The waiting after that was the hardest part of those weeks which Levi had expected. What he had not expected was that the waiting wouldn't feel the way solitude usually felt to him. He had spent 3 years getting used to solitude. He knew how to be alone and he knew how to be without anyone nearby. He had been, in his own estimation, not especially bothered by either.
The days in the line camp with Shenoa were not solitary. They were the opposite of solitary in a way that had nothing to do with the number of people in a room and everything to do with the quality of attention. She was present in a way that made the present feel substantial, as if the weight of the moment were anchored to the floor. He hadn't felt that in a long time. He began telling her things he didn't usually tell people about Kansas, about his father, about the three years moving south that had brought him to a frozen road in New Mexico carrying $2 in a wool bed roll and no particular destination.
He talked in evenings by firelight with the directness of someone who had not had anyone to talk to in a long time and had stopped noticing the absence until it was no longer absent. She listened the way she did everything fully without interruption, her face quiet. She didn't offer sympathy, which was the right instinct, because what he wanted was not to be comforted, but to be heard, and she understood the difference without needing it explained. She began telling him things in return. Not all at once, not without pauses, not without the careful quality of someone choosing which door to open, about the Jicarilla camps above Cimarron, about the way the seasons worked in the range, the summer camps higher in the mountains, the winter encampments in the lower valleys where the wind came at a better angle, and the pinion nuts could be stored in deep rock caches that stayed cool and dry. about the work of the winter camp, which was different from summer work, but no less constant, tanning hides, repairing equipment, preparing things the warm months would need.
About Miguel, who had taught her to read in three languages, and who had read to her from books he obtained from the federal agents office, who had believed knowledge was the one thing no one could take from a person as long as the person was alive to carry it. He had been the kind of man who was useful to everyone. The federal agents needed his languages. The Apache community needed someone who could navigate the documents that kept arriving and accumulating. And that usefulness had given him a kind of protection for years until it hadn't.
About her mother, who had died when Shenoa was 11 in a winter illness that moved through the camp quickly, whose face Shenoa could still see clearly, but whose voice she was beginning to lose. The sound of it going the way sounds go when you cannot hear them fresh. That was the thing about the dead, she explained, not with grief exactly, but with the precise attention she brought to factual matters. You could keep the image of them, but the living quality, the thing that made them specifically themselves in a room. She brought him into the world she had grown up in, a world that knew it was being redescribed by people with more legal machinery, and which was trying to hold its own descriptions against that pressure, not always successfully, not with any reliable protection.
The Jicarilla had been doing this for longer than any of the white settlers in the Cimarron area had been alive. They were practiced at it, if not comfortable. Miguel had been one of the men who moved between both worlds and believed that moving between them honestly was its own form of protection. One evening, with the fire steady and the cottonwood wind audible outside, Shenoa set down the rawhide she had been braiding and looked at the lamp flame for a moment. Miguel used to say, "A document was a person's knowledge made permanent. " She told him the notary stamp is a way of saying that knowledge was witnessed and therefore real.