anything. They were thirsty, and then they were not thirsty, and then they
were asleep with their heads on whatever was soft. It shamed him, in a clean
way, to think how long he had been afraid of a sound a horse herd makes.
The watering itself became a kind of clock the whole valley lived by. At the
agreed hours the band's people came down in their order — horses first, in
strings, then the water carriers with their bags and ollas, then the old and the
small stock — and Emmett worked the pump and the gate like a man running
a ferry, and learned the faces in the way you learn a crew, and then the
names, and then, without deciding to, the small facts that ride along behind
names: which old woman took her water with a pinch of something sweet in
it and thanked the well aloud each time as if it were a person who might be
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discouraged; which boy, the lookout boy, the one whose eyes had found the
hub-band, had appointed himself keeper of the second trough and polished its
rim with a rag like it was a horse he meant to sell. And one evening at dusk,
with the watering done and the yard quiet, Emmett went the way he had gone
most evenings of four years, down the path to the cottonwoods and the little
fence of stones, and stood at Martha's grave with his hat in his hands and told
her, in the low voice he used for Judge and for no other living thing, about
the camp on the flat and the old woman who thanked the water, and about the
doe dead on her feet at Eagle Rock with her legs folded careful. He did not
ask the grave for anything. He had stopped asking it for anything in the
second year. But he reported to it, the way a man reports to a house he no
longer lives in, and the reporting had become a habit he suspected he would
carry to his own plot beside hers, and it did not occur to him that anyone
would ever think to use it as a weapon against him. He had not yet met the
afternoon when a man would.
It was at one of those fires that the disagreement came, and it came honest,
the way things did with Aponi, without a raised voice on either side.
"You will go to Dry Fork in seven days," she said, "and stand in a room, and
men who have never seen my uncle's face will read papers and decide
whether three hundred people drink or walk into the desert. And you believe
in this room."
"I believe in it the way I believe in a levee," Emmett said. "Not because it's
righteous. Because the flood is worse."
"The flood is men with rifles, Emmett. The levee is also men with rifles, only
slower."
"Slower is not nothing," he said. "Slower is children grown before it breaks.
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Slower is Brandt getting his man or his paper. Aponi, I have seen what fast
looks like. Fast is a wagon circle with the herd gone and a boy apologizing at
the tongue for dying. I'll take the slow room and its bad paper, and I'll stand
in it and say the true things into the record where they can't be unwritten, and
if the paper fails us I'll be standing right here when it does, and you'll have
my well and my rifle and my word for whatever comes after. But I won't call
the room nothing. It's the only weapon I own that doesn't get people killed
using it."
She looked at him a long time across the fire, and he could not read her, and
then she did a thing she had not done before: she disagreed with him and fed
him at the same time, pushing the bowl back across with the last of the meat
in it, the good piece, in the manner of a person conceding nothing
whatsoever.
"Then go to your room, and say the true things," she said. "And if the paper
fails, Emmett Cole, I will remind you of this fire, and of what you promised
at it, and you will not enjoy the reminding."
"I expect I won't," he said, and ate the meat.
Slade came on the sixth day, in the heat of the afternoon, riding in under a
white rag tied to a ramrod held up by the man beside him, which was theater
and both of them knew it, and Kellam was not with him this time. Slade had
left his foreman somewhere out of sight like a card he was tired of showing.
He rode a fine black horse and wore a town coat over range clothes and
looked, as he always looked, like a man who had never once in his life been
caught wanting anything he could not eventually buy, borrow, or wait out.
Emmett met him at the gate with the watering suspended — the band's
people drew back from the trough at a word from Aponi, quiet and orderly,
horses and all, so that the yard stood empty except for the two of them and
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the pump handle ticking as it cooled — because Emmett would not have this
conversation with three hundred witnesses and Slade knew why and smiled
at the courtesy of it.
At the gate Slade did a thing Emmett had not expected and did not like at all:
he asked, courteously, for a drink of the water he had come to buy. "A man