cups — the crockery ones, not tin — and set one down on the trough rim at
Pesh's end, and resumed his seat, and drank his own. Pesh looked at the cup a
long time. Then he drank, and set the cup back exactly where it had been set
for him, and said, in careful English that cost him something, "My
grandmother says your coffee is a punishment." A pause. "She says to tell
you she will fix it."
"Tell your grandmother," Emmett said, "that my coffee has been a
punishment for twenty years and I have got attached to the discipline of it."
Pesh carried this home at dawn with the solemnity of a treaty clause, and by
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the third night Seya herself appeared at the trough at dusk with a small pot of
her own, and a wrapped cloth of something fried and spiced that she
distributed to the watch like communion, and thereafter the night guard ate
better than the day one and both guards knew it and the noon change
acquired a certain ceremony of complaint. It was Naseen who explained the
true order of things to Emmett, on the fifth night, in the easy dark, his rifle
across his knees and his eyes on the eastern ridge the way another man keeps
his eyes on a page.
"You think we watch the water," he said. "We do. But the first two nights,
we watched you watching the water. Now—" he gestured with his chin at
Pesh, asleep sitting up against the wellhouse wall in the manner of soldiers
and grandfathers, his watch given over to Emmett's keeping without
discussion — "now the watching is just the watching. That is how my chief
knew it would go. He says a trough is a small thing to guard, so men show
their whole selves guarding it." He grinned in the dark. "You showed coffee
and a mule you talk to. It was decided this was acceptable."
There was one bad hour, the sixth night, when the dogs across the creek set
up all at once and a horse came down the eastern trail at a pace no honest
errand keeps after dark, and Emmett was on his feet with his rifle before he'd
decided to stand, and Naseen was already gone — not fled; gone the way a
lookout goes, up the ridge in the dark without a sound, to be eyes where eyes
were needed. The rider resolved, in the end, into a lost teamster off the Dry
Fork road looking for his lead mule and terrified nearly out of his boots to
find himself apologizing to a silent Apache camp and a white man with a
rifle at a trough full of water. They gave him coffee. They told him about the
mule, which had been seen going the other way. He went the other way at a
walk, very carefully, the way a man leaves a church he has entered by
44
mistake. But Emmett did not sleep again that night, and what kept him awake
was not the stranger. It was the discovery, made in the second it took him to
reach his feet, that his first thought had not been for his well or his stock or
his own skin. It had been for the camp. For the lodges across the creek,
asleep, with their fires down — for Seya, and Pesh's grandmother, and the
child with the cracked pitcher. He sat with that discovery until dawn like a
man sitting with a letter he has not decided whether to burn, while the water
in the trough beside him stood black and still and guarded, and gave back the
stars.
The guards at the trough changed at noon and at midnight, and the night
watches were where Aponi's story came to him — not all at once, because
she was not a woman who spent anything all at once, but across the watches,
in pieces, the way she paid out everything, rope and water and truth, by the
measured bucket.
"I was at the spring before it went bad," she said, the first night she took the
watch beside him, without preamble, looking out at the dark where the creek
bed shone pale. "Eagle Rock. You know it. A day east, where the stones
stand like teeth. My uncle sent me to look at it because the water had gone
strange the week before — low, and the taste of it not right — and the old
people said the spring was tired. I went to see if it was tired, or if it was being
helped to be tired."
She was quiet a while. Her side, under her hand, rose and fell carefully.
"I saw the wagon before I saw the men. It stood off the trail in the rocks
where no wagon stands for any honest reason, with brush cut and laid over
the wheels — but the brush was fresh and the wheels were old, and a man
who hides a wagon does not think about the hub." She touched her own ribs,
absently, where the bandaging bound her. "One hub was busted. The iron
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band sprung half off it, the wood split and bound up with rope, quick work,
angry work. A wagon that had come far and hard and did not want to be
followed, and could not run fast if it was. I remember it because it was a
foolish place to bring a wagon you cared about. Unless what you cared about
was not being seen at the spring by the people who come to the spring. The