She had refused him. Refused him in front of people. In the months that followed, Duclura had made sure the band understood that Sonsee's husband's death was partly her fault. That she'd been the one who'd pushed him to ride harder, to fight more, to prove himself. It wasn't true.
But Duclura was powerful. And she was a widow and a woman alone. And truth requires someone willing to speak it. and few people were willing. Wesley listened to this account on a cool evening in November when they were both sitting on the porch steps watching the last of the light leave the western sky. She told it in pieces, part Spanish, part the Chiricahua words she'd been teaching him.
And he filled in what he could from context. She told it without self-pity. The way you tell facts about the weather or the condition of a road. When she finished, he was quiet for a while. He said that what Duclara had done was cowardice twice over.
He said it plain, not trying to soften it. She looked at him for a moment as if she were measuring whether he believed what he just said or was simply performing sympathy. Then she looked back at the darkening sky. She seemed to accept that he meant it. By December, the silences between them had changed in quality.
Early on, the silence had been the silence of two strangers being careful around each other. Then it became something more like the silence of two people who both have too much to say and too little language to say it. By December, it was a different thing entirely. The silence in the evenings, both of them at the table or on the porch, had a kind of ease to it. A rightness.
He stopped noticing it and started relying on it. He had not been sick in years. A cold came on hard in late October and pinned him for four days. He woke in a half fever to find a poultice of something fragrant laid across his chest and a clay cup of bitter tea on the bedside crate. Sonsee was already gone from the room.
She had gathered the herbs from some dry draw near the ranch. He never asked how she knew. She simply knew. By the second day, the fever had broken. She had started teaching him, too.