Shelter and Trouble

I

The house had been built for two and was now occupied by one, and the arithmetic of this was visible in every room. Two chairs at the table but only the one near the stove showed wear. Two hooks by the door but only the left hook held a coat. The bedroom had a bed sized for a marriage and slept at an angle, the sheets pulled toward the window side where Alma Goss lay each night with her face to the glass, watching the dark until it resolved into the particular gray that preceded dawn in the Manzano foothills.

She had been alone in the house for eleven months. Her husband, Phelan, had gone to Albuquerque for work in January and had not come back by February and had sent a letter in March saying he would not be coming back at all. The letter was two paragraphs. The first paragraph explained that he had found employment at the rail yards and had taken a room on Second Street. The second paragraph suggested she might want to sell the claim. He did not say to whom. He did not say he was sorry, either, which Alma appreciated, because sorry would have asked something of her and she had nothing left to give to a man who had walked away from a house in January and not even bothered to bank the stove.

She had come to New Mexico from Pennsylvania with Phelan four years ago, following a land agent’s circular that described the Manzano Basin as “well-watered and suited to cultivation.” The first claim was true in the way that a clock is right twice a day — the water came, violently, during the summer monsoons, and then it went. The second was not true at all. They had tried wheat, which burned. They had tried corn, which the wind shredded before it tasseled. They had tried sheep, which died of a disease the veterinarian in Belen could not name and the neighbors attributed to the soil itself.

The house was ten miles from Bernardo, which was the nearest settlement large enough to have a post office and a store and an opinion about her. Bernardo was not a town in any sense a person from the East would recognize — a crossroads with a depot, a scattering of adobes, a church that held services every third Sunday when the circuit priest remembered, and a general store run by a family named Vigil who had been there so long they regarded the railroad as an intrusion. The country between was open and mostly flat, creosote and chamisa interrupted by arroyos that ran dry ten months of the year and ran furious the other two. In October, she had watched a wall of brown water come down the arroyo nearest the house, carrying a fence post, a boot, and what looked like the remains of a chicken coop. The water passed. The arroyo dried. She went out and retrieved the fence post because she needed one.

II

The first delegation came in November. Mrs. Padilla, who ran the post office from a counter in her kitchen, drove out in her husband’s wagon with a flour sack of provisions — beans, lard, coffee, a tin of peaches — and a set of questions she had been formulating since August.

“You’ll freeze,” Mrs. Padilla said, standing in the doorway, looking at the stove. The stove was lit. The room was warm enough. But Mrs. Padilla was not speaking about the present temperature. She was speaking about a future she had already decided upon: Alma alone, the fire gone out, the body discovered in spring when someone finally had reason to come up the road. Mrs. Padilla had a talent for grief that preceded its occasion.

“I won’t freeze,” Alma said.

“Phelan’s not coming back.”

“I know that.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

The question had a simplicity that Alma respected. What was she doing here? She was keeping a house. She was keeping it in the way that one keeps a promise or keeps a watch — not maintaining it but holding it, the way you hold a place in a line for someone who may or may not return. She could not have said this to Mrs. Padilla, who dealt in facts, and a woman alone ten miles from a settlement was a fact that pointed in only one direction.

“I have wood,” Alma said. “I have water. The well is good.”

“The well freezes.”

“Then I’ll melt snow.”

Mrs. Padilla sat at the table — in the unused chair, the one across from the stove — and looked at Alma with an expression that was not unkind but was calculating. She was adding things up. The provisions in the sack, the distance from town, the weight of a woman’s stubbornness against the weight of winter in the Manzanos. She arrived at a number and the number did not favor Alma.

“The Vigils’ boy could take you to the depot. There’s a room above the store. It’s nothing fancy but it’s warm and you’d be among people.”

“I’m among the house,” Alma said, and the sentence came out wrong, or came out right in a way she had not intended. She was among the house. She was in the company of its rooms, its sounds, its particular way of settling at night when the wood contracted and the walls made small sharp noises like knuckles cracking. The house was company. Insufficient and at times antagonistic — the draft through the bedroom window, the leak in the southwest corner that no amount of tar and canvas would permanently fix — but it was what she had. Phelan’s name was on the claim, but Phelan had left. The land office in Santa Fe might dispute her right to be here. The house itself did not. It admitted her every night and held her weight and kept the wind on the other side of the walls, and in return she kept the fire and wiped the window glass with a rag soaked in vinegar so that the light came through clean.

Mrs. Padilla left the provisions and drove back to Bernardo. She told the Vigils. The Vigils told the circuit priest when he came through the following Sunday. The priest told the deputy who worked out of Socorro, forty miles south, when the deputy came through on his monthly round.

