Been lying up there staring at the ceiling trying to figure out what a man says to a judge to prove his own marriage is real. Turns out there's no words for it. It's just a thing you live. You can't hand it over like a deed. "No," Eleanor agreed.
"You can't." They sat with that a while, the coffee steaming between them. "There's something you need to know," Nathaniel said finally. Before we walk in there tomorrow, something I never told you because it didn't seem to matter, and now I reckon it might matter more than anything. Eleanor went still.
"What is it?" The water rights Charles wants so bad. Nathaniel turned his cup slow in his hands. They're not just valuable. They're the reason half this county has water at all.
There's a creek runs down out of the hills, crosses my north pasture, and the rights to it go back to my grandfather. Anybody downstream of me, the Hendersons, the Aldridge store, half the small spreads in the valley, they all draw off that creek. And they can only do it because my families always let them free for 30 years. It was a handshake, my grandfather's word, never written down proper. Eleanor felt the shape of it before he finished.
And if Charles gets the ranch, he owns the water, and Charles Whitaker doesn't do anything free. Nathaniel's jaw tightened. He'll charge them or cut them off. He's been wanting that creek for years, not because he needs it, but because whoever holds it holds the whole valley by the throat. That's what this is really about, Eleanor.
It was never about my land. It's about the water and the power that comes with it. Eleanor sat back slowly. "Then it's not only us he's coming for." No, but the others don't know it, or they know it, and they're too scared of him to say.
He holds notes on half of them, same as Aldridge. They can't afford to cross him. Nathaniel scrubbed a hand down his face. So, they'll stay quiet at that hearing, every one of them, and let him paint you as a fraud because standing up for us means standing against the man who holds their debts. And I can't blame them for it.
A man's got to feed his family. Eleanor stared at the lamp flame a long moment and something began to turn over in her mind, slow and deliberate. "You're wrong about one thing," she said. You said we can't hand the truth over like a deed. But Charles can, can't he?