Chapter 8: The Covenant

Kweina told him three days after the tribe’s visit that Daha wanted to come down again.

Coulter was at the barn when she said it, checking the shoes on the grey mare who had been moving slightly off on the left foreleg. He straightened and looked at her. “When.”

“Sunday,” she said. “If that is acceptable.”

“It’s acceptable,” he said. “What’s the occasion.”

Kweina looked at him with the particular patience she reserved for questions she considered to have obvious answers. “You have given your answer,” she said. “We have given ours. Among the Yahi that is not something that happens in a kitchen over coffee. It requires witnesses. It requires the proper words. It requires Daha.”

Coulter looked at her for a moment. “A ceremony.”

“What remains of one,” she said quietly. “We no longer have everything we once had. The songs, the — “ she paused, searching for the word — “the full ceremony. Much of it is gone with the people who carried it. Tsela knows what she knows. Wihi has told her what she can. It will not be what it once was.”

“Will it be enough,” Coulter said.

Kweina looked at him steadily. “It will be what it is. Among our people that has always had to be enough.”

He nodded. “Sunday then.”

He spent the intervening days working the ranch with the focused attention of a man who needs his hands occupied while his mind works through something large. He was not frightened of what Sunday represented. He was not uncertain about it. What he was, he decided on the third morning while splitting wood in the grey pre-dawn, was humbled by it — by the specific weight of what was being offered to him and what was being asked of him and the understanding that the two things were not separate.

He had not been a religious man since the war had reorganized his understanding of what God permitted. He still believed in something — the order of things, the moral structure beneath the visible world, the existence of obligation and its importance — but he had stopped placing that belief inside any particular institution or set of words. What he believed in, when he examined it carefully, was the idea that a man’s life meant something only insofar as he spent it in service of something beyond himself. The ranch had given him that in a limited way. What Sunday was offering was something considerably less limited.

He thought about his mother, who would have had a great deal to say about all of this and most of it would have been worth hearing. He thought about the men in Redding who had strong feelings about things that weren’t their business. He thought about Daha looking at the twin pines on a slow walk around the property and finding the word that meant a man whose inside and outside were made of the same material.

He thought about Miwena’s near-smile and the way it had rearranged her face.

He split wood until it was fully light and then went inside for his coffee.

They came on Sunday morning as they had come before, down the long slope through the tall grass in the early light. All eighteen of them, moving with the same unhurried deliberate pace. Coulter was on the porch with his coffee and watched them come and set the cup on the rail and went down the steps.