She laid out the old papers after that, the operating agreement, the original property survey, the letters from the previous landowner. She set them side by side on the table and sat down with them. Gideon stood in the doorway. What are you going to do? He said, "Find out whether his survey is correct." She didn't look up from the papers.
"And if it isn't, I'm going to prove it. And if it is," she was still for a moment. Then I'm going to find out if my agreement is worth what I believe it is. He watched her, the papers spread across the table. The pen moving, careful and deliberate.
A woman who had just found out her home might be taken from her and who was responding to that news by making records. He'd seen a lot of people face hard things in his time. Most of them made noise. This woman made notes. The formal notice arrived three evenings later.
Railroad courier sealed envelope. No conversation. He set it on the counter and rode away before she'd finished reading the letter head. She broke the seal. Read it standing up.
Read it again. Then she placed it flat on the table, put both hands on either side of it, and stood there. 30 days to vacate or face legal removal. She looked at that paper for a long time. She thought about her aunt. She thought about the spring, the troughs, the fire she built every morning before the sun came up.
She thought about every man she'd fed, every bowl she'd served, every year she'd poured into this particular patch of Arizona ground. And she thought, "They are counting on me not having the energy to fight." She picked up her pen. She began writing a letter to the county surveyor's office. Her handwriting didn't shake, but her hands did. The county surveyor's office wrote back in 17 days.
Nia read the letter at the counter with the breakfast fire still going and a line of workers waiting for their bowls. She read it once, set it face down, and served the next man before she let herself read it again. The reply was courteous. It was thorough, and it told her exactly nothing useful. The survey line filed by the railroads contracted land agent had been accepted provisionally by the county 3 weeks prior.
Any challenge to its accuracy required a formal petition. An independent reservey of fee she didn't have and a processing window of 60 to 90 days. She had 30. She pressed her palm flat on the letter. Bad news, said Gideon.
He was at the far end of the counter finishing his second cup. He'd been there since 6:00. He kept saying he'd leave when the steer's leg was sound. The steer kept finding new reasons to need another day. Procedural obstacles, she said.
Those are sometimes the same thing. Yes, she said, but one of them you can go around. She folded the letter and put it with the others the county notice. Voss's formal correspondence, the operating agreement building into the kind of record that powerful men counted it on women like her losing before the real fight arrived. She wasn't going to lose a single page.
She wasn't built that way. The next week, the construction crews came closer. The rail line had been pushing through the desert in pieces since spring, and now the nearest work camp was a mile and a half out and moving fast. every morning brought more workers to her counter. Eight became 15, 15 became 25. By the middle of July, she was serving close to 60 men a day, and the line stretched beyond the shelter before sunup.
She needed space. She needed shade over the eating area. The summer heat was driving men away at noon when sitting in the open sun became worse than the hunger. Gideon showed up one morning with borrowed lumber and a post hole digger. Where do you want it?
He said, she looked at the lumber. Looked at him. That's not from your gear. Bought it from the carpenter at the work camp. Tobias Fenwick.
He gave me a fair price. I didn't ask you to do that. No, ma'am. He set the digger down without ceremony. You want a shade structure or not?
She looked at the load, calculated the angles, the shadow it would cast at peak sun, the post positions that would hold under wind. I'll pay you back for the lumber end of week. You don't have to. I know I don't have to, she said flatly. That's not why I'm doing it.
He almost smiled. He caught it before it arrived. She appreciated that men who smiled at her when she was being precise drove her to an absolute end. Southwest corner, she said. The post nearest the spring goes deeper.
Ground runs wet under that side in summer. If it's not anchored, right? The whole structure comes down in one storm. I know. He picked up the digger.
I already dug it deeper. She looked at the hole. He had already dug it deeper. She turned back to the kitchen and felt something move in her chest. Small, quiet, the size of a thought she wasn't ready for yet.
She set it aside the same way she set aside any problem she couldn't solve immediately. She'd come back to it later. Meritt Shaw had the kind of foreman's authority that came from 20 years of being the man standing between 60 workers and something going wrong. He leaned on the counter with his bowl and studied Gideon's work on the shade structure with the expression of a man doing math. That cowboy, he said, you hire him permanent or is he just decorating the place?
He pays for his own board, Nia said. Awful lot of work for a man who's paying to be here. People do strange things in the summer. The heat affects their judgment. Merritt looked at Gideon, who was refitting a brace with the absorbed attention of a man for whom doing a thing correctly was not optional.
"He building that thing straight?" Merritt asked. "Not entirely," she said. She didn't look up, but Merritt caught one corner of her mouth. He took his bowl and left before the laugh got away from him. The supply wagon didn't come that Friday or the one after she adjusted.