Embers of Hope
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: What the World Outside Knows
The man’s name was Garrett Hollis and he ran cattle on the three hundred acres that bordered Coulter’s eastern fence line and had done so for two years. He was not a bad man in any way that Coulter could specifically identify. He was simply a man of his time and place, which meant he carried certain assumptions about the natural order of things the way he carried his belt knife — so habitually that he had stopped being aware it was there.
He rode up on a Thursday morning in the fifth week, coming along the fence line from the east the way he usually did when he had something on his mind and wanted the approach to look casual. Coulter was replacing a section of fence post near the eastern gate and saw him coming from a quarter mile out and had time to think about what he was going to say before Hollis arrived and swung down from his horse and looped the reins over the fence and said, “Morning, Vane.”
“Hollis,” Coulter said.
“Saw your smoke last night. Thought I’d ride over.” He looked toward the house. “You’ve got company.”
It was not a question. Coulter set his post driver down and looked at Hollis with the same steady attention he gave everything.
“I do,” he said.
Hollis worked his jaw slightly. He was perhaps forty, weathered, with the particular squint of a man who has spent most of his life outdoors reading distances. “Heard in town you’d been buying extra provisions. Johnson at the supply said you’d doubled your flour order.”
“Johnson talks too much,” Coulter said pleasantly.
“He does,” Hollis agreed, equally pleasant. “Who’s staying with you.”
Coulter looked at him for a moment. “Three women,” he said. “They’re working the ranch with me through the season.”
The silence that followed had a specific texture. Hollis looked at the house again. At the kitchen garden visible beyond the corner of the porch where Tsela had been working that morning and was not working now, having gone inside some minutes before Hollis appeared on the fence line, which told Coulter that Tsela had seen him coming before Coulter had.
“Indian women,” Hollis said. Not a question.
“Yahi,” Coulter said.
Another silence. Hollis took his hat off and turned it in his hands and put it back on. “Coulter. You understand what people are going to say.”
“I have a fair idea,” Coulter said. “I find I don’t have much interest in it.”
Hollis looked at him with the expression of a man trying to determine whether his neighbor is being deliberately obtuse or has simply thought the situation through further than he has and arrived somewhere Hollis can’t follow. He appeared to conclude it was the latter, which was accurate.
“It’s not just talk,” Hollis said. “There are men in Redding who feel strongly about this kind of thing.”
“There are men in Redding who feel strongly about most things that aren’t their business,” Coulter said. “I’ve noticed that feeling strongly appears to be a substitute for thinking carefully.”
Hollis was quiet for a moment. He looked down the fence line and then back at Coulter. “I’m not coming here to cause trouble. I’m coming here because we’ve been decent neighbors for two years and I thought you deserved a plain word from someone who doesn’t wish you ill.”
Coulter recognized the fairness of this and nodded. “I appreciate that. Truly.”
“Then hear it plain. There are men who will not leave this alone. You understand me.”
“I understand you,” Coulter said.
Hollis held his eyes for a moment. Then he unclooped his reins and remounted. He settled in the saddle and looked down at Coulter with something in his face that was not hostility and was not approval and was perhaps the particular discomfort of a decent man who has delivered a true message he wishes he hadn’t needed to deliver.
“Watch yourself,” he said, and turned his horse east and rode back along the fence line.
Coulter watched him go. Then he picked up the post driver and went back to work, turning the conversation over in his mind the way he turned most things, steadily and without panic, looking at it from each angle and determining what it actually meant and what it required of him.
What it meant was that the ranch was no longer a private world. It had probably never been a private world — privacy being an illusion that solitary men built and maintained until something punctured it — but he had been operating as though the five weeks inside its fence lines had been invisible to the surrounding country. They had not been invisible. They had been observed and discussed and were now, apparently, a matter of feeling strongly in Redding.
What it required of him was a decision about how much that mattered.
He set the last post and tamped it solid and concluded that it mattered practically and not at all in principle, which meant it had to be accounted for without being surrendered to.
He told them that evening.
He had thought about not telling them and discarded the thought within an hour of Hollis’s departure. They were not children to be protected from the weather. They had been surviving the precise weather that Hollis was describing since before Coulter arrived in this country. The least he owed them was the information.
They sat at the table after supper and he laid it out plainly. A neighbor had come. People in town knew there were women living at the ranch. There were men who would not leave it alone.
Kweina translated for Miwena as he spoke. Tsela needed no translation.
When he finished, Tsela said, “We know this.”
“I know you know it,” Coulter said. “I wanted to say it directly.”
“What do you intend to do,” Kweina said.
“Nothing different,” Coulter said. “We go on as we are. I’m not going to change what I’m doing because of what men in Redding think about it.”
Miwena said something in Yana. Her voice was level.
“She says,” Kweina said, “that we have been hiding in those hills for three years because of what men in Redding think. She says she would like to understand why this is different.”
Coulter looked at Miwena. She was watching him with the straight-on attention she brought to everything, waiting for an answer that was going to have to be real to be worth anything to her.
“Because hiding didn’t keep your people safe,” he said. “You came down out of those hills because hiding had run its course. You made a different choice. I’m making a different choice too. And I’ll defend it.”
Kweina translated. Miwena listened and looked at the table and then back at him.
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