Red Mesa Ledger

The mesa itself seemed to hold its breath until the sun was well up. Red stone ran like a wound along the horizon and the wind came down off the high plateau with a dry, rattling susurration that pulled dust out of the creek bed and made the windmill creak like an old man waking. Maeve Callahan moved through the morning with the sort of economy that comes from years of waking to too little water and too much work: draw two buckets from the cistern, check the pump for leaks, feed Etta before school, mend the briar-split fence where the jackrabbits were learned to squeeze through. Her hands remembered tasks her face would not let her forget; the steady, small labors that meant this place kept breathing.

Etta braided her hair with stubborn little fingers, humming the same crooked hymn that had been in the house since Maeve’s husband died. The girl’s eyes were too big for her face, as bright as the scrape of tin on the washboard, and when she looked at Maeve there was an instinctive faith that someone would always answer. Maeve liked the trust, and hated that she deserved its simplicity. She had seen places where paper could change a river’s course, where signatures could turn a family’s well into a line on a ledger. She had learned, before she had children, about other people’s maps.

The notice nailed to the post by the road did not look like a map. It was white and crisp, the black letters stamped with a kind of officialness that made a hand tremble: “NOTICE OF REQUISITION — CALHOUN LINES & LAND DEVELOPMENT.” Under it, in smaller type, a list of plots, numbers, coordinates. Under those, the paragraph that finished the sentence for the valley: “Immediate right to water, easement for survey, and possession reserves exercised.” Someone had hammered it with a neat, practiced hand, not slack or angry, and left the nail head glinting in the sun the way a cocked gun might.

Maggie O’Dell brought the black coffee and the news at the same time. She had a way of moving through the world as if every worry could be tucked into a coin purse and strapped to the belt, but her smile that morning did not reach her eyes. "They posted them outside everyone’s place," she said. Her dry hands shook when she handed Maeve the cup. "Said there’s to be an appraisal in a week. Said the Company holds the easement and the surveyors been paid. Folks are taking the cash, Maeve. Hard not to when the well’s run thin."

There were faces down at the store that morning that Maeve had only nodded to from the porch over the years: honest hands, cheated by a slow drought or a trick of usury. The notices had a smell of ink and money and the kind of certainty that comes from men who have a ledger bigger than a town. Maeve had thought, long after the war and after the guns, that paper was easier than blood. Then she read the small type about possession and the word possession tasted, in her mouth, like a threat.

By midday the sheriff rolled in with the slow, dusty authority of a man who had memorized boundaries on the map more than he had memorized the people who lived between them. Garrett Harlan took off his hat when he spoke and put it back on with an old, ritual weariness. "Calhoun’s good at getting what he wants," he said, looking at the notice as if it were a squall on the horizon. "Company owns the right on paper most times. We don’t have the men to press against his lawyers, Maeve."

Maeve watched the way the sheriff's jaw worked. There are ways a man can say no without closing his hands, and Garrett had learned to keep his hands open and his words dry. "You could tell them to leave the kids’ wells alone," she said. The words felt foolish in her mouth, small as the whistling of livestock.

He lifted his hands, palms out, and the gesture settled like a gavel between them. "I ain’t the man to start a war, Maeve. If Calhoun brings surveyors and the Company men come with a badge from the county, I don’t have the force to stop a posse. Don’t make this harder."

When the sheriff left, the town gathered in the dust like something making a decision. Men and women who had been there before the railroad tongues were laying plans and doubts on the board like cards. Maeve stood for a long while at the fence, the notice fluttering its edges in the wind like a thin flag. She could feel the old pattern of her life — the scattered days of a woman who could gut a rabbit and read the weather by the color of the soil — unravelling at one corner. There was an ache in her ribs she had not felt since the night the army took rifles and left promises. She thought of the ledger they had always whispered about, the Red Mesa ledger, and how paper had always been a kind of law on top of the law. She thought of what it would mean if a man with locomotive money decided that this valley’s water belonged on a paper in his office.

At dusk, when the sun bled into the mesa and the sky turned a bruise-colored violet, someone came staggering down the ridge. A neighbor had ridden hard to the Callahan place and thrown himself from his horse with a face the color of old stories. His voice cracked like a rope as he told of a body found beyond the lowbrush, by Halvorsen’s shack. Maeve felt the ground drop into the place where one learns that the world can tilt without warning. She took the kerosene lamp and the rifle and walked into the dark.