Emmett watched the small machinery of it with a hunger he did not examine.
"Understand the two roads you're on," Brandt said, walking them out to the
horses. "The hearing at Dry Fork is a civil room. It decides whose name sits
on the water. It does not hang anybody, and Slade's lawyer knows it, and that
room will discount your scout's word by half for the crime of whose mouth it
comes out of — that's not my doing, that's the territory's arithmetic, and I've
hated it longer than you've known her. The other road is mine: a poisoning
charge, a criminal room, where a dead cow and a fouled spring and a boy's
sharp eyes are evidence and not atmosphere. That road I can walk, if the last
piece comes. But hear me, Cole — don't you go trying to fetch that piece
yourself. Men who go fetching pieces end up in the ground with the evidence
still warm in their pockets."
"I hear you," Emmett said, which was not the same as promising, and Brandt,
who had known him a long time, heard the difference and let it ride.
On the ride back to the ranch, in the long light, Aponi rode beside him a
while in silence, and then she said, "Your sheriff is an honest man."
"He is."
"An honest man who has told us the law cannot help until after the harm. I
have heard this song before, Emmett. It is a long song and my people know
all the verses."
"He said the waiting costs," Emmett said. "He didn't say it costs only you."
The days after the ride settled into a shape, and the shape was work. Tadan
59
had given his word that the band would earn its water in labor as well as in
peace, and the Mescalero understood a debt the way Emmett understood a
freight contract, as a thing you discharged to the pound and the mile or not at
all. His north fence, which had leaned in three places since the spring winds
and which he had been mending in his mind for a month, stood straight in
four days, with posts dug down to the caliche and set like they meant to
argue with the next decade. The young men built a second trough beside the
first, a long box of pine planks pitched at the seams, so that the band's horses
could water twenty at a time at the agreed hours instead of crowding the gate,
and they hauled wood until his woodpile stood higher than it had since
Martha's last winter, and an old man whose name Emmett never did learn to
say properly spent two afternoons re-hanging the barn door that had sagged
on its strap hinges since before the war between the states, and left it
swinging true as a plumb line.
In the evenings, when the watering was done and the joint watch posted —
two of the band's young men and Emmett or his hired boy taking the dark in
turns around the trough and the well — Emmett found himself, some nights,
at the camp's fires on the flat below the cottonwoods, with a bowl in his
hands. Nobody made a ceremony of him. That was the thing he noticed, and
the thing that undid him a little more each time: nobody made a ceremony of
him at all. The children stared the first night and were bored of him by the
third, which is the most honest welcome a stranger can get. He ate what was
put in front of him. He listened to talk he mostly could not follow, and
followed what he could, and once, laughing at the wrong moment at a story
Manuel was telling in English for his benefit, he heard his own laugh come
out rusty, like a hinge on a door that had not been opened in years, and an old
woman across the fire nodded at the sound as if he had finally said something
sensible.
60
He had carried a picture in his head for twenty years, and the picture had a
camp in it too. He had been nineteen, freighting with a train out of Fort
Sumner, green as grass and proud of his first good rifle, the night riders had
come into the wagon circle for the horse herd, and what he remembered was
not the shooting — there had barely been any — but the sound of it, the herd
going out into the dark like a river leaving its banks, and an older teamster
named Oakes dying at the wagon tongue of a wound nobody had seen made,
holding his own belly and apologizing for the trouble, which is what men did
then with the breath that should have gone to cursing. He had been afraid of
camps in the dark ever since, in the deep part of himself that does not listen
to argument, and the fear had done his thinking for him on a hundred
occasions he could name and some he could not. Now he sat in a camp in the
dark with a bowl in his hands and watched a girl of maybe seven solemnly
watering a puppy out of her own cupped palms at the edge of the firelight, a
little at a time so as not to waste it, spilling none, and he felt the old picture
go thin in him, like ice going in a pan of water, not breaking all at once but
no longer able to bear weight. The children at these fires were not symbols of