autumn rains had come up the arroyo in two good floods and scoured the
pool to its gravel, and the water, which had held its bitterness all summer like
a grudge, had let it go. A sheepherder had drunk there in October and lived to
report it, and then a family, and then it was simply a fact again, as it had been
for a hundred years: Eagle Rock ran clean. Emmett heard it by his stove with
the snow ticking on his new roof, and he thought of the sack corner and the
hub-band at rest now in a courthouse drawer, and of the water underground
making its slow way back to innocence without a single human hand on it,
and he was content to let the spring have the credit. Some things men broke
and men had to mend, with paper and testimony and work. Some things the
country mended itself, given time and rain and to be left alone. A wise man,
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he was learning at forty-five, knew which list a given sorrow belonged on.
Winter went out of the valley the way it had come in, in its own time, and the
spring that followed was a wet one — the creek up, the meadow across it
greening to the fences, Martha's garden showing the first spears of the
grandmothers' beans through the worked soil like a signature coming up in
sympathetic ink. Brandt's spring letter lay read twice and put away in the
drawer: the trial done, the sentence given, years in the territorial prison. The
well yard was ready for the season as it had never been ready in the years of
Emmett's hiding. Troughs scrubbed and sound. The road past the ranch firm
from its autumn keeping. The sign repainted, the Apache marks gone over
fresh, so the words would be legible to the first thirsty reader of the year.
On a day in the full green of it, with the heat standing up off the yard at noon
the way it had stood on the day that had started everything, a rider came
down the spring road.
He saw the dust first, and then the single rider ahead of a wider dust on the
ridge — the band's spring movement coming down behind its scout. She rode
ahead alone, as she would now always do on this road, and she came through
his gate without checking her horse, and swung down at the well with the
dust still settling on her shoulders, and looked at the yard — the full troughs,
the ready bucket, the ladle hanging on its nail by the curb where it had
always hung — and found it all in order, and nodded once, the scout's nod,
country read and approved.
Neither of them made a ceremony of it, which was their ceremony by then.
She drank first, from the ladle, standing in the heat with her hat pushed back,
a working scout at the end of a morning's ride, and Emmett watched her
drink the way he had watched the first time — as a thing with its own
gravity, water going where water was needed, the well doing the one thing it
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had ever been dug to do.
Then she filled the ladle again, full to the trembling brim, and held it out to
him.
He looked at it, and at her, and understood the argument in the gesture —
that he had been on his feet since before dawn in the service of other people's
water, travellers' and horses' and the garden's and the road's, and that the
keeper of a well could stand in his own yard at noon and be the thirstiest soul
in it, and never once think to drink. It was exactly the kind of foolishness she
had been watching him for since a summer morning when she had come over
his fence with blood on her temple.
"You've learned the house rules," he said.
She held the ladle steady, and her face did the thing it did instead of smiling,
which by now he could read the way he read weather. "Drink, well-keeper.
The water's for everybody. You said so yourself — it's on the sign."
He drank. It was cold the way well water is cold out of the deep ground in
spring, cold enough to ache, and it tasted of stone and iron and nothing else
at all, which is to say it tasted clean. He drank it all and handed back the
ladle, and she hung it on its nail on the first try, like a woman who had hung
it there a hundred times in a life that had run, for one whole turning of the
year, alongside his own.
Behind her, on the ridge, the band was coming down in its long order —
riders, herds, the wagon with the old ones riding like queens — and the road
would fill, and the troughs would empty and fill again, and the bucket would
go down into the dark and come up shining, all afternoon, for whoever came
next: for the band and the traveler, for the scout and the stranger, for the next
hurt and thirsty soul to lean on his fence in the heat of a day not yet arrived,
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whose name he did not know and would not need to ask. The water rose in
the bucket, clear as the year it was dug, clear as the morning it had first been
given away. It would keep rising. That was the whole of the covenant, and
the whole of the well, and it was enough.
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