Physical labor kept my hands busy and my mind from circling endlessly around the same dark thoughts. But at night, lying on my bedroll by the stove, I heard her. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she paced.
Once, I heard her speaking in Apache. Soft and rhythmic. I realized she was praying. I never asked what she prayed for.
I was afraid of the answer. On the eighth day, everything changed. I was in the barn that morning, treating one of the horses for a stone bruise, when I heard the crash. It came from the direction of the house.
Loud enough to carry across the yard even through the wind. I dropped my tools and ran. The kitchen was full of smoke. Takala stood by the stove, beating at flames that licked up the wall beside it.
The pot of stew she'd been making had boiled over, spilling grease onto the hot iron. The grease had caught fire. The flames had spread to a dish towel hanging too close. From there, to the dry wood of the wall.
I grabbed a bucket of water from the barrel by the door and threw it on the flames. The fire hissed and sputtered but didn't die. Takala was coughing, her eyes streaming from the smoke. I pulled her away from the stove and threw another bucket of water.
Then another. On the fourth bucket, the flames finally gave up. We stood there in the smoky kitchen. Both of us breathing hard.
Both of us covered in soot and water. The wall was blackened but intact. It could have been worse. Much worse.
Takala was shaking. Not from cold. From something else. Her hands trembled as she wiped her face.
When she looked at me, I saw something break behind her eyes. "Matto died in fire," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper. "When your soldiers burned our village, I watched him try to save the children trapped in a lodge."
"The roof fell on him. I heard him screaming. I could not reach him."
She sank down onto the floor, her back against the wall, and the shaking got worse. I knelt beside her, careful not to touch, not to crowd. "I didn't know," I said. "I wasn't there. I wasn't part of that."
"But you were part of the army that did it. You wore the same uniform. You followed the same orders."
She looked at me, and for the first time since she'd arrived, her face showed something other than hatred. It showed pain. Raw and terrible.
And old. "Do you know what it is like to smell burning flesh? To know it is someone you love and you can do nothing?"
I thought of Emily and the children. Of coming home to find them cold and still, the sickness having taken them while I was away serving at Fort Union. Of knowing that if I'd been there, maybe I could have saved them. Maybe not.
But at least I would have been there. "Yes," I said quietly. "I know."
Something shifted in her expression. Not forgiveness. Not acceptance.
But recognition. The acknowledgement that we both carried scars from different fires. She stood up abruptly and went to the basin to wash the soot from her hands. I opened the windows to let out the smoke, even though it meant letting in the cold.
We worked in silence, cleaning up the mess, checking the damage, making sure no embers remained to restart the fire. When we finished, she made fresh coffee and poured two cups. She set one in front of me without a word, but it was the first thing she'd done that felt like an offering instead of an obligation. We sat at opposite ends of the table and drank the coffee.
Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the shutters. Snow began to fall, heavy and wet, the kind that would pile up fast. "Why did you leave the army?" she asked suddenly. The question caught me off guard.
I set down my cup and looked at my hands, at the scars and calluses earned from years of work that had nothing to do with soldiering. "There was an order," I said slowly. "After a battle near Fort Craig, we'd captured some Apache fighters. Mostly young men, a few boys."