She hadn't thought about a name. She'd been so focused on the legal architecture that the name had seemed like a secondary thing, something for later. She sat with the question now, looking at the document in front of her. She thought about Toby running through the cottonwoods with his arms pumping. She thought about a door opening.
She thought about what the first thing you needed was when you arrived somewhere with nothing. Not a name, not a sign, not a declaration. Just warmth, just someone who didn't ask you to explain yourself before they decided you deserve to come inside. I'll think about it, she said. But she already knew.
The trial began in late April and ran for 9 days. Mara testified twice. Once in the first week, once in the third day of the second. Both times she wore the same gray dress because she had decided that consistency projected something she wanted the court to which was that she was not performing anything. She was the same person she had been the first day she'd walked in there, and the same person she'd been in the frozen field outside Gideon's ranch, and the same person who had stood on a porch on one leg and refused a powerful man to his face.
Ror's attorneys did what Whitlock had predicted. They worked on her reliability, on her grief, on the gap between what she claimed and what a widow on the frontier with no legal resources could reasonably have understood about document recording procedures. They were good at it. She could how effective it had been before against families who hadn't kept their originals, who couldn't produce witnesses, who had been too frightened or too beaten down to hold their ground in a courtroom. She held her ground.
She answered every question directly without elaboration, without defensiveness. When she didn't know something, she said so. When she knew something completely, she said that, too. She did not perform grief because her grief was not a performance. And she did not perform strength because she'd stopped performing things sometime in February on a frozen creek bed.
On the third day of the second week, Ror's lead attorney asked her whether she could be certain, given the circumstances of her husband's death and the state she'd been in following it, that her reading of the documents was objective. She looked at him, then at Ror, who was seated at the defense table with the particular controlled stillness of a man who has spent a long time believing that stillness communicates authority. She had known him for 3 years as a man who controlled Ironwood crossing through the specific power of making people uncertain about what he might do. She looked at him and felt none of the old fear, not because she was brave in some abstract sense, but because she had finally completely stopped believing that his certainty about his own power had anything to do with whether she was right. She looked back at the attorney."My husband was a careful man,"she said.
He filed his deed with a witness and a surveyor and a territorial recorder because he understood that paperwork was the difference between owning something and being told you never did. I read that document because I lived with the man who created it, and I understood what it meant. My grief didn't change what the surveyor's mark says or what year it was made or what the pre-standardization notation format looks like. She paused. You can ask me if I'm sad about my husband.
I am. You can ask me if I want Silus Ror held accountable for what happened to my family. I do. But those things don't change what's in the document. The document says what it says, regardless of how I feel about any of it.