She helped a neighbor's wife with the persistent cough using osha root tea, and word traveled the way it does in a small valley, and people began coming by the ranch with ailments they hadn't known where to take. Not many people, enough. One afternoon in December, a rancher named Aldous Farr rode up from the south end of the valley with a swollen hand he'd wrapped in a dirty cloth and was trying not to look at. He sat down on the porch steps and Sadie unwrapped it without comment, held it up to the light, turned it once. "How long since it started?
Fever or not? " He gave terse answers in the way of a man who was embarrassed to have an ailment and more embarrassed to need help with it. She diagnosed a deep bruise with early infection along the tendon, cleaned the wound with what she had, packed it with a prickly pear poultice, and gave him instructions for the next four days in the flat direct way that made clear this was information, not opinion, and that following it was up to him. Aldous Farr was not a man who took advice easily. Mattis had known him for seven years and watched him argue with a blacksmith about the correct way to shoe his own horse, but he listened to every word Sadi spoke and left with the cloth wrapped exactly as she'd shown him. Mattis watched all of this from across the yard leaning against the corral post and understood something about her that he hadn't fully articulated before.
She was not a woman who had been made smaller by what had happened at the creek. She had been temporarily separated from the tools of her work and now she had the tools back and this was what she looked like at full power. It was something worth being present for. He received them on the porch with a matter-of-fact authority that made clear she was giving them a healer's attention, not a charity case's sympathy. The right questions, a methodical diagnosis from someone who has been doing this since she was young, and specific instructions on the way out.
Never vague reassurances. On a December evening with the first real snow coming sideways through the cottonwoods and both of them inside by the fire. Mattis looked across the table at Sadi sorting arrow seeds she dried, saving them for spring planting, and felt the weight of what he wanted to say pressing for a particular moment, and decided this one was as good as any. I'm not going to ask you to give up your people. She set down the seeds and looked at him.
I know that's not what this would be. He turned his cup on the table, looking for words that said what he meant precisely. But I'd like to know, can this be your place, too? Not instead of where you come from, in addition to it. Sadi was quiet for a moment.
He could see her taking the question seriously, the way she took all things. She was going to give it an honest answer, rather than a fast one, because a fast answer would be disrespectful to what he was actually asking. I was already thinking of it as my place. He looked at her. Since the third day, maybe the second.