III

The deputy’s name was Amado Salazar, and he arrived in December on a horse that was unhappy about the climb. He was twenty-six, appointed by the county sheriff to handle the territory south of Belen and north of San Antonio, a stretch of country so large and so thinly settled that his primary duties were resolving cattle disputes and looking for people who did not want to be found. He had not previously been asked to look for a person who wanted very much to be exactly where she was.

He dismounted and stood in the yard. The house was a modest frame structure — not adobe, which would have been more sensible, but wood, built by a man from Ohio who understood houses in terms of lumber and had not accounted for the way the dry air would split boards and shrink joints until the walls were gapped like an old fence. Alma had stuffed the gaps with rags and newspaper and, in one place, a length of rabbit fur nailed to the frame with tacks pulled from a calendar. The effect was eccentric. It was also effective.

Alma came to the door before he knocked. She had seen his dust from the window — you could see dust for miles here, and she had learned to read a dust column the way a sailor reads weather. One horse, one rider, no wagon. An errand.

“Mrs. Goss.”

“Deputy.”

“I’m told your husband has left the claim.”

“He left me. I don’t know that he left the claim. You’d have to ask the land office whether a man can leave a claim by leaving his wife in it.”

Salazar took off his hat. It was black and sweat-stained and had a shape that suggested it had been sat on more than once. He held it the way men do when they want something to hold while they think.

“The concern is that you’re alone up here.”

“The concern is whose?”

“Mrs. Padilla’s. The Vigils’. Father Dominguez mentioned it. Frankly, ma’am, I share the concern. This isn’t country for a woman alone.”

“What country is?”

The question stopped him. He looked at the yard — the wire clothesline, the juniper woodstack, the chicken coop with its three surviving hens. He looked at the mountains, which were not large but were large enough to hold snow from November to March and send their melt down through the arroyos with enough force to rearrange the landscape. He looked at Alma Goss, who was forty-one and had the hands of a woman who split her own wood.

“I can’t make you leave,” he said.

“No.”

“But I can tell you it’s not safe.”

“I know what’s safe and what isn’t.”

He was quiet. A quail called from somewhere in the chamisa. Salazar looked at the mountains and then back at Alma, and she could see him trying to fit her into a category he understood. He had categories for drunks and trespassers and men who beat their horses. He did not have a category for a woman who had been left and had decided not to notice.

“And you’ll stay.”

“Yes.”

He put his hat back on. He wrote something in a notebook he carried in his shirt pocket — she could see the pencil moving but not the words. A complaint? A welfare check? He mounted and rode south without looking back, and the dust he raised stayed visible for a long time, catching the late-afternoon light before settling back into the ground.

IV

The winter was what winter is in the Manzano foothills: a negotiation between the person and the cold, conducted daily, won temporarily, never resolved. Alma woke each morning to a house that had cooled overnight — the stove banked but not out, the embers still red under the ash if she had done it right. She usually did it right. She had learned from eleven months of doing it wrong. She raked the ash and fed the embers and built the fire up until the stovetop was hot enough to boil water, and then she boiled water and drank it and boiled more and drank that too.

The well froze in January, as Mrs. Padilla had predicted. A night when the temperature dropped below zero and the stars looked aggressive. Alma found it at dawn — the bucket rope slack, the water sealed beneath a plate of ice. She could hear the ice ticking, adjusting, settling into its new solidity. She took the ax and broke it. Forty minutes. Her shoulders ached for three days. The well froze again the following week and she broke it again. This became the rhythm of January: freeze, break, draw, carry, heat.

She talked to the house. Not in any way she would have admitted to Mrs. Padilla — not out loud, not in full sentences. But she addressed it. She said come on when the stove draft was sluggish. She said hold when the wind hit the southwest wall and the whole structure shuddered. She said good when the lamp glass warmed under her hands and the light steadied.

In February the southwest corner leaked again. Rain ran down the interior wall and pooled on the floor and the pool froze overnight into a shallow lens of ice that caught the morning light and threw it across the ceiling in a pattern so unexpectedly beautiful that Alma stood in the doorway and watched it for five minutes before she thought about the damage. The water was in the wall. The wood would rot. The frost would work into the rot and the wall would soften and eventually give way in some future season she might or might not be here to witness. She packed the crack with tar and canvas and oakum she had bought from the Vigils’ store in the fall.

But the light on the ceiling. She kept thinking about the light on the ceiling. It had tracked across the plaster in a shape that was not a rectangle and not a circle but something the house and the water and the sun had made together without intending to. The most beautiful thing she had seen in months, and it was a symptom of failure. She did not know what to do with this. She tarred the crack and the light did not come back.

V

Enoch Britten owned the land on the north side. He ran forty head on six hundred acres, which was not enough of either, and he had the weathered, skeptical look of a man who knew this and did it anyway. He came by in March, when the snow was melting and the arroyos were starting to make noise.

