one day. The well was deep and cold and true, but it was a seep-fed well in a
drought year, and it had a recharge like an old man's temper — generous
enough if respected, sullen if rushed. Draw it too hard at dawn and by noon
you were hauling up mud and apologies. So he set the measure by the stone
Martha had set into the wellhouse wall twenty years gone, a notch cut at the
level where the water stood in the morning, and the rule was read off the
notch like scripture: so many buckets for the herd, and the herd waits; so
many for the households, and no vessel filled twice while another stood
empty; and when the water in the shaft dropped to the second notch,
everything stopped, horses and grandmothers alike, until the earth had given
back what the earth could spare.
Aponi learned the notches the first morning and thereafter enforced them
with a quartermaster's joy, tally sticks in her sash, her voice carrying across
the yard in two languages, entirely indifferent to whose ox was waiting. She
stationed the children with cups at the trough's end to catch the spillage for
the camp's dogs. She rotated the guard at the trough — two of Tadan's young
men, changed at noon, with names Emmett began to catch and then to know:
Pesh, who was nineteen and grave as a judge; and a broad, laughing boy the
camp called Naseen, who was not a boy at all but the band's tireless lookout,
and who had eyes, Emmett would learn, like survey instruments. She set an
old woman named Seya — a grandmother of grandmothers, with a face like a
dried riverbed and a wit that traveled faster than her feet — at the gate with a
stick across her knees, to keep the queue honest and the gossip flowing in the
right direction.
And Emmett, moving through his own yard with the rope burns coming back
41
on his hands, learned names. He learned which mare belonged to which
lodge and which child belonged to which mare's rider. He learned that the
old man who blessed the water every morning with a pinch of dust was
Tadan's brother and had been a raider in the old days and now raised the
camp's best horses and its worst-tempered grandson. He learned the word for
bucket and the word for wait and the word for enough, and the word — there
was one, and it did not mean what his dictionary would have said — for the
particular courtesy of not asking a guest why he has come.
His fear unlearned itself in work, against his will and almost without his
permission. That was the shameful arithmetic of it, which he did at night and
could not make come out any other way: he had feared the Apache for
twenty years the way a man fears weather — wholesale, from a distance, as a
category of sky. It is difficult to fear a category when it is holding your rope.
It is difficult to fear it when its children are underfoot in your yard fighting
over the tin cup, when its grandmothers have decided your coffee is an insult
to coffee and begun improving it without asking, when its young men stand
your own watch beside you through the cold hours with their rifles across
their knees and their silence companionable as a dog's. He did not stop being
afraid all at once. He stopped being able to remember, on most days, what
exactly the fear had been for, and the few times it came back — a shout in
the camp at night, a rider coming fast — it came back as something personal
and specific, a fear for people whose names he knew, and that was a different
animal entirely, and worse, and he knew it was worse, and he fed the trough
guard's fire and said nothing about it to anyone.
Across the creek the camp settled from a flight into a town. Lodges in their
rows by family and clan, cookfires in their places, the herd's dust hanging
over the horse lines at evening like a second, lower sky. Laundry appeared
42
on the brush — bright cloth, snapping in the wind off the dry hills.
Somebody's kettle sang. Somebody was always mending something, harness,
moccasin, a child's temper. It had the sound of a place, which is the sound of
people not thinking about leaving it, and Emmett stood at his gate in the
evenings and listened to his valley fill up with a town that had not asked the
valley's permission, and was surprised, most evenings, to find that the sound
did not grieve him.
The joint watch began stiffly, the way all new nations begin — with
everybody polite and nobody sleeping.
The first night, Pesh stood his post at the trough's head with his rifle held
across his body like a fence rail, and Emmett sat his own post at the trough's
foot with the lantern between them, and for two hours neither man said a
word that was not strictly necessary, because each of them understood that
the other was also, in part, watching him. That was Tadan's design and
Emmett honored it even in the discomfort: trust, in the old man's arithmetic,
was not a feeling to be waited for. It was a structure to be built and then
stood inside of until it either held or didn't. At midnight Emmett rose without
a word, went to the house, and came back with coffee in Martha's two good