chapter of one of his mother's books by lamplight — a history of Rome, of
all the useless glories — and listened to the windmill take its night voice,
slower. The mare would go back at the week's end, and Foster would get his
four dollars and sixty cents, and the blacksmith his two, and there would be
another string, and another season. He banked the stove and slept.
The horses woke him.
Not the windmill — the horses. Roach's whinny came first, high and strange,
and then the mare's, and then the sound of bodies moving in the corral,
hooves shifting and stopping, shifting and stopping, the restlessness of
animals who have seen something they cannot file away. Wade was out of
the bed with his boots half on and the rifle in his hand before he had decided
anything. The light outside was the gray that comes before the true dawn.
The windmill stood against it, still, the wind not yet up. And both horses
were at the corral rail with their heads high and their ears pricked, staring —
not at the road, not at the hills — at the trough.
He went out slow, barefoot in the dirt with the rifle down along his leg, and
the smell reached him before the sight did: iron and mud and something
wrong underneath. The trough was dark. The mud at its base, where the
overflow kept a permanent wet apron in the dirt, was churned and scored as
if something had crawled there. And in the mud, half up against the trough's
side as if she had climbed toward the water and spent the last of herself doing
it, lay a woman.
She was young, and she was Apache by her dress and her hair and the
beadwork at her throat, and she was more dead than alive. One arm was
flung out and the hand of it still held a knife, held it the way the drowned
hold wreckage. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and the shoulder beneath it
was a dark, swollen ruin, blood gone black and crusted, and even at three
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paces he could smell the fever on her — the hot, sweet, wrong smell of a
wound going bad. Her lips were cracked white. She had crawled a long way
on her belly to reach water, and the water had been six inches from her
mouth when she stopped.
Wade set the rifle down in the dirt. He knelt in the mud and put two fingers
to her throat and found the pulse there, thin and fast and stubborn, and
something in his chest loosened by a fraction. Alive, then. Alive changed
everything and it changed it in the direction of trouble, and he knew it, and it
made no difference at all.
"Well," he said, quietly, to no one. "Well. All right."
He took the knife first. Not from fear — she could no more have used it than
flown — but because a wounded thing with a blade in its hand can hurt itself
in its thrashing. He worked her fingers open one at a time, gentle as untying
knots, and laid the knife up on the trough's rim, and then he got his arms
under her and lifted her out of the mud. She weighed almost nothing. That
frightened him more than the blood did. A grown woman should weigh more
than that; the fever and the crawling and the days without food had burned
her down to the frame of herself. Her head fell back against his shoulder and
her hair, coming loose, smelled of smoke and dust.
He carried her into the shack and laid her on his own bed, because it was the
only bed, and stood a moment looking down at her with his hands hanging at
his sides and his mind going fast and plain through the inventory of what he
had. Whiskey, half a bottle, kept for snakebite and company. A sewing
needle and thread. Clean rags — not many. His mother's old kit in the tin
box: carbolic, a probe, forceps gone a little rusty at the hinge — the things a
schoolteacher in a town without a doctor had kept, and taught her son to use.
And in the wound, by the swelling's shape and the blackness at its heart, the
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ball still in there, sitting in the muscle of her shoulder like a stone in a plum.
There was no decision to make and he wasted no time making it. He built the
fire up and set the kettle on and heated the knife blade in the flame until it
shimmered, and poured whiskey over the wound and into her, a spoonful at a
time between her cracked lips, and she swallowed reflexively and moaned.
Her eyes opened once and did not see him.
It was grim work and he did it the way he gentled horses: slowly, talking the
whole time, his voice the steadiest thing in the room. It will not be told here
in detail, because Wade himself would not have told it — some things a man
does with his hands are not stories. The ball came out flattened on one side, a
rifle ball, and he dropped it in the tin cup with a small clean tick of sound he
heard about for three nights afterward. He cleaned the wound as his mother
had taught him, flushed it, packed it, and bound it with strips torn from his
one spare shirt, and by then his hands were shaking and the sun was up, and
the trough outside held one Apache knife on its rim and a set of drag marks
in its mud that told, to anyone who could read ground, a whole story Wade
would rather no one read.
She slept the sleep of the emptied. He washed his hands and went out and did
the things that could not wait — fed Roach, fed the mare, looked long at the
drag marks coming in out of the greasewood from the south, the direction of
the high country and the Ojo Caliente. The marks said she had come miles on
her belly and her knees, in the dark, toward the sound of a windmill. Toward