He did not decide, exactly. His body decided the way it decided things on the
freight road, in the half-second before thought, and he found himself walking
— not toward her. Toward the well. That was as much courage or as much
sense as he had in him, and it was exactly the right measure of both: he did
not go to her, and he did not go for the rifle. He went to the well, and he drew
the bucket up hand over hand on the chain with the cold water sloshing, and
he set the full bucket down on the stone collar, and he stepped back three
paces, and he said, in a voice that carried without shouting, "Water."
She watched him. Her eyes were the only thing about her that did not look
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beaten. They took him in entire — the well, the bucket, the three paces, his
empty hands — with the flat, measuring attention of a person reading a treaty
for the part that will be broken.
"Water," he said again. "It's clean. It's cold."
"Tó," she said, or something like it, the word soft in her throat, and then, in
English as plain as his own, which startled him worse than the rifle would
have: "You are the man of this well."
"I am."
"Then I will drink from it." She said it not as thanks and not as pleading, but
as a statement of terms between parties, and she let go of the fence post.
She crossed the forty yards the way a person crosses ice they do not trust,
each step placed, her body held upright by an act of will so visible it was
almost a sound. Twice she stopped, not to rest — he understood that she
would rather have fallen than rested — but to let the ground settle under her.
When she reached the well she did not touch it. She stood before the bucket
the way a person stands before a judge, and she looked at him, and he
understood that she was waiting to see if he would stay stepped back, and he
stayed.
Then she knelt, slowly, one knee and then the other, and took the tin ladle
from its nail on the collar where it hung, and dipped it, and drank.
Emmett had seen men drink after a desert crossing who drank like drowning
men breathe, all throat and panic, and sickened themselves with it. She drank
the way a person does a thing that matters: slowly, with discipline, a swallow
and a pause, a swallow and a pause, her eyes closed, her free hand resting flat
on the stone of the collar as if taking the well's measure through her palm.
The water ran down from the corner of her mouth and cut a clean line
10
through the dust on her jaw. She drank one ladle and dipped another and
drank that, and a third, and then — though her body was still crying out for
it, though her hand shook on the ladle with more than weakness — she
stopped. She poured the rest of the fourth ladle back into the bucket, a
careful, exact gesture, and set the ladle down on the stone.
"Enough," she said.
"There's more," he said. "The well doesn't run dry. Take what you need."
"Enough is what I take." She looked at him then, fully, for the first time, and
he saw the crease at her temple where something had grazed her — a fall, a
stone, a glancing thing — and the blood had dried in her hair and down the
side of her face, and he saw that the stain at her ribs was not from the fall,
and that she was holding her left arm against her side in a way that was also
an act of will.
"You're hurt worse than the head," he said.
"I fell among rocks." Her voice was even. "And there was — a thing before
the rocks. It is not your affair."
"It is if you're going to bleed on my fence line."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth that was not a smile and was
not not a smile. "Mescalero do not bleed on fences. We lean."
"Sit down before you fall down, then. There's shade."
He bound her side with a clean cloth from the cabin, because she permitted
the cloth and the binding and nothing else, and it took all his freighting years
to do it as impersonally as a man saddling a horse, over the deerskin, tight
enough to matter. The wound under her ribs was torn rather than cut, as if
something had hooked her in passing — he did not ask. She bore the binding
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without sound, watching his hands only, and when it was done she said,
"You have done this before."
"On the road. Men get torn up on a freight road."
"And women?"
"One woman." He had not meant to say it. The heat, perhaps. "My wife. Not
a wound. A fever." He tied off the cloth. "It didn't take binding."
She considered this with the gravity she seemed to give everything. "Then
you know a house can empty from one room." She said it as fact, not
comfort, and it was the closest thing to kindness anyone had offered him in
two years, because it required nothing back.
She refused the cabin. She refused food with a shake of her head so final he
did not offer twice. What she accepted, after a negotiation conducted mostly
in silences, was the shade of the largest cottonwood by the creek bed and one