Jasper paused, his hand on the gate-latch. A slow, dry sort of grin twitched the corner of his mouth—the only part of his face that ever acknowledged they were both living inside a joke whose punchline had been forgotten during the Buchanan administration. “Then we’ll eat the mustard plain, like rabbits.”
He walked off toward the wagon road without another word, his long, ungainly stride eating up the grade as if he were still climbing scaffolding with a hod of mortar on his shoulder.
Isabelle watched him go until the blue of his coat vanished behind the screen of scrub-oak. Then she turned back toward the cabin, where Toby was currently trying to balance a dead beetle on the bridge of his nose.
*
The workshop smelled of hot oil, damp lime, and the particular, sour sweetness of unwashed wool that seemed to cling to everything in the foothills after the winter rains.
Jasper didn’t find Strickland at the blacksmith’s. The magistrate was sitting on a three-legged stool outside the land office, whittling a piece of sugar-pine into very thin, useless curls while he discussed the price of barley with a teamster who had three fingers missing from his left hand.
“Prescott,” Strickland said without looking up from his pine-stick. He was a small, neat man who wore city boots even when the mud was up to the stirrups, and his hair was pomaded with bear-grease that smelled faintly of cinnamon. “I was just telling Miller here that if your steam-contraption keeps up that rattling through the night, the town council will have to declare the gully a common nuisance.”
“The gully’s been a nuisance since the Indians left,” Jasper said, leaning his bulk against the door-jamb. “Mostly on account of the gravel.”
“The gravel belongs to the state, Jasper. Or to the railroad syndicate, depending on which way the legislature votes after the whiskey wears off.” Strickland flicked a curl of pine off his knee. “You’re six weeks behind on the boiler inspection.”
“The boiler’s not a locomotive. It doesn’t travel through the streets frightening horses.”
“It frightens Mrs. Genter. She says the smoke smells like a burning wool-warehouse.”
“Mrs. Genter thinks everything smells like a burning warehouse since the chimney fire in ’61. It’s her liver.” Jasper reached into his pocket and pulled out a greasy iron bolt. He began to turn it slowly between his thumb and forefinger. “I need three feet of five-eighths copper tubing and twenty pounds of Welsh coal.”
Strickland stopped whittling. He looked up, his small, dark eyes sharp as gimlets behind gold-rimmed spectacles that didn’t have any ears on them—they pinched the bridge of his nose with a little steel spring. “You haven’t paid for the last forty pounds of coal, Jasper. The bill came up from Stockton on the stage Tuesday.”
“The stage brought twenty pounds of coal and thirty pounds of slate-slack. I used the slack to bank the furnace, and it wouldn’t draw enough heat to boil a kettle of beans.”
“That’s between you and the freighter.”
“The freighter’s your brother-in-law.”
“Which is precisely why I don’t interfere in his business.” Strickland stood up, brushing a few yellow pine-curls from his trousers. He was five-foot-eight and carried himself like a man who spent his Sundays practicing how to look stern in front of a looking-glass. “Look here, Prescott. The Evans woman is holding forty acres of bottom land that hasn’t paid an inheritance fee since her uncle died of the dropsy. If you want the tubing, and if you want me to misplace the tax-roll for another month, you can sign a quitclaim on the lower timber-cove.”
Jasper stopped turning the bolt. His thumb stayed pressed against the threads until the metal disappeared in his palm.
“That’s Isabelle’s timber,” he said. His voice dropped half an octave, losing its bird-like pipe and taking on the flat, heavy resonance of a paving stone settling into its bed. “Her grandfather planted those cedars when the Mexicans were still riding mules through here.”
“Her grandfather’s bones have been turning into clay since the Taylor administration. She can’t eat cedar shingles, Jasper. And neither can you, though God knows you’ve tried harder than most.” Strickland stepped closer, lowering his voice so the teamster couldn’t hear. “She’s twenty-eight years old, she lives in a shed that leaks like a sieve, and she spends half her time mending trousers for men who don’t even remember her first name. Let her go. You take the upper claim—there’s good placer gravel up by the divide where no one’ll bother you with boilers—and let the county take the cove. We’ll turn it into a timber-lot for the railroad tie-contract.”
Jasper looked down at the magistrate. He didn’t feel angry; he felt a strange, cold clarity, like the moment before a five-ton granite lintel slips off the rollers and you have to decide whether to jump clear or stay and try to catch the weight on your shoulder.
“She likes the trees,” Jasper said simply.
“People like a great many things they can’t afford, Prescott. That’s why we have courts.”
“She likes the way they look when the sun hits the ridge at four o’clock,” Jasper repeated, as if Strickland hadn’t spoken. “She says they look like an old coat that’s been brushed until the nap comes back.”
Strickland stared at him for three seconds, then gave a short, dry snort of disgust. “You’re a fool, Jasper. A stone-mason with a machine-shop heart. When the boiler blows—and it *will* blow, because you’re too stubborn to buy proper rivets—don’t come to my office asking for a coroner’s permit.”
“I won’t,” Jasper said. “I’ll bury her myself.”
He turned on his heel and walked back down toward the creek, his boots kicking up little puffs of yellow dust that settled slowly back onto the manzanita leaves.
*
By three o’clock the wind had died down, leaving the gully trapped in that breathless, golden heat that California hills manage to summon even when the snow is still knee-deep four thousand feet above.
Isabelle was sitting on an overturned salt-barrel by the cabin door, trying to darn a pair of Toby’s drawers with coarse sail-twine because the cotton thread had given out on Tuesday. Her fingers were red and swollen at the joints—not from age, but from twenty years of scrubbing wool in cold creek water and hauling buckets up the granite incline.
Jasper came up the path without his coat, carrying the copper tubing over his shoulder like a long, slender snake. He dropped it in the dirt by the water-butt with a dull *clink*.
“Did you see him?” she asked, not looking up from the patch.
“I saw him.”
“And?”
“He wants the lower timber-cove.”
Isabelle’s needle stopped. She held the gray flannel taut across her knuckles, her thumb pressing down until the skin went white. “For the railroad?”
“For the railroad.”
She sat very still for a long moment, watching a lizard scuttle across the warm face of the granite boulder beside the door. The cedar grove down in the cove was the only part of the original grant that her father hadn’t mortgaged to buy a hydraulic pump that had turned out to be made of cast lead instead of steel. It was where she went when the house felt too small—which was most days between October and May.
“Did you sign anything?” she asked.
“I told him I’d bury you myself first.”
She looked up then, her eyes—which were the color of stagnant river-water after a rain—meeting his with a quick, hard flash of iron. “You’re a great comfort, Jasper Prescott. Has anyone ever told you that you have the bedside manner of a derrick?”
“Frequently,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the water-trough and wiping his neck with a rag that was dirtier than his skin. “Usually just before they throw a chisel at me.”
“We can’t pay the tax on the cove.”
“No.”
“And if we don’t pay it, Strickland will have the sheriff post the notices by Monday.”