he could, and when the storekeeper's wife asked after him in the tone of a
woman compiling a list of the valley's unaccompanied dead, he said he was
keeping well, and bought his salt, and rode out.
It had not always been so complete a solitude. There had been the freighting
years, when he was young and strong enough to think the road was a life.
Six-mule teams, government contracts, the long haul between the river towns
and the forts, himself and Doyle riding the wagons with rifles across their
knees and the whole territory unrolling ahead of them at twelve miles a day.
It ended on a morning not unlike this one, in country not fifty miles from
where he now stood, when the Apache came down out of a arroyo in the gray
light and the world became noise and dust and the particular terror of men
4
who have been surprised at the one moment surprise cannot be afforded.
Doyle died with a wagon at his back and never knew, Emmett had always
hoped, exactly what had happened. Emmett lived because a mule fell on the
man who was killing him, which was the kind of arithmetic the freight road
did, and he carried a scar along his ribs for a year like a seam, and after that
he was done with roads and done with partnerships and done, in most
respects, with people.
What he remembered of that morning, when he remembered it, was not the
fighting. Men who have been in one fight remember it honestly or not at all,
and he had resolved to remember it honestly, which meant he remembered
the sound first — a sound like the world tearing along a seam — and the
dust, which was total, and Doyle calling his name twice in a voice that was
trying to be annoyed, as if the whole thing were an inconvenience with
paperwork attached. He remembered crawling. He remembered the underside
of a wagon and a wheel hub's iron cold against his cheek, and thinking, with
great clarity, that he would not see noon. He had been wrong about the noon.
He had seen eleven years of noons since, each one arranged so that no
morning could ever again catch him in the open, with his life depending on
other men's eyes. A ranch in a bowl of hills with one gate and one well could
be watched by one man willing to watch it forever. That was the true
foundation of the place, dug deeper than the well itself. The fences, the collar
stones, the roof — all of it was built on a vow he had made under a wagon at
the age of thirty-four, with another man's blood drying on his shirt, that he
would never again need anyone to be watching his back, and never again be
the man whose back someone else had died watching.
He did not hate the Apache. Hatred required an energy he had spent
elsewhere. He feared them the way he feared lightning and bad water and a
5
green horse on a cliff trail: as a fact of the country, permanent and
impersonal, to be arranged around. He had arranged. No one could say he
had not arranged. The ranch sat in its bowl of hills with its one well and its
one man, and for eleven years the arrangement had held, and the fear had
thinned with the years into something almost like peace.
Almost. There were letters in the cabin he had not answered. A cattle
speculator named Vernon Slade had written three times that spring, through a
lawyer in Santa Fe, offering money for the ranch and, failing that, for the
water rights alone, in language that grew more reasonable and more
expensive with each letter, as if reasonableness were a kind of rope. Emmett
had used the first letter to light a fire. The second he had kept, because a man
alone should know the shape of what is circling him. The third he had not
opened. It sat on the shelf by the door with the coffee tin, patient as a tick.
Slade's herds were dying on dry range east of the mountains, everyone at Dry
Fork knew it, and Slade's money was looking for a well the way a tongue
looks for a loose tooth. Emmett had no intention of selling. A man who has
dug his own well in his own yard, beside his wife's grave, under his own
cottonwoods, is not holding real estate. He is holding the one place the world
cannot send him away from, and there is no price written for that in Santa Fe.
So the morning went, in its order, the way all his mornings went, and nothing
in it warned him. That is worth saying plainly, because afterward he would
go over it looking for the warning, the way men do, and find none. The
morning was only a morning. The warning, such as it was, came with the
afternoon, and the afternoon came with the heat.
The heat that day was not the ordinary cruelty of a New Mexico July, which
a man could work in if he was careful and drank when he should. It was a
heat with weight to it, a heat that pressed. By noon the light had gone white
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and flat and the hills shimmered at their edges like something seen through
water, and the air in the yard smelled of hot stone and dust and the iron of the