“Your fence is down on the east side,” he said. He said it from the yard. He did not come to the door.

“I know.”

“My cattle are getting through.”

“They’re welcome to what’s here. There’s nothing for them.”

“That’s the problem, Mrs. Goss. There’s nothing for them and they go through your land to the arroyo and then I have to go get them out of the arroyo and last week one broke a leg and I had to shoot it.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“I’m not asking for sorry. I’m asking you to fix your fence.”

She fixed the fence. It took two days. She used the post she had retrieved from the arroyo in October and three lengths of wire salvaged from a spool Phelan had left in the shed, the wire rusted but functional, the rust working into her palms and leaving marks that looked like burns. On the second day the wind came up and the wire sang in her hands — a high, thin sound that seemed to come from the metal itself. She set the last staple and stood back and looked at the line of wire running north across the slope, catching the light in bright points that diminished into the distance.

She fixed the fence and Britten’s cattle stayed on Britten’s side and Britten did not come back to the yard, but she saw his dust sometimes, moving along the fence line, checking.

There was a fourth perspective, which was Phelan’s, and it arrived by letter in April. A single page, forwarded through the post office in Bernardo, in which he informed her that he was filing to void the claim. The land office required continuous occupation and improvement, and he had not been occupying or improving, and therefore the claim was forfeit unless she wished to file in her own name, which she could not do because women could not file homestead claims in the Territory of New Mexico. He presented this without comment, the way he had presented his departure without apology.

Alma read the letter at the table, in the chair near the stove. She read it twice. The second reading was not for comprehension but for the tone. She was listening for some residue of the man who had carried boards up the hillside and nailed them into a house and slept beside her for three years. She did not find it. The letter could have been written by any clerk about any parcel of disputed ground. She folded it and put it in the drawer with the first letter, and she went outside and looked at the house. It was not a beautiful house. A box of wood set into a hillside, with a corrugated roof and a chimney that listed east and windows too small for the walls they were set in. But it was there. She knew the rot was working behind the canvas and the oakum, in the dark space between the inner wall and the outer wall where she could not see and could not reach. The house was surviving the way she was surviving — not by being sound, but by holding.

VI

She did not file a claim. She did not leave. She occupied a legal twilight — the wife of a man who had voided his claim on land she lived on, in a house she maintained, in a territory that did not recognize her right to hold it. The land office in Santa Fe would eventually send someone. Or it would not.

The spring was dry. The arroyos ran for two weeks in April and then stopped. The well held, but the water tasted different — minerally, deeper, as though the drought had drawn it from some stratum where the rock was older and less willing to part with what it held.

The garden she planted behind the house — beans, squash, a row of chiles grown from seeds given to her by a woman at the Vigils’ store whose name she did not know — came up sparse and pale. She watered from the well, two buckets at a time, morning and evening, the path between the well and the garden becoming a packed track in the otherwise wild ground. Two inches deep in May. Three by June. The soil compacted under her feet into something that was almost a floor.

Mrs. Padilla came again in June, without provisions, driving her own wagon. She had a different look. Not concern. Something cooler.

“The Vigils heard from the land office. They say Phelan voided. They say you have no standing.”

“I know.”

“Then you know they’ll come eventually.”

“Eventually isn’t today.”

Mrs. Padilla looked at the garden. She looked at the fence, repaired. She looked at the house, which had weathered another season and was still standing, still leaking in the southwest corner, still holding Alma Goss inside it each night like a hand holding a stone — not gently, not cruelly, but with the impersonal grip of a thing that does not know it is holding.

“You’re a stubborn woman,” Mrs. Padilla said.

“I’m a woman with a house.”

“It’s not your house.”

“Whose is it?”

Mrs. Padilla did not have an answer for this. The claim was voided. The house belonged to the Territory, or to the land office, or to the next person who filed. Alma knew this. She also knew that the well was producing water and the beans were growing and the southwest wall was rotting behind its patch, and that none of these facts answered Mrs. Padilla’s question or her own.

Mrs. Padilla drove back to Bernardo. Alma went inside. She sat at the table in the chair near the stove and listened to the house making its evening sounds: the wood adjusting to the cooling air, the stove ticking, the window glass humming faintly in the frame as the wind came down off the mountains and pressed against the walls.

The light was going. The long June light that filled the rooms all afternoon was pulling back toward the west, and the shadows were coming in from the east like water, filling the corners first, then the floor, then the walls.

She lit the lamp. The glass warmed under her hands.

From outside came the sound of the wind shifting, and then something else — a creak from the southwest corner, deeper than settling wood. The rot. She could hear it now, or imagined she could, working in the dark space she had tarred and packed and could not see into. The wall would hold or it would not. She would be here either way, at least until she wasn’t, and she could not have said whether that was the same thing as choosing to stay or simply the absence of leaving.