true specie, which was being asked. He ate regular. He slept in his own shack
with the new roof ticking in the cold nights. And if, on certain evenings, he
found himself listening to the windmill a moment longer than the gearing
required — a man alone may listen to his own machinery without accounting
for it to anyone.
The first cold morning of autumn came down out of the high country with
frost on the trough's rim and the windmill blades rimed white, and Wade was
out before full light with the wrench and the oil can, because a freeze finds
every weakness a pump has been politely concealing since spring. He had the
gearbox half open and his hands gone numb to the wrist when he heard
horses on the trail — two horses, and a third's lighter step — and he looked
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up with his heart doing something he declined to examine, and there she was.
Enola rode in out of the frost leading two of her father's best young mares,
her breath and theirs making small ghosts in the air, a bedroll behind her
saddle and Kaya's formal answer to the partnership riding in her saddlebag in
Osborn's clerkly hand. She swung down in the yard as if she had been gone a
week instead of a season, and she looked at the open gearbox, and at his
frozen hands, and at the windmill standing over them all with its blades still,
and her straight face did the thing it had threatened to do at the trough a
summer ago — it broke, slowly and entirely, into warmth.
"My father sends his word on the partnership," she said, "and the mares. The
agreement stands. The remuda winters here." She hung her reins over the
corral rail with the air of a woman unpacking at a place she means to be
awhile. "And I have come to do the winter work myself."
"Have you," Wade said.
"My father's horses will not gentle for a man who talks to them like
machinery," she said gravely. "I told him so. I said: Father, this man is honest
and he is brave and he works like two men, but he talks to a horse like it is a
stove he is persuading. Someone must supervise him properly, or the colts
will all grow up speaking stove." She considered him with her head on one
side. "He said, 'Then go and supervise him, daughter.' So."
Wade laughed — out loud, in the cold yard, a sound Roach lifted his head to
investigate — and he found that the laugh had been stored up in him
somewhere since about the age of twelve, waiting on a morning cold enough
and bright enough to be worth spending it on. "Well," he said, "the windmill
gear's half open and my hands are froze. A supervisor could start by passing
tools and criticizing my technique."
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"That," Enola said, rolling her sleeves, "I have come a long way to do."
They set to it the way they had set to everything, in the wordless division of
labor that had been theirs since a night neither of them mentioned anymore,
when he had bound her leg by lantern light in the shadow of that same mill.
She took the ladder and called down for the wrench, the oil, the rag; he
worked below with his shoulder to the frame, feeding parts up into her hands.
The bad tooth came out — worn to a knife edge, a winter's worth of failure in
one small piece of iron — and the good spare went in, and the gearing took
its grease, and then there was the pump to coax: a persuading with the
handle, a cussing in two languages, hers considerably better aimed than his,
until with a groan and a shudder the whole column of the thing woke up and
the water came. It came up the way it always did and the way it had no
business being taken for granted — first the cough of air, then the muddy
sigh, then clear and cold and shining, pouring into the trough in a bright rope
that steamed in the frosty air. Roach came at once, because Roach had
priorities older than either of them, and the two young mares came after, and
the three of them drank with the deep, rhythmic pulling that is the sound a
windmill exists to make possible.
Wade stood with his hands on the trough's edge and the cold water running
over the stone by his boots, and he thought — not in words at first, but in the
settled way a man thinks with his whole history — about what a town can
take from a man. It can take his credit, and spend his name, and burn his roof
over his head while he stands in the ashes in a borrowed shirt. It can take his
work and his welcome and his place at the table. But the thing he does with
his own hands when a stranger is bleeding at his gate — no town on earth
can take that, because it was never the town's to give, and it is never the
town's to take away. It is the one property a poor man owns outright, and it
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compounds, like interest in a bank that does not fail, into everything else he
has: the roof, the horses, the water, this woman on the ladder above him
passing down the empty oil can and criticizing his wrench work in tones of
deepest Apache concern.
"Your technique," Enola said from the ladder, "is improving. Soon you will
be almost adequate."
"High praise," Wade said, "from the management."
"It is the only kind worth having," she said. "Come up and hold this before
the freeze takes your hands entirely, horse-breaker. There is all winter to do,
and I intend to see it done properly."
He climbed up beside her into the morning, and the windmill turned slow and
sure above the draw, and the trough filled and kept filling, and the whole of
Sutter's Draw stood around them in the first clear light smelling of frost and
horse and cold clean water.
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