Chapter 6

The auction was confirmed now. Saturday, twelve noon.

They had ridden the eighteen miles home from Long Fork in the Thursday dark.

Friday passed in a house that would not talk.

Then, after supper, Alva lifted a key off the nail by the stove.

She carried a lamp down the back hall.

Tacy followed, because Alva didn't tell her not to.

The gray cloth door at the end.

The key turned, and the lock gave easy, like it had been waiting.

Inside, the air was cold and smelled of dust and old wool.

A shape stood under a sheet in the corner.

Alva set the lamp on a trunk and pulled the sheet away.

A cradle. Empty. The wood dry and gone pale.

Beside it, a chair set on runners. A rocker.

One runner was worn smooth. The other wasn't worn at all.

"Eldred started building it," Alva said. "Never got the second runner even."

"He was dead before she came."

Twenty-four years, and no one had ever set it rocking.

Tacy put two fingers on the cradle rail and took them back.

On a shelf by the window sat a Bible, black, swollen with damp.

Alva took it down and opened it to the family pages.

She didn't have to search for the line.

Her own young hand had written it.

"Emmeline Deighton," she read. "Born February the second, 1862."

"Ten past five in the morning."

Her voice caught on the next part.

"Attended by Dollie Frain of Ranlow."

There it was. The full name. The town.

The county book Thursday had set down only "Dollie."

The Bible gave the rest of her.

Tacy's hand went to the cord at her throat out of habit.

Nothing hung there. The ring was in Alva's apron.

February the second. The birthday Alta had always kept for her.

Not the third, the day the county swore she died.

She'd been alive on the second. Named on the second.

Alta had baked her a cake on the second every year of her life.

She'd thought it only a number Alta had picked.

Alva closed the Bible over her thumb and went to the door.

"Shay," she called down the hall.

He came with his hat still on.

"Saddle the bay. Ride to Long Fork tonight."

"There's a woman in Ranlow named Dollie Frain. Ranlow's on the rail."

"Wire her to take the morning train in."

Shay looked past her to the open Bible and the empty cradle.

"Tell her what for?" he said.

Alva lifted the ring up on its cord.

"Tell her the D-Bar knows its own child now."

Shay didn't ask again. He went.

Alva turned back into the cold room.

Tacy was already on her knees at her carpetbag.

Her fingers worked the twine loose.

The letter had ridden eighteen hundred miles tied shut.

Alta's hand ran across the front, careful loops, a schoolteacher's.

"Open only when someone in that house knows the child for her own."

Tacy looked at the Bible, the named day, the ring in Alva's hand.

Then she broke the wax.

The paper was thin and the lines were few.

"A midwife brought her to me in the storm, three days old and breathing."

"She said the ranch had been told the baby died and was buried."

"I fed her on milk meant for my own, and called her Tacy, and the ring came in her blanket."

Tacy read it twice.

She held it up without a word.

Alva read it standing, the lamp behind her.

"Told the baby died and was buried," she said.

She looked at the box-shaped place the room was built around.

"They gave me a box and said it was kinder not to open it."

"I never opened it."

Her breath came short in the cold.

She came down slow, apron and knees, to the boards beside Tacy.

She lifted one cracked hand, the one that had held the ring all week.

She laid it against Tacy's cheek, light, like testing if it was warm.

"Emmeline," she said.