CHAPTER 22
Beck
◆
I had not slept.
The last date had been put there by an eastern hand that did not know our courthouse, and I would have to be the man who told my wife what the date was for.
She was at the table.
She had been waiting at the kitchen table since first light. The brass lamp was lit; the cracked chimney threw the thin ray on the east wall behind her left shoulder. Her braid was already pinned with the bone pin at the nape. She had not been to bed either.
I took off my hat and set it on the peg. I sat across from her.
"Mrs. Carrow. Willa."
She nodded.
"There is an eastern man in Larkspur Bend with an eastern-bonded paper deed.
The rider yesterday brought word. The man has been asking after the Last Claim deed by name.
Hattie Doss held his portfolio in her hand for half a minute on the morning he arrived — he had paid her three nights up-front and could not be bothered to walk the deed to the clerk's window himself — and Hattie has handled county papers for nineteen years and Hattie says the paper feel is wrong. "
I scratched the scarred palm again.
"That is the most of it. The rest is shape."
She drew in one breath.
"Bring me his name when you have it. " She pressed her thumb to the cleft between her own eyebrows once and took it away.
"I am the daughter of a tailor, Beck. I weigh paper.
My father weighed paper every Friday afternoon at the cutting table.
The bonded papers were stamped and the western stocks were not, and the difference was a thumb-weight. "
I nodded.
"Aye."
I said, "Tate and I will go down-pass today, sweetheart.
We will be back by dusk. The wagon goes empty so the brake will hold at the Hairpin.
" I stopped. "Levi keeps the cabin. One armed man stays at the cabin.
We have packed for that since the morning Old Brigham went down with the chickens, and we will keep packing for it. "
She put her right hand across the table over my left and turned my palm up the way a tailor's daughter turns a coat-cuff to see the lining. She closed her hand over the long pink crescent at the heel of my hand and let it stay closed for the length of one breath. Then she let go.
"Eat something before you go. The kettle is hot."
She went to the range.
I scratched the scarred palm a third time — small, low, against my own thigh — because she had touched it and the touching had loosened a knot I did not know what else to do with.
---
Tate was at the freight stable at seven-thirty harnessing the mules.
He had wrapped the bell-mare's brass bell with damp rawhide so it would not ring on the road and laid the Spencer carbine across the wagon-seat at his right knee.
Levi was at the corral with the roan mare and his English shotgun crossed on the top rail at his elbow.
The wagon-bed sat empty under its hooped canvas, the way we packed it any morning a man might need to put a household in it before dark.
I came down off the porch with my Colt in the holster I had taken off the kitchen-wall peg. Willa stood on the porch-step.
"Two days at the outside," I said to Levi.
"I keep her."
"She keeps you," Willa said.
Levi laughed once, dry, and rubbed the cleft of his sternum-scar with two fingers. "Aye, lass. We keep each other."
I went up to the porch step. She was at my eye level on the boards and I was below her in the dust. The morning sun was at the east ridge behind me; she was lit clean.
"Sweetheart."
She put her hand on my left cheek for the length of a breath.
"Bring me his paper, foreman."
"Aye."
The wagon rolled out of the dooryard and down the lower freight gate, and the iron pump-handle's two-strokes-pulling-air sound came out of the dooryard behind me and then was gone behind the lip of the south ridge.
The smoke was at twelve miles north per the latest rider, and the wind had turned north overnight and was carrying the smoke nearer — not by much, but nearer.
The Cottonwood Stand at mile six clattered like paper.
---
It was ten when we walked up the boardwalk to Sheriff Owen Mahon's office.
Mahon was at his plank desk by the front window with a tin coffee cup in his right hand. His ginger beard was a half-shade more gray than I had last seen it. He stood when we came in.
"Beckett. Tate."
"Owen."
"I have been waiting on you. Sit. The coffee is bitter but it is coffee."
We sat at the two ladder-back chairs.
He laid his hands flat on the desk.
"The eastern man is at Hattie's. He arrived yesterday off the Granite Forks stage. He has been polite. He has been asking the deed clerk about your basin. He has eastern-bonded paper. He has a silver-headed walking stick. He has come for the basin."
Tate said, "Owen. The paper."
