27
translated without being asked twice: "She says the ladle first. It is the cup of
the house. She will drink from the cup of the house." Emmett put the ladle in
her hands. She held it in both of hers, dipped it herself from the trough with a
steadiness that shamed his raw hands, and drank, and then she spoke over it
for a little while, low, the way a person speaks over a grave or a cradle, and
touched her forehead to the ladle's rim before she gave it back. "She blesses
it," Aponi said. "She says water remembers the hand that gives it, and this
water will remember yours. It is not a small thing she says. In her life she has
blessed two wells. One of them was her grandfather's."
"Tell her I'm obliged," Emmett said, and felt the inadequacy of it all the way
down.
"She knows," Aponi said. "That is why she blessed it and not you. The well
got there first."
At the fence, the warriors watered their horses at the second trough Emmett
had dragged out to the yard's edge, and their rifles stood stacked outside his
fence in a neat tripod row, twenty-three rifles by his count, with one unarmed
young man sitting by them in the dust, cross-legged, in the shade of nothing
at all, keeping guard over weapons in a white man's yard as if it were the
most ordinary duty in the world. Emmett counted the rifles twice, the way a
man counts money owed him, and then was ashamed, and then counted them
a third time and let the shame go, because the counting was not suspicion. It
was the treaty, being kept, in a form he could see. Every rifle outside the
fence was a word Tadan had given him, stood up in the sun where a man
could look at it. He hoped the old man knew he was counting, and what the
counting meant on his side of it: not doubt. Attention. The attention a
promise deserves.
At the midday drawing, the short one, for the children and the sick and the
28
old, he went down the shaft with the bucket and listened harder than he had
in the morning, and what he heard changed the temperature of his blood. The
splash came later. Not much later. A breath, two breaths of rope more than
the morning had asked. He drew up and looked in the bucket: clear. But
when the trough had been filled once as agreed and the party dismissed, he
took the lantern and leaned far in over the curb and ran his hand down the
shaft wall, and the damp line where the water stood was lower than at dawn
by the width of his spread hand.
He did the arithmetic standing there with his wet hand on the stone, and the
arithmetic did not care how either he or the chief felt about anything. Three
hundred people. Call it a gallon a day each in this heat just to keep souls in
bodies, and more for the ones walking. Horses beyond counting — say three
hundred horses, and a horse in July drinks what ten men drink. His own
cattle and mule drank from the same slow cup. The well gave what it gave: a
good well, a strong seep, and finite as a candle. Kept to its hours, rested
between drawings, it would hold — he believed it would hold, the way a man
believes a roof will hold, by faith in his own building and no other evidence.
Broken of its hours, drawn on without rest by a crowd that meant no harm at
all, it would go to mud in three days and to nothing in five, and then the
treaty and the blessing on the ladle would be words said over a dry hole, with
three hundred people standing in his yard.
He climbed up into the light and found Aponi watching him from the fence,
and something in his face must have told her the numbers, because she said,
"The hours will be kept. I heard you count in the dark down there. My uncle
has given his word and I will stand at this fence at every drawing and be its
other keeper. If any of mine come at the wrong hour, they will find me
before they find the bucket."
29
"It isn't your people I'm doing the sum on," Emmett said. "It's the well. The
well doesn't know whose hand is on the rope."
"Then we will teach it," she said, "one hour at a time."
The evening drawing was the biggest, because the main body of the band had
come in by then and the camp across the creek was rising in the bottomland
— lodges going up in a pattern older than the territory, smoke from the first
cook fires standing straight in the still air, a baby crying somewhere and
being sung down, dogs, the whole ordinary thunder of three hundred people
making a town out of a creek bank in one evening. Emmett hauled until the
light went the color of the dust on his boots and his shoulders burned like
they'd been branded in the shape of the rope. The last party went back across
the creek in the dusk with their skins full. Judge stood in the yard with the air
of a beast who had supervised everything and approved of none of it. Beyond
the cottonwoods at the creek's bend, where Martha lay under her stone with