off the hills now and it had the fire by the collar and was walking it toward
the corral fence, toward the shack, toward the trough and the tower. The
mare was screaming in the corral, a sound that went through the teeth, and
Roach, the big gelding he was breaking for nobody now, was crashing
against the rails in the dark and the smoke.
Wade went through the far gate with his hands up and his voice down,
talking the way you talk to horses and to God, in one continuous low stream
that means nothing and carries everything. He got the mare by the halter and
she tried to go over him and he let her momentum spend itself against his
shoulder and turned it, and got her through the gate and down into the draw
with a slap that sent her running for the low ground. Roach took longer.
Roach took the kind of longer that men measure afterward in the scars on
their hands, but he got him out, and the gelding went down the draw after the
mare with his tail flagged and his eyes rolling white, and then Wade turned
back to the fire with a wet grain sack and a bucket and understood the whole
arithmetic of the night in one breath.
The trough. Everything ran through the trough. The windmill was pumping
into it in its steady creak, a thin stream, nowhere near enough for buckets at
the rate a fire drinks them, and the trough was already half down from the
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day. There was no one to work the pump handle and carry water too. A man
is one pair of hands. That was the design of it, he understood, even as he
worked. Whoever had set the stack alight had not needed to find the girl or
even to find him. They had only needed to make one pair of hands
insufficient.
He beat at the corral's near corner with the sacking where the fire had taken
the top rail, and the sacking smoked and stank and the rail charred under it
and held, and he went back for water with the bucket and the trough was
lower and the pump's creak was the only sound the wind left him.
The pump handle was moving.
He stopped with the bucket in his hand and the fire at his back. The handle
was going up and down in long steady strokes, worked from the far side of
the windmill where the light did not reach, and it took his eyes a moment to
put the figure together out of the smoke and the dark. Enola. She had dragged
herself up out of the cellar against every order the doctor had given and every
arrangement he had made, up the ladder with a shot shoulder, across the yard
in her bare feet, and she was standing at the windmill post in her shift with
her hair loose and her good arm — her right, her whole arm, all the strength
she had left in the world — thrown into the pump handle, stroke on stroke,
keeping the trough full for his buckets. The bandage on her left shoulder had
gone dark through, fresh and spreading, the wound torn open again by the
ladder or the work or both. She did not look at him. She looked at the handle.
"Keep it coming," she said, in the voice of a woman giving orders on ground
she had chosen. "I will keep the water. You keep the fence."
He kept the fence. He could not afterward have said how long it went on.
There are stretches of a man's life that the clock does not get a vote in. The
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bucket went from the trough to the burning rail and back again more times
than he counted, and the trough never emptied, because the handle never
stopped, and the windmill turned above them both and the pump sang its iron
song into the smoke. The stack was gone from the first minute — he had
known that before he ever reached the gate; a helped fire in a haystack is a
verdict, not an argument — but a stack is only hay. The corral he could save.
The shack he could save. He soaked the fence line and the ground between
the fire and the buildings and he beat out the brands the wind threw ahead of
the main burn, one by one, stamping and slapping like a man fighting an
animal that kept having more heads, until the wind, as if it had spent its
errand, began to die with the night, and the great wall of flame sank in on
itself and became a heap, and then a glow, and then a black ruin breathing
sparks under a skin of ash.
His winter feed. His margin. The thing that stood between his stock and the
cold, between his claim and the bank, between keeping and selling — gone
up in one hour of orange light, as tidy a piece of arithmetic as ever Barlow
read off a bill.
In the last of the light of it he went to the windmill. Enola was swaying
against the post with both hands on the handle now, holding herself up with
it as much as working it, her shift soaked through with sweat and trough
water, the bandage a ruin. He got his arm around her and took her weight and
she let him, which frightened him more than the fire had. Her face was close
to his and gray as paper in the ember light.
"Now you see," she said. "They do not have to find me. They only have to
make keeping me cost more than you have."
Wade looked past her at the ashes of everything he owned that could burn,
settling and ticking in the dark, and at the corral standing, and at the shack
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standing, and at the trough, full to its brim and shining with the last of the
firelight, because a wounded girl had kept it full with one arm.
"Then they'd best learn what I'm made of costs extra," he said.