one traveling preacher's mule, and never once sunk an inch in its basin. "The
whole township drinks from our hill that summer," Marta said, "and Johann,
he charges nobody. He says water is not a crop. Water is a neighbor." She
said it with pride and without any knowledge of the weight it was about to
carry, and Willa — who knew exactly what the company had moved forty
rods of earth to own — felt the sentence go through her like a plumb line
finding true. But a man shows his work before he shows his wounds —
Willa's father had been the same — and Johann, when the bread was eaten
and the coffee drunk, walked them the claim the way a man walks a
catechism he knows by heart. The orchard first: twenty-two whips of apple
and peach in two straight rows, each one staked, each one wrapped in burlap
against the rabbits, the varieties named off like children — Winesap, Ben
Davis, Elberta — in a township where half the settlers' trees had died the first
dry summer and been left standing as tinder. The stone cistern next, that
Johann had laid course upon course through the whole of last winter,
dry-stacked and plumb and true, each stone sounded with a knuckle before it
was set; he knocked one as he passed, from habit, and it rang like a struck
bell. The field beyond, broken in furrows so straight Willa thought of ruled
paper and of her father's columns. The frame posts of the windmill he meant
to raise next year over the dug well, for the stock, so that in the next dry
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August the water would come up whether the creek did or not. Everywhere
the claim said the same sentence in a different material: a man was here, and
the man intended to remain.
"Two years Marta and me, we make this," Johann said, not boasting —
stating, the way one states rainfall. "In Germany my father is a tenant on
another man's stones. Here the paper says the land is ours if we live on it and
improve. We live. We improve." He looked at Willa then with an expression
she had to brace against, because it was the expression of a man who has
already had the night she has come to warn him about. "You must see the
spring now. You must see what a man's work looks like, before you hear
what the night has done to it."
The spring rose in a basin Johann had lined with stone, at the foot of the bank
below the house — water coming up cold and perfectly clear through white
gravel, so still at its heart that the stones at the bottom seemed polished, and
running off in a bright thread between cottonwood roots to join the branch at
the ford. Willa had drunk from it a dozen times on school visits and it had
always tasted of stone and cold and something green. She knew, standing
there, that she was looking at the true reason for forty rods of moved earth.
Townships died of thirst on schedule in Kansas; whoever held this spring
held the township's throat in a gentle hand, and Edwin Harrow had never
once in his life kept his hands gentle or off anything.
Johann did not speak at first. He only pointed, with one of his rope forearms,
at the bank above the basin, inside the corner her father's chaining had set
and the company's resurvey had unmade — and the temperature went out of
the afternoon.
A survey flag stood planted in the bank. Not a claim stake, not a settler's
marker: a company flag, red cloth on a peeled staff, and when Willa stepped
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closer she saw the Harrow brand burned into the wood below the cloth with a
running iron, neat as a signature. At first light that morning, Johann told her
— his voice gone flat and careful, a man handling a loaded thing — he had
gone down for the morning water and found it standing there, square on the
bank of his own spring, inside the true corner, on land the company's paper
now claimed was theirs and his family's feet had stood on every day for two
years. Some rider in the dark had crossed his furrows without leaving a track
a plow would keep, planted the company's color on his water, and ridden out
again before the sky paled. And beneath the flagstaff, weighted down with a
flat stone so the wind would keep it like a secret, lay a printed notice on
heavy paper — an eviction contest, filed and stamped, giving Johann and
Marta Weiss thirty days to answer a claim against their homestead that they
could not afford a lawyer to fight, on grounds printed in a hand-some legal
type: defective filing, false corner, prior claim. Willa read the date twice. The
notice was dated yesterday. Yesterday — before she had fled Alder Creek,
before the storm, before Rube Halloran's lantern confession had ever been
spoken aloud. The machine had not been reacting to her. It had simply been
arriving, on its own schedule, the way weather arrives.
Marta had come down the path behind them without a sound. She took the
notice from Johann's hand and held it at arm's length, the way she might hold
a snake by the tail to look at its markings, and her English — which all
afternoon had run ahead of her husband's like a brighter horse — thickened
and slowed under the weight of it. "They put their flag on our water in the
night," she said. "Like the land already forgot our names on it."
The red cloth snapped and snapped again in the clean wind coming down the
creek, a small bright sound, insolent as a laugh at a funeral. Willa looked at it
for a long moment — at the brand burned true, at the stone holding the paper,
35
at the spring running clear and indifferent under its new flag, at Marta's
hands and Johann's stillness and Rube Halloran standing behind her with his
hat off and his confession still to make at this family's table. She thought of