Payment is for strangers who owe each other nothing but coins. This is what happens when one hand reaches out to another hand that reached first. This is what my father taught me and what his father taught him. Going back so far that no one remembers the first reaching anymore. Elijah looked at the wagons, looked at the riders, looked at the horses and the furs and the sacks of grain that were being unloaded now and carried toward his barn by men who moved with purpose.
He opened his mouth to say something, to thank them, or to protest or to ask how this was possible, but no words came out because his voice had locked up somewhere in his chest. He felt something hot behind his eyes that he had not felt in years. Not since the day he stood at his wife's grave, he stood on his porch and watched strangers fill his barn with more provisions than he could have earned and 3 years of the hardest work, more than he could use in a decade if he was careful. And he understood suddenly that he had been wrong about something his father used to say. The old man had told him there was always another way through, even when you could not see it yet.
But that was not quite right. Sometimes there was no other way. Sometimes you went through the fire and came out the other side with nothing left. But sometimes on the far side of that losing, there was something waiting that you could not have imagined. Something bigger and stranger and more generous than anything you could have planned for.
The people of Redcliffe came up the trail a few days later, drawn by the smoke from Elijah's chimney and the rumors that something strange had happened at the Tanner place. They found him standing in his yard, healthier than he had any right to be after the winter he had endured, with a herd of horses grazing in his meadow and a barn so full of grain and meat and furs that the door would not close all the way. Bucker was the first one to speak, asking where it had all come from. And Elijah told him the truth because he had never seen much point in lying. "The Apache brought it," he said.
"The same ones you wanted me to send back into the snow. They walked a 100 miles through the mountains to find the rest of their people, and they spent the rest of the winter hunting and gathering. Then they walked a hundred miles back to give me what they had gathered, every bit of it, because that is what they do when someone helps them when no one else would. I did not ask them to. I did not expect them to, but that is what happened.