He asked how she was. She was quiet for a moment. Different, she said finally. Like something I was carrying is now somewhere else, not gone. Placed somewhere it can be held.
That sounded like the right kind of different, he agreed. She looked at him, the measuring look that would never fully leave her because it was part of who she was and not something he would have wanted different. But it was warmer now and open in a way that hadn't been possible on the mountain in November. She said his name, Levi, just once carefully. I'm glad the paint found you on that road.
He told her he was too. The wedding was in April when the Jicarilla range had come back from the cold and the high meadows above the Rio Mora were showing the first green. Harlon Beckwith stood up for them at the county judge's office in Mora, a different county, a different judge. The ceremony took 15 minutes. Beckwith signed his name in his wide unhurried hand.
Shenoa wore her elkhide coat with the red and black geometric stitching at the collar, repaired now at the shoulder seam. Levi wore his clean shirt. Afterward, at the line camp that had become over the winter, something closer to a beginning than either of them had arrived there expecting, Shenoa sat in the doorway in the afternoon light. The paint horse stood in the small corral Levi had built in February, its chin on the top rail, in the satisfied way horses have when they are content. She had the leather parcel in her hands.
The document inside was a copy now the original in a federal lock box in Santa Fe, part of an inquiry that would take years and might not end cleanly because these things often did not. But Miguel Aldama's name was in the record. The 1872 agreement was in the record. The Eastern Quarter section was on hold. Three men from Cimarron had been questioned by Aldis Pratt and Gerald Coulton had not run for reappointment in January.