promise should be no longer than the thing it stands on."
Tadan looked at his niece for a moment. Then he looked at Emmett, and
something that was almost humor moved at the corner of his mouth, gone
before it settled. "She has corrected me since she was nine years old," he
said. "It has kept my word worth having. A chief whose tongue is never
corrected begins to believe his own weather." He put his hand flat on the well
curb again. "It is agreed. On your terms, at your well, under your hours. My
people will keep them as they keep the law, because for as long as we drink
here, your terms are the law."
"And the payment," Emmett said, because it had been offered and a thing
offered and ignored sits between men like a third party at a table. "I'll take
the work, and I'll take the guard, and I'm obliged for both. The horses we'll
talk about when there's time to talk. And the water itself — " He stopped,
finding the words with some care. "I won't sell water, Tadan. I've been the
kind of thirsty that makes a man understand it's not a crop. A man doesn't
charge for the thing that keeps a child alive and then sleep in the same skin
25
after."
"Then we will find the price in work, and in guarding, and in the years after,"
Tadan said, "because a debt of water is not finished when the bucket is
empty, and both of us know it." He straightened, and raised one hand, not
high, just enough, and on the ridges the riders began, at last, to move — not
down toward the ranch, but along the crests, eastward and southward, toward
the creek bottom and the cottonwoods, the long file of them unspooling like a
dark thread drawn off a spool, and behind them, far off where the trail came
down out of the hills, Emmett could see the dust of the main body of the
band, the walkers, the families, coming on at the pace of the slowest
grandmother among them.
The first party came down to the yard within the hour, and Emmett
understood, watching them come, that he had agreed to a thing he had not yet
seen the size of, and that seeing it was going to be the rest of his summer.
They came in the order Tadan had promised: the old ones first, and the
mothers with children, and they came on foot in a line that had discipline in it
like a spine. No one pushed. No one called out. A young warrior with his
rifle nowhere about him walked at the head of the party and another at the
tail, and between them the grandmothers of the Mescalero came down
Emmett's dirt track in the heat of a July morning carrying empty skins and
gourds and one tin cup among six of them, and if any of them looked at his
cabin or his ungrazed pasture, they looked the way travelers look at weather
— as a fact, not a grievance.
Emmett worked the windlass. That was the shape the day took, and it took it
fast. He drew, and the bucket came up dripping and cold, and the water went
into the trough at the yard's edge and into the skins and gourds, and the
bucket went down again. Aponi stood at the fence with her bound side and
26
her good arm working, passing the filled skins along a line of women who
passed them on, hand to hand, a bucket chain of human beings that reached
from his wellhead to the creek, and when he tried to wave her off the
windlass she looked at him with an expression he was beginning to recognize
as her opinion of his judgment.
"You will tear your back out by noon," she said, "and then the well has no
keeper, and my uncle has a treaty with a cripple. Sit on the curb when the
bucket is down, old man. The rope does the waiting for you."
"Old man," Emmett said. "I'm forty-five."
"In my people's reckoning you are an elder with one foot in the honored
seats. It is a compliment. Take it and sit."
He sat, some of the time. Most of the time he hauled. The work had a rhythm
and the rhythm had a cost that collected in his shoulders and the small of his
back, and by the middle of the morning his shirt was dark through and his
hands were raw in the creases despite the rope being old friend to them. He
hauled for grandmothers who nodded to him with a grave courtesy that asked
nothing. He hauled for a girl of maybe seven who held up a gourd nearly as
big as herself and watched the water go into it as if she were watching a
ceremony she intended to remember exactly. He hauled for a woman with a
baby tied against her chest who drank only after the baby had been given sips
from her cupped hand, and who met his eyes over the child's head with a
look so plain and unadorned — here is what your water is for — that he had
to turn back to the windlass before he'd finished receiving it.
An old woman, the oldest of the party, small as a child herself and bent like a
drawn bow, came last to the trough and did not drink at once. She asked for
the ladle. She said it in Apache and pointed, and Aponi, after a moment,