In the evenings, they talked by the fire or sat in a silence that stopped feeling like emptiness. She had a low, direct way of speaking that said what it meant and left room for what the other person was going to say, and he found that after enough days of it, he'd stopped filling his half of the space with noise just to fill it. She described the band she was traveling to. 40 people or so, a tight community that moved seasonally through country they'd worked for generations. She talked about them the way you talk about family, specific, complicated, with names and histories and accumulated small griefs that were just part of the texture of things.
Her uncle who was stubborn about the old ways in ways that were sometimes wisdom and sometimes just the stubbornness of a man who had lived long enough to be attached to his own certainties. A cousin who could find water in country that looked completely bone dry. The elder woman who had taught Sadie her medicine knowledge and who was slowing down now, part of why Sadie had made this particular trip alone. The elder not being able to manage the distance anymore. She talked about her people with a grief threaded through it that she didn't name.
She didn't need to. Mattis knew what it sounded like when someone spoke of community in the past tense. From across a distance that had no clean name. Because of things that had been taken and couldn't be returned. He knew enough about what the army had done in this territory to understand the shape of what she wasn't saying.
He brought up Anna that evening, unprompted. He hadn't talked about Anna to anyone except the priest and Benson on the anniversary of her death, and that had been a formal kind of speaking, more like filing a report than grieving. But sitting across the fire from Sadie with a cup of coffee going cold in his hands, things came out of him that he hadn't spoken aloud before. Anna had been from a cattle family in Sonora, the second of six daughters. She'd come north with her father when Mattis's father was expanding the herd and needed hands he could trust with breeding records.
Mattis had met her over a corral fence when he was 23 and she was 20. And from that first hour of talking, he had understood that she was sharper than him and funnier than him and that this particular gap between them would probably not close over time. It hadn't. She'd been good with books and numbers, good at reading cattle temperament before the cattle themselves knew they were going to be trouble. She'd kept a kitchen garden with a fond exasperated attention, talking about it like a minor child who grew things without asking permission.
The garden had gone to weeds in the two years since she died. He hadn't been able to pull it or plant it. It just sat there under the kitchen window doing what untended land does, and he walked past it every day without looking directly at it. One evening, the sixth day, Sadi looked up from the fire. Her eyes had found the yellow ribbon near the window.
He didn't answer right away. The ribbon was Anna's mother's, a length of trade cloth Anna had kept her whole life, first tied in her hair as a girl and later just hung where the light found it. He'd left it there because it was the kind of thing Anna would have wanted to stay exactly where it was. He gave Sadie that much. Not all of it.