"He filed it Thursday at my own clerk's window. The clerk is required to take a filed paper. He filed it as a counter-deed to your April '77 filing. He named the bearer. The paper is dated June 1, 1877. It sits in the iron-banded box behind the window, sealed."
I said, "Have you a warrant against him."
Mahon looked at me steady.
"Aye, I have no warrant. He has done nothing yet but ask.
I will not arrest him for asking. He has eastern-bonded paper and a deed I cannot put my finger on without federal authority.
The day I have cause I will take him by the collar and put him in the second cell and hold him seventy-two hours. The day is not today."
He turned a quarter-inch and looked out the window.
"He showed Hattie this morning by accident.
He had the portfolio out for the morning mail; Hattie was at the counter.
He laid the deed face-up for half a minute.
Hattie has the touch. Hattie says the paper feel is wrong.
She says eastern-bonded paper of the kind Crane and Sons of Dalton, Massachusetts made in 1875 versus 1878 — the watermark differs, she says.
She does not have the eye for the year of it. She has sent for you to look."
I scratched the scarred palm.
"How long do we have her hand on the paper today?"
Mahon almost smiled and did not.
"He went to the privy at half past nine.
Hattie keeps his portfolio under the lid of her writing-box while he is out.
She has thirty minutes from when she sees him cross the back garden.
She has been counting since five past ten.
You have twenty minutes by my pocket-watch.
Walk. I will sit here at this window so no man on the boardwalk thinks the sheriff has stirred. "
We went out the side door at the back of the cells.
Christ Almighty.
---
Hattie was at her boarding-house desk in the side parlor. The braid she wears coiled round her head was iron-gray at the front. She set the morning mail aside when she saw us in the doorway.
"Beckett. Tate. Come."
She brought the wooden writing-box across to the post-office counter under the south window, lifted the lid, and tilted the leather portfolio with the corner of the lid until the deed slid out of its own weight. She lifted it by its top edge with her left thumb and forefinger and turned it face-up.
I leaned in.
The paper was cream eastern-bonded. It was heavier than the cheap county sheets I had been signing my name to since '77; the difference was a thumb-weight to the side that knew it.
The deed-text was clean copperplate. The seal at the foot of the page was a flat-tooled wax wafer in a shade of green a half-step darker than the green Bear Fork County wax I had handled at my own filings.
Hattie tilted the deed against the south window light.
The watermark lay at the lower edge — Crane & Sons / Dalton, MA — the lettering with a small flourish under Dalton and a small bracket above Crane.
I had seen both in the Granite Forks freight invoices up the road in last December's stage.
I had seen the un-watermarked 1877 stock at this same counter when Hattie signed in as witness on the December 12 amendment for Levi, because Hattie keeps spare 1877 sheets in the writing-box's bottom tray for her own letters.
The date on the deed was June 1, 1877.
I felt for the chain of my father's watch in my vest pocket and closed my hand around the silver case.
The hands of the watch had been at four-eleven for fourteen years.
I held the case the way a man holds a small living thing and I figured the dates again.
April 17, 1877 — Beck and Tate, original filing.
May 4 — territorial filing window closed.
December 12 — Levi added by courthouse amendment.
June 1, 1877 — a date written on a sheet a Massachusetts mill had not yet milled.
"Christ Almighty."
Tate had moved a quarter-inch left to my elbow. He breathed out slow through his teeth.
"Ach. The watermark is younger than the date."
I scratched the scarred palm.
The daughter of a tailor was right, I thought, in her voice. The paper feel is wrong. The paper itself was not made until a year after the date that has been written on it.
I said, "Hattie. The 1877 sheets in the lower tray."
She had a sheet up before I finished the sentence. The 1877 sheet was a sixteenth thinner than the deed under the south window light. The 1877 sheet held no watermark at all. I put my left thumb to one corner of each sheet and pressed and felt the difference travel up the bone of my hand.
"Aye."
"Twenty seconds, Beckett."
She lifted the deed by the top edge and laid it back into the open portfolio at the angle it had been at when she lifted it.
She had counted the corners. She had counted the fold-creases.
She would not leave evidence she had handled it.
She slid the portfolio back under the writing-box's lid and set the lid down.
She turned and was at the post-office counter sorting the morning mail by the time the back garden door opened.
I did not turn to look.