Gratitude was part of it and the recognition of being welcomed into something and a simple warmth that came from the understanding that the woman he loved carried him forward with her even when she was going back to her people. Mattis and Sadie were married in May outside with the cottonwoods in new leaf and the paint mare and copper in the corral behind the ceremony and a handful of valley neighbors who had become if not quite friends then the good kind of neighbors, the kind a person is glad to have when years get hard. Sadie's aunt came four days on horseback and arrived the morning before. Looked Mattis over with the same direct measuring eyes Sadie I used when she was making a decision about something and said very little. That evening while Sadie I was inside with her aunt, the old woman came out to the porch where Mattis was watching the last of the light and stood beside him without preamble.
After a long silence in careful English, she is not easy. No, she will argue with you when you are wrong and sometimes when you are right. I've noticed. She chose this. The old woman turned to look at him directly.
She had good reasons to go east with the band. Many good reasons. She chose to come back here instead. That is not a small thing, Mattis Reyes. I know what Mattis said.
I'm not going to make her regret it. She studied him for another moment. Then she nodded once and went back inside. The county ledger in Cochise County recorded the marriage that summer. Two names, a date, a location.
San Simon Valley, Arizona Territory. Three lines on a page among hundreds of others. What those three lines couldn't hold was the size of what had started at a creek crossing in October with a coat thrown across cold water in the dark and the particular quality of attention one person pays to another when they are choosing against the weight of grief and loss and all the ordinary reasons not to to let something in. The physic garden grew.
The house held two people where it held one for too long and in the mornings when the light came over the Dos Cabezas and the frost was still on the ground and the valley was quiet the way it only gets in that first hour before the day fully begins you would sometimes see them both out there in the garden. One woman who knew the name of every plant and what it was for and what it needed. One man learning slowly. Both of them working in the unhurried way of people who were going to have plenty of time to get it right.