The drought had been on the valley since April, and by the middle of July it
had stopped being weather and become a condition of the world, like gravity,
like the past. The grass had gone the color of old paper by May. By June the
creek that gave the ranch its name had shrunk to a chain of cracked mud pans
with a skin of alkali on them, white as salt, and by July there was no creek at
all, only Dry Creek, a name that had become a description. Emmett Cole
walked his morning round the way he had walked it for eleven years, and the
round began, as everything on the place began, at the well.
The well stood in the yard between the cabin and the barn, and it was the
heart of the ranch in the plainest sense: stop it, and everything stopped. He
had dug it himself the first year, down through caliche and broken rock with
a pick and a short-handled shovel and a bucket on a rope, going down a foot
a day on the good days and sometimes no feet at all. Twenty-two feet of dirt
and stone. Then, two years ago, after Martha died, he had gone down into it
again with the grief still fresh enough to work by, and dug it six feet deeper,
because the water table was falling with the drought years and because a man
with empty hands in an empty house will find work or find worse. He had
collared it with stone he cut and laid himself, flat river rock set in a ring two
courses above the ground, and the collar was true and level and had not
shifted a quarter inch in eleven years, which was more than he could say for
most things built by men.
He lowered the bucket on its chain, link by link, listening. The splash came
up to him faint and far. The water down there was cold and sweet and did not
fail. In a season when springs were going bad all over the territory and creeks
were giving up, the Cole well gave what it had always given, and Emmett
understood, the way a man understands a debt, that this was not entirely a
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blessing. Water was the only wealth the drought respected. A man with the
only well in two days' ride of dry country was a man other people would
eventually come to, one way or another, and Emmett Cole had arranged his
life with some care so that people would not.
Judge came to the corral fence to watch him draw, because Judge watched
everything, it being his nature and his name. The mule was seventeen, gray
around the muzzle, long in the ear and short in his opinions of other
creatures, and he had been named in another life, on the freight road, by a
man who said he had the face of a hanging judge and the same reluctance to
be hurried. Emmett poured half the bucket into the trough and drank from the
dipper himself and poured the rest, and Judge lowered his head and drank
with the slow deliberation of a creature who has never once been surprised
by the world and does not intend to start.
"Morning," Emmett said.
Judge blew out through his nostrils, which was the whole of his conversation
most days, and Emmett had long since stopped needing more.
He watered the garden next, carrying buckets down the short path to the plot
behind the cabin where the cottonwoods stood. The garden had been
Martha's. It was not large, beans and squash and a row of onions gone
stubborn in the hard ground, but he kept it the way a man keeps a promise he
is no longer sure anyone is counting: faithfully, and a little past reason. In a
drought a garden was an extravagance of water, and he knew it, and he
watered it anyway, two buckets every morning, because the day he stopped
would be the day he admitted certain things out loud, and he was not a man
who admitted things out loud.
Her grave was at the edge of the cottonwood shade, marked with a stone he
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had cut her initials into with a cold chisel, the letters plain and deep. He did
not stop at the grave in the mornings. Stopping was for Sundays, and this was
a Wednesday. But he passed close, the way you pass a sleeping person's
door, and his hand, carrying the empty bucket, swung a little nearer the stone
than the path required. That was the morning's whole ceremony, and it was
enough, and then he went on to the rest of it: the barn, the corrals, the tack,
the roof patch he had been meaning to finish since the last rain had shown
him the leak, which was a joke the drought made, since there had been no
last rain anyone could remember.
Eleven years he had been building the place into a shape that suited him, and
the shape was this: a cabin a man could hold, a barn, two corrals, forty acres
of graze that was currently worth nothing, a garden that cost more water than
it returned, and a well that would outlast them all. No hired hand. No partner.
No nearest neighbor closer than the settlement at Dry Fork, half a day's ride
north, which suited everyone. He went to Dry Fork four times a year for salt,
coffee, nails, and news, in that order, and he came home the same day when