outside the fence, twenty-three of them — and then ride back and report what
a hostile camp looks like. Now. You've said your piece on my land, all five
of you, and I've stood here in the heat for it, and that's the end of my
hospitality. You can leave the way you found it. By the gate."
They went. Haney first, with a storekeeper's haste to be out of a transaction
gone sour; the others after; Kellam last, unhurried, mounting with the same
judgmental deliberation, gathering his reins. At the gate he stopped his horse
a moment and looked back — not at Emmett. At the wellhead again, and at
the trough, a long considering look, as if he were counting something that
could not be counted from a saddle. Then he touched his hat brim with one
finger, the exact measure of courtesy as before, and rode out into the
shimmer after the others.
Emmett stood in the yard until their dust settled, then walked once around the
well and once around the trough, looking the way he'd look at fences after a
storm, and found nothing out of place, nothing fouled that his eyes could
find. He told himself the look had been a buyer's look. He almost believed it.
He went back up on the barn roof and finished the patching with his
shoulders screaming, and the thing he could not name went up the ladder
with him and sat in the heat, patient as a creditor.
The evening drawing was the largest yet. The whole band was in now, the
camp across the creek a settled town with its fires in rows, and the parties
came and went through the dusk in the order of the law, and Emmett hauled
until his arms were ropes of pain and the bucket chain of women passing
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skins hand to hand stretched from his wellhead all the way to the creek
crossing in the failing light. When the last party had gone and the yard was
his again, he stood a minute in the quiet with the rope in his hand, listening to
the well breathe below him, that slow seep and settle, the cup refilling in the
dark at its own unhurried pace. Then he took up the bucket for the last duty
of the day, which was his own: his cattle had stood since midday in the home
pasture, waiting on the trough at the yard's edge the way they always waited
at evening, patient and stupid and entirely his.
He filled the trough for them from the well's last strength, the way he always
did, and opened the pasture gate.
The cattle came the way cattle come to water in a drought year, in a body, at
a trot, bawling. They reached the trough. And they stopped.
It was not a hesitation. Forty head of cattle do not hesitate at evening water in
July; they drink or they are driven off it. These bunched. They crowded and
shouldered and bawled and would not put their heads down. A steer at the
front dipped his muzzle to within an inch of the surface and blew and jerked
back as if the water had shown him teeth. Another circled to the trough's far
end and stood with her head high, rolling her eyes at it. Judge, who had come
up behind with the mule's usual opinion that cattle were a lower form of
weather, planted his feet a full yard short of the trough and laid his ears back
and refused it flat, and Judge had drunk out of that trough every day of his
life on this place and had never once been consulted or mistaken about water.
Emmett set the bucket down.
He dipped one finger in the trough and raised it to his face, and the smell
reached him before the wet did: faint, under the honest smells of iron and
dust and cattle breath, a bitter wrongness, something laid on the water like a
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film on a eye. He put the finger to his tongue, a touch, no more, and spat in
the dust. Bitter. Bitter the way no well of his had ever run, bitter with a
chemical patience to it, a thing that had been put there, in a quantity
measured by somebody's hand, sometime during the watering hours when his
yard had held a hundred people and his back had been turned to the trough a
hundred times, hauling, always hauling, while the crowd flowed around the
one piece of furniture on his ranch that all the water passed through.
The cattle bawled at him. Across the creek, in the blue dusk, the campfires of
three hundred people were coming on one by one like a second, lower set of
stars, women and children and old ones behind those fires, all of them asleep
tonight on the strength of his word and his hours, all of them expecting to
come down his track at dawn in their patient order and drink. The bucket
chain stood stilled along the fence where it had been left, bucket to bucket,
rope to rope, waiting for morning. His finger burned faintly where he had
touched the water, or he imagined it burned, which at this hour amounted to
the same testimony.
He looked down at the ladle hanging on its nail by the well curb, the blessed
ladle, the cup of the house, and he understood that of all the people in this
valley tonight — the chief in his lodge, the speculator at his supper, the
grandmother asleep on her blessing, the three hundred settling into the dark