Cole did not know what it meant. He nodded and rode home. Spring came late. The creek rose as Nalin had warned and the weak fence went down on a Tuesday. By the time Cole waded out to find his cattle, the water was up to the saddle girth.
He was wrestling a bawling heifer out of the current when a second horse crashed into the creek beside him. Nalin leaned from the saddle, caught the heifer's halter, and between them they hauled the animal onto the bank. They sat on the bank afterward, both soaked, laughing like fools. "You mended it too late," she said. "You said it would fall." "I also said to mend it." "You did." He pushed wet hair from his eyes.
"I should have listened to a woman who knows fences." "Yes," said Nalin gravely. "You should." And she smiled. It lit her whole face like sun on a frozen lake. Cole forgot for a moment how to breathe. After that, the fence was not the only thing he mended.
He rebuilt the barn roof. He cleared the south pasture. He found without ever saying why that he was asking himself what she would think of every decision. She came more often. She taught him the names of the plants along the creek and which ones healed a fever and which ones eased a cough.
He taught her to play checkers on a board made from a shingle. She beat him every time and pretended it was luck. Word traveled, of course. The storekeeper at the crossing frowned over his spectacles. A rancher named Pruitt told him straight that folks were talking and no good would come of it.
Cole thanked him politely and said he would take his advice under consideration, which was the way he said no to a man he did not intend to argue with. It was Nalin who pulled back. She stopped coming for two weeks in early summer. When she finally appeared at the fence, she was grave and silent. Her eyes fixed on the horizon.
"I cannot come anymore," she said. "Why not? There are things my people say and things yours say. Neither will be kind to us." She said it plainly, the way she said everything. "I do not want you harmed.
I do not want my family shamed. It is easier if we are strangers." Cole stood very still. "Nalin, I don't care what either of them says." "You will. In winter, when they will not trade with you. In spring, when they will not look at you.
I have watched it happen to others." "Then I'll lose a few customers." "It is not a small thing." "No," said Cole slowly. "It isn't, but neither are you." She looked at him then, a long searching look. Her jaw trembled just once. She wheeled her mare and rode off without a word. He watched her go until she was only a dark speck against the green hills.
And then he did a thing he had not done in 10 years. He sat down in the grass at the edge of his own pasture and put his head in his hands. That was the last he saw of her for a month. On the first morning of August, he opened his door at dawn and found the bundle on his step. It was wrapped in a red blanket and tied with a braided cord.
He knelt and untied it with clumsy fingers. Inside lay a small flat object wrapped in doeskin. He folded back the leather and found a book. It was old, very old. The cover cracked, the edges stained with years.
A name was stamped into the cracked leather in tarnished gold: Amos Brennan, his grandfather's name. Cole had never known the man. The family story said that Amos Brennan had gone west in the gold rush and been killed on the trail, leaving his wife with nothing but a story. Cole's father had told it a hundred times. A good man lost to the road.
Cole had always assumed the Bible, the one the family claimed Amos took with him, had gone into the earth with him. He opened the cover. The first page was a family record in a looping faded hand. Births, marriages, deaths. At the bottom, in the same ink, was a short careful paragraph.
I, Amos Brennan, being of sound mind, have this day given my Bible and my letters to the keeping of the Apache woman who nursed me through the fever. I am dying and have no one else. If any of my blood should come to this country, let them receive this book and know that I was not alone and was not afraid and was shown more mercy by strangers than I ever was by my own kind. I have also recorded here the claim to the land where I lay, which I ask them to honor. Beneath was a signature, a date, and a hand-drawn map.