor at that.
Zoe had her thumb on the back board of the book where the cloth had pulled loose at the corner of the binding.
She worked it with her nail, slow, and the old glue gave at the corner with a small dry sound, and the cloth lifted off the board.
A folded paper came out from behind it into her hand; yellowed at the fold, soft with age, sealed once with a wax gone brown and cracked across the years.
She held it up to the lamp.
The hand on the front of it had faded near to the color of the paper. She turned it to the light and read the four words at the front aloud.
“To whom it concerns.”
Wade was at her shoulder at the writing table.
“Open it, Zoe.”
She broke the old wax. The paper near came apart at the crease in her hands, and she set it flat on the table under the lamp and smoothed it with the side of her hand. The two of them bent their heads at the lamplight over the faded brown hand.
It was dated the spring of eighteen fifty-three.
The hand was the hand of Wade’s grandfather. Zoe had no need to be told it; Wade had gone still at her shoulder at the first line, and the stillness told her the whole of it.
To whom it concerns, the letter ran. I set this down in my own hand in the spring of my sixty-first year, being of sound mind and failing body, against the day my sons or my sons’ sons should have need of it.
There is a thing I have kept from the whole of this valley for the better part of a year, and I have kept it from a love of peace and a fear of greed, the two motives a man my age finds hardest to tell apart.
Zoe drew a breath. She read on at a low voice, and Wade read it over her shoulder, the lamp throwing the two of their shadows long against the parlor wall.
Caleb Dawson is not wrong about the gold.
I have read the seam at the dry wash the same as he read it, and I am the better reader of rock, having buried two brothers in the California fields to learn the trade of it.
There is gold at the south face of the wash.
Small, but true. Not a fortune. A hard year’s wage for a hard year’s labor, no more, and the labor the kind that takes a man’s back and his Sundays and the peace of his house.
I bought the parcel off Caleb at a fair price for the grass and the water, and I let him believe I took it for grass alone, and I have carried the lie a year, on account of a true seam of gold being a thing that turns neighbors to wolves and brothers to strangers, and I had small wish to see it loosed in this valley.
The fire ticked low at the parlor hearth.
I have taken what little the south face gave to a single season’s quiet labor, and I have spent it on the raising of the chapel at the north pasture, and on the bell in the belfry, and on the planting of the white moss rose at the south wall that my wife is fond of.
The gold of the dry wash is in the walls of the Lord’s house and the rose at its foot, where no man can dig it out again without pulling down the church, and where it does the only work I judged it fit to do.
Let it lie there. Let the wash lie quiet.
If any son of mine reads this and feels the old fever come up at him, let him go and stand at the rose at the south wall of the chapel and know that the whole of the fortune of the dry wash is bloomed out in white at his feet, and let him leave the wash to the Lord, who set the gold there and little intended it for the ruin of a household.
The letter was signed in the faded brown hand.
J. Collins. The spring of 1853.
The parlor was very quiet.
Zoe lifted her face from the letter and turned it up to Wade. She found his eyes already on her, gone wide, the tiredness struck clean off his face by the words the gold is in the walls.
“Wade.” Zoe’s hand had gone flat on the table. “He has been looking at the wrong ground. Jameson has been cutting your fence and watching your house and asking after your parcel, and the gold his father swore on was never under the southeast quarter at all.”
Wade straightened slowly at her shoulder.
“Then he has been a fortnight cutting the wrong fence,” he said, low, “and the day he learns it is the wrong fence is the day he turns the whole of his greed at the right one. At the chapel, Zoe. At the rose. At the one place in the whole of the valley a man cannot dig without pulling the Lord’s house down. ”
Zoe’s hand closed at the edge of the letter.
“Then we take this to Ben at first light, Wade. Tonight, if the dark will let us. This is the proof. This is the thing under the whole of it. This letter is the reason for the cut fence and the ball at the fence and the man at the corner of my garden. Ben can carry it to the judge at Helena, and —”
“It is past nine, Zoe.” Wade drew his hand across his face.
“The dark is full. The snow has the creek road half closed. Ben is across the water with his own door bolted and his own watch set, and there is little in this letter the morning will not hold as well as the night. It is a paper a hundred years could little change. It will keep the eight hours to first light.”
“It won’t keep if Jameson learns tonight what we have learned tonight.”
“He has little way of learning it, Zoe. The letter has sat behind that book board since fifty-three. It came down from my own attic this afternoon in your own two hands. There is no soul in the whole of the valley knows of it but the two of us.”
“That is the very thing, Wade.” She was up off the chair at the writing table now, the letter at her hand.
“It has sat safe behind a book board for all these years because no soul knew to look. The hour we know is the hour it stops being safe. I have a cold thing in my chest that has not left it since Sunday, and it has nothing to do with my nerves and a great deal to do with my eyes, and I am telling you, Wade Collins, that I have looked at this letter and I have looked at that man and the two of them have lined up like a key in a lock. I should be obliged if you would look at them lined up with me for one waking hour before you climb the stairs and sleep on it.”
Wade looked at her a beat.
“I have looked at it, Zoe.” His voice had gone flat and low.
“I have looked at it the whole of the day you have been at your maps. I carried a third piece of his wool across the creek. I rode the south line at dusk in the cold. I have set the watch and walked the line and turned the matter over to Ben twice, and I am telling you the matter is in hand, and the letter will keep. The one thing in this house that will not keep is the man standing before you. He has had four hours’ sleep in two nights, and he is being held off the stairs at half past nine by a cold thing in a woman’s chest he has little power to warm. ”
The words landed wrong the moment they left him.
Zoe went still. “A cold thing at a woman’s chest,” she repeated, low.
“Zoe — I didn’t mean—”
“No. You have said it plain, and I have heard it plain, and I will not make you say it twice.” She folded the letter once, careful, along the crease, and set it on the kitchen shelf above the oven.
“Climb the stairs, Wade. You are tired, and a tired man should little be kept from his bed by a woman’s nerves. I will bank the fire.”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is the half of what you said, and the half you said is enough to be going on with.” She turned from him at the shelf and took up the iron at the hearth. “Good night, Wade.”
Wade stood a beat at the parlor doorway with the lamp throwing his shadow long and the wrong words echoing between them.
“Good night, Zoe,” he said at last, low.
He climbed the stairs.
Zoe banked the fire alone, the iron scraping at the embers. When the fire was down to a red sullen glow, she stood at the cold hearth with her arms folded at the front of her shawl and her eyes on the kitchen shelf where the letter sat folded beside the dark lamp.
She had little intention of leaving the matter until the morning.
She had less intention of leaving it with a man too tired to look at it.
She took the lamp off the writing table, crossed to the kitchen shelf.
Then, she set the lamp down, drew her shawl close at her elbow, and lifted the letter off the shelf and into the pocket of her apron, where it sat against her hip light as a dry leaf and heavy as the whole of the thing she had little managed to make a tired man see.
Outside the kitchen window, far off at the south end of the dark valley, past the cottonwoods and the bolted door and the banked red fire, a single light burned at the Dawson place, and burned, and went out.