well chain warming in the sun. Emmett had put off the fence work as long as
the posts allowed, but there was a stretch on the south line where two rails
had come down and the whole thing leaned, and stock that does not exist yet
cannot get out, but a fence down is a fence down, and he had his father's
religion about tasks half-done, which was that they were sins.
The work went the way work goes in such heat, by inches and by rests in the
sliver of shade the posts themselves threw. He dug out the leaning post and
re-set it, tamping the earth in layers the way his father had taught him on a
farm that no longer existed, in a wet green country he had left at seventeen
and never seen again. He wired the rails. He drank from the canteen he'd
hung on the fence, sparingly, a working man's ration, and he thought —
because the mind wanders where it wants on a fence line — about water,
which was the only thing anyone in the territory thought about anymore. In
Dry Fork the storekeeper kept a barrel by the door and charged nothing for it,
saying a town that sells water has already died and just hasn't noticed. The
outfits east of the mountains were moving herds at night to save the animals
the walk, and losing them anyway. And here was his well, his twenty-eight
feet of dug earth and laid stone, giving cold water in the worst July in
memory as steady as a heartbeat, and Emmett understood that in a year like
this a well like his was not a possession but a rumor waiting to spread. Men
would come to it eventually — friends, strangers, Slade with his lawyer's
letters, or worse than Slade — the way men in a desert country have always
eventually come to the one place the water still lived. He had known it since
spring. It had not told him what to do about it.
He was working the south fence with his shirt stuck to his back and the sweat
7
running into his eyes when Judge, up at the corral, made a sound.
It was not a loud sound. A mule has a repertoire like a man's, most of it
complaint, and this was not complaint. It was the short, arrested note of an
animal that has seen something and stopped. Emmett straightened with the
hammer in his hand and looked where Judge was looking, which was the far
end of the fence line, east, where the posts ran down toward the dead creek.
There was a figure against the fence.
At first it was only a shape, and his mind, doing what minds do, tried the
ordinary explanations and discarded them one by one. Not a stray cow; the
shape was upright. Not a traveler off the Dry Fork road; the road was north.
It was a person, standing — no, not standing. Leaning. One hand gripped the
top rail and the body hung from it at an angle that said the post was holding
up more than fences usually hold. He set the hammer down in the dirt,
carefully, the way a man sets down a tool when he does not yet know
whether his hands will need to be empty.
"Hello the fence," he called.
The figure did not answer. The head came up slowly, the way a head comes
up when lifting it costs something, and he saw the hair, black and loose and
caked pale with dust, and the deerskin dress, and the height of her. Even bent
against the post she was tall; standing, she would look down at most men and
across at him, and he was not short. A woman. An Apache woman, alone, on
foot, at his south fence in the killing heat of a July afternoon, and every
lesson the territory had ever taught him stood up in his mind at once and
began to talk.
He had reason. He had the scar along his ribs and Doyle's grave somewhere
on the freight road with no stone at all, and he had eleven years of
8
arrangement, and the arrangement said: a lone Indian at the fence is a thing
you study the way you study weather coming over a ridge, from a distance,
with respect for what it can do. It said other things too, in the storekeeper's
voice and the voice of every man who had ever leaned on a bar and known
everything: that they never come one at a time, not really; that a wounded
one is the bait of an old trap; that the kindest reading was still a reading of
trouble.
What the arrangement had never accounted for was the sight of her, at forty
yards, deciding whether the fence post or the ground was going to have her,
and choosing the post.
She was hurt. That he could see even at the distance: the way she favored one
side, the dark stain down the deerskin at her ribs, the hair at her temple
matted with something darker than dust. She had come a long way in the heat
in that condition, and she had come to the fence of his ranch, and he stood in
his yard with his hammer in the dirt and understood that the arithmetic of his
whole life had just been altered by a fact it could not process, which was that
she was dying of thirst within sight of his well, and the well was his, and
there it was.