their strings, the people filled every vessel they owned, and the well worked
steadily, bucket over bucket, the windlass creaking its one note, while
Emmett worked it with whoever stood nearest rather than stand aside and be
a monument at his own farewell. The camp across the creek was already
half-struck, lodge covers coming down in the last light, the whole
architecture of a people's life folding itself into loads with the practice of a
hundred generations. Nothing about it looked like defeat, and Emmett was
glad, standing at his well with his sleeves wet to the elbow, that he had never
once been fool enough to think of these people as refugees at his gate. They
had come to the valley the way weather comes, and they were leaving the
way weather leaves. The country was theirs in a way it would never be his,
and he had stopped needing that to wound him.
The gifts were exchanged at first light, in the yard, with the loaded horses
stamping and blowing around them and no ceremony at all, which was the
ceremony.
From Tadan, a horse: a roan gelding, three years old, long-legged and
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sensible-eyed, white-socked on his off hind and scarred on one shoulder. He
was not a gift a man gives to make an impression. He was a gift a man gives
to be of use, sound and young and worth twenty years, and Tadan put the
lead rope in Emmett's hand himself and said, through Aponi, that a man with
one mule was a man one accident away from walking, and the valley was too
wide for that.
From the camp's grandmothers, a gift so quiet Emmett did not find all of it
until they were gone: Martha's garden, down by the cottonwoods where the
fence had sagged for six years and the weeds had won every summer since
her death, stood cleared and hoed and fenced again — every rail reset, the
soil worked dark and ready — and on his kitchen table a pouch of seed,
beans and squash and corn together, tied with a strip of red cloth. The oldest
of the grandmothers, Sani, who had bossed the work, said something that
made Aponi laugh out loud before she translated it: the garden had been an
insult to the woman buried beside it, and now it was not, and that was all the
thanks the matter required.
From the band's young men, mended gear: his freight harness, taken in the
night and returned with every cracked strap replaced and every buckle
tongue trued; and the cabin roof, whose leak over the bunk he had cursed for
two winters, patched and re-shingled in cedar by hands that had never asked
his permission, because permission would have made it a debt.
What Emmett gave in return he had settled on the ride home from Dry Fork,
and he gave it without speech. His second freight wagon — the old
high-boxed wagon standing in the barn since his last contract, sound in the
bed, honest in the iron, wanting only a wheelwright's hour on one wheel —
rolled out behind two of the band's teams with a sack of coffee and a keg of
nails in the bed. He had not freighted in three years; a wagon standing still
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was only a memory with wheels, and a memory did nobody any good in a
barn. On travois a people's old ones rode hard. In a wagon they would ride
like queens. He watched it go down the roadbed he had just covenanted to
keep, and felt the accounts of the whole summer settle in him to a balance he
could finally read: nothing owed, in either direction, by anybody. It was the
first clean ledger of his life.
The camp was gone by full morning. That was the thing that stayed with him
— not sadness, exactly, but the speed of the silence. One hour there was a
town across his creek, with its smoke and its dogs and its morning noises, as
much a fixture of his days as his own barn; the next hour there was a
trampled meadow, a scatter of cold fire rings already weathering, and a quiet
so complete that Judge, at the trough, lifted his head at nothing and stood
listening with his ears turning like a pair of questions.
Aponi left last, with the rear party, and she left the way she had first come to
him — on her feet at his fence before he knew she was there, except that this
time he was watching for her, and this time she came through the gate.
They had never once, in all of it, talked around a thing that mattered, and
they did not start on the last morning. She stood by the well with her horse
cropping the yard grass, taking the inventory of the place the way she had
taken it the first day, as a scout reads country: for what it would do in a hard
season.
"You will winter well," she said. "The wood is in. The roof will not leak on
your bed now." A pause. "You are welcome," she added, dry as a stick, and
he laughed.
"I don't know when you'll come this way again," he said.
"No," she said. "Nor I. The band moves with the grass and the orders from
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the agency, and both change their minds." She tightened her horse's cinch,
and did not look at him while she said the rest of it, which he understood was