They Sent Me to Prison for the Family Fire, So I Came Home to Sell the Ranch Out From Under Them novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sign on Monday
At the Basque festival dinner Maite's mother thanks God for the whole family and tells two hundred neighbors Maite will sign the ranch transfer on Monday; Maite takes the microphone, names the two who lied, tears the paper in half and walks out to the man at the gate.
My mother thanked God for the whole family, back together at last, and she did it into a microphone in front of two hundred people.
I was sitting at the head table in a blue dress my sister had ironed for me.
I had been home for eleven days.
"And on Monday," my mother said, "Maite will sign the range transfer, to put the past behind us."
The tent clapped.
They clapped for a woman who had come out of Carson City on a bus with a plastic bag of her things.
Under the long white lights the neighbors turned in their folding chairs to look at me and smile.
A plate of lamb and beans sat in front of me, and nobody had said a word to me about a transfer until that second.
My father leaned over with his big soft hands and slid a folded paper under the edge of my plate.
"Just your name, mija," he said, under the noise.
"Ten minutes at the bank on Monday, and it's over."
I looked at the paper.
It was typed, three pages, with a yellow flag stuck where I was meant to sign.
On the line above the flag it said that I was the blood heir of Josu Etcheverry.
I picked it up.
I didn't look at my mother.
I had learned that in eleven weeks at seventeen and relearned it in five years inside.
When Arantxa Etcheverry looked at me, she looked at my face, my dress, the microphone, the wall behind me.
She had never once looked at my hands.
My sister Amaia sat beside me with her left hand flat on the white tablecloth, and the split in her thumbnail caught the light.
Abuela's thumb, the aunts called it.
Amaia had been teased for it since she was two, and she was the one they all loved.
She was crying already, softly, the way she always cried when the family was in a room together.
"Maite," she whispered.
"Please just stay sitting."
I stood up.
The chair scraped, and the whole tent went quiet at once.
My mother held out the microphone to me with a smile that had no room in it.
I took it.
It was warm from her hand.
"Good evening," I said, and my voice came back at me off the canvas.
"Most of you know me.
"I'm the girl they found in a Reno group home, and I was loved for eleven weeks."
Someone near the back coughed.
"Five years ago this county said I burned down the barn on this family's ranch.
"A man named in this room's own prayers died in that fire.
"I served five years in Carson City for it, and I did not set it."
My father stood up fast.
"Maite."
"I'm not done, Josu."
I had not called him anything in five years.
I felt the whole tent lean toward me.
"Two people told the court I did it.
"My brother Iker swore he saw me with the gas can.
"He's sitting right there."
Iker was at the second table in his good canvas coat, with his hat in his hands and his eyes on the cloth.
"The foreman's son swore I'd talked about burning the place.
"We were sleeping together at the time, and I never said it."
A woman gasped.
The foreman's son wasn't in the tent, but half the tent was his family.
"I came home to a dinner and a pen," I said.
"I'll answer the dinner."
I unfolded the transfer in both hands.
The burn scar across my left palm showed pale and shiny in the light.
I held it up, so that the room could see what my mother wouldn't.
Then I tore the paper straight down the middle.
I tore the halves again.
Amaia made a sound like a child.
My father said my name in a voice I had never heard him use, and it wasn't soft anymore.
I set the pieces on the head table, on top of the lamb, and put the microphone down beside them.
It rang once against the cloth.
"Thank you for the beans," I said.
I walked down the aisle between the tables.
Nobody stopped me.
A hundred faces turned like sheep in a pen, and a man at the back stood up and took off his hat, and then the old women near him did the same, and I didn't know why.
I went out through the flap into the dark.
Parked trucks stood in rows on the cold gravel behind the tent, and beyond them the lights of Elko lay low and orange under the mountains.
One man was standing at the gate to the lot with a flashlight pointed at the ground.
He had held that gate open for the bus eleven days ago.
He had held a gate open outside the prison in Carson City on the first Sunday of every month for five years while I sat inside and let him.
Ansel Callister wore his gray county jacket, and a stamp stuck out of the breast pocket.
"You heard," I said.
"The whole lot heard," he said.
"They've got speakers on the poles."
I almost laughed.
I looked down and saw that my hands were shaking, both of them, and that I hadn't felt it until now.
Behind us, back in the tent, the microphone came on again with a thump.
My mother's voice carried across the whole gravel lot, calm and warm and patient.
"She is overwrought," Arantxa Etcheverry told the neighbors.
"She will sign.
"She always comes home."
Ansel looked at me.
I looked at his truck.
"Don't take me to the ranch," I said.
"I wasn't going to," he said.
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