It happened the way healing happens — not all at once, but in small stubborn increments that added up while nobody was watching. The Kline widow's seep, which had been giving a bucket a day of brown sludge, ran clear by the end of the first week. The livery well, dry for two years, started seeping on a Tuesday, and by Friday you could hear water when you dropped a stone. People took to dropping stones down their wells just to hear it, the way they'd once knocked on wood for luck.
Caleb walked the town every morning with his dowsing rods and a notebook, checking each well, marking the levels, telling people when to rest a well and when to draw. He did it without being asked and without being paid, and when the town council tried to pay him he said he'd think about it, which in Caleb Mercer's language meant yes, eventually, when he was done being stubborn about it.
The territorial court moved slower than water but surer. In Prescott, a judge with no love for bankers reviewed the foreclosure sales of the last three years — every farm Whitmore had bought for pennies while the creek ran dry behind his dam — and reversed them one by one. Deeds went back to the Abernathys, to the Klines, to a dozen families who'd been living in tents on the edge of town. The bank's new manager, a nervous young man from Tucson who kept looking over his shoulder as if Whitmore might walk back in, signed the papers without argument.
Nobody went hungry that winter. The creek ran, the wells filled, and for the first time in three years Copper Creek planted a crop without first holding a meeting about whether it was worth the water.
The Abernathys got their farm back in December — all sixty acres Whitmore had bought for eleven dollars at the foreclosure auction. Caleb rode out with the deed papers himself, because Crowe asked him to and because he wanted to see it. Old Abernathy stood in his own doorway holding the paper like it might dissolve, and his wife sat down right there on the step and cried, and their boys ran out to the dry field and just stood in it, looking at dirt that was theirs again.
"You know what the judge said?" Abernathy asked Caleb, folding the deed with shaking hands. "He said fraud vitiates everything. Fancy word. Means a thief can't keep what he stole, no matter how many papers he writes."
"Good word," Caleb said.
Up in Prescott, the federal trial made the papers all winter. Whitmore's lawyers fought hard — money buys good lawyers — but the tally book didn't lie, and Amos Barlow on a witness stand turned out to be the most immovable object in the territory. Twenty years, the jury gave him. Commissioner Reed got twelve, and a one-way trip out of territorial politics. When the news reached Copper Creek, Crowe read it aloud in the church, and nobody cheered — they just nodded, the way people nod when a debt is finally marked paid.
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They buried Elias Hartwell properly in October.
It wasn't a second funeral, Elise said — it was the first real one. The first one had been for an accident, and there hadn't been an accident. So the town turned out on a Saturday morning, near two hundred people, and stood around the grave up on the hill while Reverend Albright read the words, and Amos Barlow — who'd known Elias since they were both young and stupid — told the story of the night Elias figured out the creek was being stolen.
"He came to my forge after dark," Hiram said, his big hands hanging at his sides, "with mud on his boots up to his knees and that look he got when he'd worked something out. Said, 'Hiram, the creek didn't die. Somebody killed it.' I told him to be careful. He said, 'Somebody has to drink first, old friend.'" Hiram cleared his throat. "He drank first."
They'd ordered the headstone from Prescott, gray granite, plain. Elise had chosen the words herself, and Hiram had carved them deep enough to outlast all of them:
JONAS MERRILL
He found the water.
They couldn't drown the truth.
Afterward, people came up to Elise one by one — people who'd taken her secret water rations in the night for a year and never told a soul — and squeezed her hand and didn't say much, because there wasn't much to say. Nora Bell pressed a jar of preserves into her hands. The Abernathy boys stood at attention like soldiers. Caleb stood a little apart, the way he did, until Elise looked over and crooked a finger at him, and he came and stood beside her, and that was that.
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The town council voted in November, unanimous for the first time anyone could remember: Copper Creek needed a well-master, a public well in the square, and Caleb Mercer was hired to be both, at a salary that made him snort and accept.
He dug the well himself, in the middle of the square, with Hiram to shoe the bucket chain and half the town's children "helping" by carrying away spoil in their hats. He dowsed first — the rods crossing sharp and sure over a spot ten feet from the old flagpole — and when he told Elise, she said, "My father always said there was water under the square. Whitmore told him he was dreaming."
"Your father," Caleb said, "was right about most things."
It took three weeks. At forty feet they hit sand, at sixty they hit gravel, and at seventy-three feet the diggers broke through into a flow so strong it knocked a man's hat off and filled the shaft faster than they could bail. Caleb stood at the rim with water running over his boots, and laughed out loud, and the children cheered, and somebody rang the church bell, and Elise — standing at the edge of the crowd with flour on her sleeves from the schoolhouse kitchen — met his eyes across the square and smiled like the sun coming up.
They named it the Hartwell Well. Nobody suggested anything else.