And Elias Ward, who had spent the day hoping for a gentle wife, went to bed unsettled in a way he had never been unsettled before, and for the first time since the wagon had appeared on the road, he wondered whether his mother had sent him not the wife he wanted, but the wife he needed.
It began, as most trouble between a man and a woman begins, with a small thing.
Three mornings after the wedding, Clara said at breakfast, in the same pleasant tone she used for everything, "I should like to look at the well today. The water has been dropping, and the trough was low again this morning."
Elias did not look up from his coffee. "The well is fine. It always drops in October."
The casing may be cracked, she said. "If the spring is blocked, the water will fall no matter how much rain we get."
The well has served this ranch for thirty years, Elias said, and he heard the edge in his own voice. "I know my own well, Clara."
I am sure you do, she said. "But I would still like to look."
He set his cup down harder than he meant to. "I said it is fine."
The words hung in the kitchen, louder than he had intended, and he saw Caleb look down at his plate, and he saw Pete, coming in for his own coffee, stop in the doorway and then quietly step back out again. Elias felt his face go hot. He was a man who prided himself on not raising his voice in his own house, and he had just raised it at a woman who had asked, politely, to look at a well.
Clara did not flinch. She did not look away. She folded her hands on the table and said, "I understand. It is your well, and your ranch, and I am a guest in both, whatever the papers say. I only thought that water was worth looking at, because a ranch without water is a ranch without anything."
She said it without anger and without pleading, and that made it worse, because Elias could not answer anger with anger, and he could not answer reason with pride, and he sat there with his coffee cooling and his pride burning, and he knew, even as he sat there, that he was wrong and that she knew he was wrong, and that the only question left was how long he would pretend otherwise.
She did not argue. She did not raise her voice. She simply finished her breakfast, and put on her shawl, and went out to the yard, and Elias watched from the window as she walked across to the barn, where Pete was mending a harness, and spoke to him for a few minutes, and then the two of them walked together toward the well house, carrying a rope and a bucket and a spade.
Elias stood at the window with his coffee going cold in his hand, and his pride burned in his chest. She had gone anyway. His wife of three days had gone to inspect his well after he had told her it was fine, and she had taken his foreman with her, and every man on the place would know by supper that Elias Ward's wife had overruled him about his own water.
He went out after them, because he could not bear to sit in the house while it happened, and he found them at the well house with the cover off and the rope down, and Pete leaning over the dark opening with a lamp, and Clara beside him, calm as a judge.
Pete, Elias said.
Pete straightened, and his face was careful. "Boss. You'd best look at this."
Elias looked. The lamp showed the water far below, lower than it should have been, and along one side of the shaft the stone casing had bellied inward and collapsed, a heap of broken stone and packed earth choking the spring's mouth. The water was getting through, but barely, a thin seep where there should have been a flow.
It's the casing, Clara said quietly. "It gave way, probably in the spring rains. The earth has been filling in ever since."
Elias stared down into the dark, and the truth of it settled on him like a weight. She was right. He had walked past this well every day for months, and he had told himself the low water was October, and he had been wrong, and his wife had found it in three days.
Pete scratched his beard. "We can dig it out," he said. "It'll take the better part of a day, and we'll need to shore the casing with timber, but the spring is still there. She's not dry. She's just choked."
Clara nodded. "Then let us dig."
And so they dug. Elias, because he could not stand aside while his own well was mended, took a spade and went down the ladder himself, and Pete worked above him, and Wiley brought timber, and Clara stayed at the top with the rope and the bucket, hauling up stone and earth hand over hand, her sleeves rolled, her hair coming loose in the wind, never once complaining and never once looking at Elias with anything like triumph.