He lay a moment in the dark of the shack
and listened to it a moment, and then he got up and put his boots on in the
cold.
The shack had one room and a lean-to and a root cellar under a trap in the
floor, and everything Wade owned was in it or in sight of it. A bed he'd made
himself from cottonwood poles and rawhide. A stove with a crack in the door
that he'd wired shut. A table, a chair, a shelf with eleven books that had been
his mother's, the spines sunned pale. His saddle hung on a peg by the door,
with his bridle and the soft rope he used for gentling, and the curry and the
hoof pick and the rasp, each in its place. Outside: a corral of cedar posts he'd
set himself, a trough under the windmill, forty acres of grama and
greasewood and rock that the neighbors called Sutter's Draw, and six miles
of empty country between him and San Tomas.
He was twenty-seven years old and owed money in two places, and he
carried both debts in his head, without paper. At Foster's general store he
owed four dollars and sixty cents for flour, salt, coffee, and cartridges. At the
blacksmith he owed two dollars for shoeing and a mended bit. Both would be
paid, as they were always paid, out of the next string he gentled. Wade kept
the figures the way he kept the windmill greased. It was not worry. It was
maintenance.
Roach came to the corral fence when he heard the door, a blaze-faced
gelding going gray at the muzzle, eleven years old and smarter than most
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men Wade had worked for. Roach was the one thing Wade owned that other
men envied, and Wade was aware of the joke in it: a poor man's whole estate,
walking around on four legs, eating. He fed him a handful of oats he could
not afford and scratched the place between his ears, and then he went to look
at the mare.
The mare was B-Bar. She stood at the far side of the corral with her hip
cocked and her ears working, a sorrel with a white hind sock and a scar on
her near shoulder where a fence had argued with her in her second year, and
she was, as of this week, the whole of Wade's income. Barlow's foreman
brought strings of unbroken four-year-olds down every spring to men like
Wade — men with good hands and no land worth mentioning — and paid by
the head for horses returned gentle. The mare was the last of a string of six.
Five had gone back already, walking quiet under saddle. The mare had taken
longer. She was not mean. Mean horses Wade understood the quickest. She
was frightened in a deep and organized way, frightened the way a creature
gets when it has learned exactly which things in the world hurt and keeps the
list current.
So he worked her the slow way. He did not rope her. He went into the corral
with the soft rope over his shoulder and a bucket with a little grain in the
bottom and he let her come to the grain or not come, and while she decided
he talked, the low unbroken talking that was not words so much as weather.
His mother had talked that way to her schoolroom in San Tomas in the years
before the fever took her — thirty farm children and miners' children in a
one-room schoolhouse, and her voice going over them like a hand over a
quilt. His father he remembered mostly as a height and a smell of pipe
smoke, and then a letter, and then a grave in a place with a name Wade had
had to look up on a map. The war had taken the father and the years after had
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taken the mother, and what they had left was a boy who could read, who
could sit still, and who could not walk past a suffering thing — horse, dog, or
stranger — without stopping. It was not a virtue. It was more like a defect in
the fence. Things got in.
By full light the mare had taken grain from his palm and let the rope rest
across her neck without flinching, and he stood with his hand flat on her
shoulder feeling the tremor go out of her by degrees, the way heat goes out of
a stove. "There you are," he said. "There you are. Nobody's in a hurry. Hurry
is a thing men invented and horses never did."
He worked until the sun was well up and the windmill had settled into its
daylong creak, hauling water up out of the earth a cupful at a time. The well
at Sutter's Draw was the claim's one true wealth — sweet, shallow water that
had never failed, not in the drought of '77, not ever — and the windmill
Wade had raised over it the year he filed, with borrowed money and his own
back, was the reason a man could live here at all. Travelers watered at his
trough. Barlow's riders watered at his trough. Wade kept it clean and full the
way his mother had kept her schoolroom steps swept. It was not hospitality,
exactly. It was the same defect in the fence.
That afternoon he rode Roach down to the far end of the claim to look at the
fence where the wire had sagged, and he thought about Sunday. On Sundays
he rode into San Tomas and put flowers or whatever green thing the season
offered on his mother's grave in the churchyard, and stood there a while with
his hat in his hands. It was not much of a life by the measures men used at
the B-Bar bunkhouse. Wade had heard those measures. He had also felt a
frightened mare choose, of her own will, to stop being afraid that morning,
and he had his own arithmetic, and it balanced.
In the evening he ate beans and salt pork standing at the stove, and read a
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