Epilogue
The town made her mayor in the fall, when enough of it had been raised back up out of its own ashes to hold a thing like a vote and stand for a thing like a ceremony.
On the morning of it, Marielle Vaughn stood in the back room of the new town hall that had been the wheelwright’s shop, in the only good dress the fire had left her, and couldn’t make her two hands hold still.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “I’ve no earthly business doing this and the whole town knows it as well as I do.
I hunted my father for two years and got nowhere, and then a stranger rode in and did in a week what I couldn’t do in two years, and at the end of it I shot a man in a rainstorm and dug another man’s grave open with my own hands.
That’s the sum of my qualifications. That’s the whole of what I’m bringing to it. And they want to stand me up out there in front of every soul left in this town and put the running of it in these hands that won’t even hold still.”
“Stop.” Abe was leaned in the corner of the little room on the cane he still carried, the leg mended but not all the way back and not likely to come all the way back, and he said the word gently, the way he said most things to her now.
“You’re shaking because it matters to you.
That’s the right reason to shake and it’s the only good one.
A person who could walk out there and take this with steady hands is a person who hasn’t understood what they’re taking, and this county has had a long bellyful of men who understood the office and weren’t afraid of it.
Briggs wasn’t afraid of his star. Nash wasn’t afraid of his chair.
Look what came of men who weren’t afraid. ”
He pushed off the wall and came across the small room to her, slow and even on the cane, and stood in front of her.
“The shaking is the thing that’ll make you good at it. Don’t go wishing it away. It’s your conscience telling you the weight is real, and a mayor who can feel the weight is the only kind worth having.”
“That’s an easy thing to say from the corner.”
“It is. I’ve made a study of saying easy things from corners while you do the hard ones out in the open.” That got the ghost of something out of her, not a smile but the near side of one.
“You’ve done harder things than this one, Marielle, and done them this very year.
You walked into a dark house full of the men who killed your father and you walked back out of it with the truth.
Standing up in a street and letting people who love you say thank you isn’t the hard thing.
It only feels like the hard thing because it’s the first one in a long while that doesn’t ask you to bleed for it.
Let them give it to you. You earned the having of it. Let them.”
She looked at him a moment, and the shaking didn’t stop, but it settled, the way she settled when he laid a thing out flat and plain in front of her, the way she’d settled at the corral fence in the dark with the town still burning.
“Alright,” she said.
The ceremony was a small thing and a ragged thing and a proud thing, held out in the open in the half-rebuilt main street under a high clear hard-blue fall sky, because there was no building yet standing whole enough to hold the whole of the town and because there was a rightness in doing it in the open street regardless, in the very place where they had all of them stood months back and watched the town burn down around them.
What was left of Colinas Rojas gathered in its new pale lumber and its old griefs and its slings and its half-healed burns, and stood in the dust of the street it was rebuilding, and watched one of its own stand up and take up the running of it.
Huerta the baker was there in the front of them, his eyebrows grown back in now, in a clean white apron because he’d been up since three baking for the thing and wouldn’t have come in anything else.
The man and his half-grown son they had dragged out from under the fallen feed store in the dark of that night were there, both of them healed and standing, the son a head taller already than he’d been when they pulled him out.
The young mother with the burned arm was there, the arm scarred now but hers, the baby on her hip grown fat and loud.
They were a smaller town than they had been and they would be a long time yet rebuilding to what they’d been, and they stood in the street and they were glad, in the bruised careful way of people who have learned what gladness costs and are spending it anyway.
And Marielle’s mother was there, in the very front of it.
Sober these months, and not the brittle clinging sobriety of a woman white-knuckling her way between one bottle and the next, but a thing settled and real and come back to stay.
She stood upright and gray and clear-eyed in her good dark dress and watched her daughter the way she had once watched her husband walk a street, with that same straight-backed proprietary pride.
But she didn’t look at the office the way she had looked at Emmett’s badge, and Marielle had marked the difference over the weeks and marked it again now across the crowd.
Her mother had loved her father and grieved him and would grieve him the rest of her days, but the finding-out of the how and the why of his death, ugly as the truth had been, had done something to the grief, had let go some hard-locked knot of it that the not-knowing had kept pulled tight for two years.
There was a peace come into the old woman that Marielle hadn’t seen in her since before the night Emmett walked up the road and didn’t come back, the particular peace of a thing finally and fully over, however hard the ending of it had been, the peace of a wound that has stopped bleeding even if it will always be a scar.
Marielle caught her mother’s eye across the heads of the gathered town, and her mother held it.
She nodded once, slow and certain, and that single nod from that particular woman was worth more to Marielle than the office and the ceremony and every word that was said over her that morning put together.
They said the words over her. A man read out the thing that made it official, and Marielle said the words back that she was meant to say, and her voice held, and her hands, down at her sides where the town couldn’t see them, slowly stopped their shaking somewhere in the middle of it, the way Abe had said they would.
And then it was done, and she was the mayor of Colinas Rojas, and the small ragged proud crowd made its small glad noise in the rebuilt street. And the thing she had become turned out, in the doing of it, not to have killed her after all.
Afterward, in the press and the noise of the celebrating, the long tables somebody had knocked together out of new lumber and laid with whatever the recovering town could spare to lay on them, Marielle worked her way through the crowd of her people and found Abe at the far edge of it, out of the press, leaned on his cane in the long shade of a fresh-raised wall, watching the town make its glad noise over her and not making any move to be part of the noise himself.
“I couldn’t have done any of this,” she said, coming up to him.
“And I want it said plain, out loud, in a place where you’ll have to stand there and hear the whole of it.
Two years I went at this alone and got a stack of nothing for it.
You rode up off that river half a stranger and inside a week the whole thing broke open.
My father’s at rest in the churchyard. The men that did it are dead in a canyon or in a federal cell.
This town’s still standing and putting itself back up and there’s a woman running it who knows what was done and got the truth of it.
And every part of that is because of you.
I will not stand here on the day they made me mayor and let you do the thing you do and wave it off. ”
“You’d have got there,” Abe said. “In your own time. You’re not a woman who doesn’t get where she’s set on going.”
“I wouldn’t have. Not to the bottom of it. Not alive. Take the thanks, Abe. You are as bad as Samson Jennings ever was about taking a thing that’s plainly owed you, the two of you, a matched pair of stubborn men who’ll bleed for anybody and can’t stand to be thanked for it.”
That got the near side of a smile out of him, the second of the day, which from him was a great plenty.
And then he set the cane carefully aside against the new wall, and he put his arms around her, careful still of the shoulder that had set true but would always be a half beat slow, and he held her there a moment in the long shade at the edge of her own celebration.
She stood into it and held him back, and there was a great deal carried in the holding that neither of them put into words.
They had both learned across that hard year that the things that weighed the most were mostly the things you didn’t have to say out loud to a person who already knew them down to the ground.
“Go on,” he said, after the moment, letting her go and taking the cane back up. “They’re waiting on you, the whole town of them. Go and be their mayor and let them celebrate you. You’ve earned it and there’s no shame in standing still long enough to be celebrated. Go on. I’ll see you after.”
So she went, back into the noise and the press and the small bright glad faces of her people, the men who wanted to shake the new mayor’s hand and the women who wanted to tell her they’d known her mother as a girl and the children who didn’t know what a mayor was but knew it was their Marielle and that there was cake.
She was a long while in it, the gladness of it carrying her further than she’d thought she had it in her to be carried on such a year.
And when at last there came a lull in it, and she thought to look again to the shade at the edge of the celebration where she’d left him leaned against the new wall, he wasn’t there.