the years. It sat across his knees with its familiar, reasonable weight, and the
argument for it was a good argument, and he made it to himself in full. Three
hundred Apache coming down on a one-man ranch at dawn. The freight
road. The scar along his ribs, which ached before weather changes and was
aching now, though whether from weather or from memory he had never
been able to determine. The storekeeper's voice. The voice of every man who
had ever been right about such things, and the graves of every man who had
been wrong. He was forty-five years old and alone, and no one would even
know, for days, and that only if a rider happened past the smell.
And against all of it, the other argument, which was not an argument but a
picture: a woman kneeling at his well, pouring water back into the bucket
because enough was what she took. A hand flat on the stone collar, reading
it. A cloth tied off and the words, a house can empty from one room. Step
back from the bucket and a person can be told things.
He got up, sometime in the deep of the night, and went down the porch steps,
and the rifle went with him out of the same habit, and he stood in the yard a
long time looking east where the ridges made their black saw against the
stars. Three hundred people. Old ones. Mothers with sick children. He
thought about the children drinking at Eagle Rock and he thought about
Martha, in the fever winter, begging water in a voice that didn't know him,
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and how there had been all the water in the world in that well and it had not
been the thing she needed, and it had not saved her, and he had dug the well
six feet deeper anyway, in the spring after, as if depth could be an apology.
"All right," he said, to the yard, to the dark, to no one who could be sent
away. "All right."
What he did then, he did in order, like the morning round. He drew water —
bucket after bucket in the starlight, the chain loud in the stillness — and
filled the horse trough to the brim, and the spare barrel by the barn, and the
garden's empty rain barrel. He set the tin ladle clean on the collar. He went to
the yard gate, the wide one, the one a wagon or a crowd would use, and he
lifted the latch bar and swung it open and left it open, the chain hanging
slack. Then he went back up the porch steps and sat down again with the
loaded rifle across his knees, because he was not a fool, and because trust, he
was learning in his forty-fifth year, is not the same as certainty, and a man
can hold both at once the way he can hold a bucket in one hand and a rope in
the other.
He did not sleep. The night was too full of listening. Twice he thought he
heard something on the ridges, and twice it was only the country talking to
itself, a stone giving up its heat, an owl over the creek bed. Toward the
middle of the night he got stiff sitting and walked the yard once, slowly, with
his hands empty, the way he walked the morning round, and stopped at the
gate he had left open. The bar lay in the dirt where he'd dropped it. The
gateway stood black and wide between its posts, and beyond it the trail went
down into the dark toward the creek bed and the hills, and he stood there a
long time looking at his own open gate as at a word he had said out loud in a
room he'd sworn to keep silent. He could still close it. That was the thing he
kept coming back to, all night: every part of it was still revocable. He could
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swing the gate to and bar it, bar the cabin door, and be the man he had been
for eleven years — the man no one could need, behind his ditch of solitude,
with his well inside the walls of his arrangement like a heart inside ribs.
Nothing that had happened that day had been a promise. A woman had drunk
his water and told him a true thing, and a true thing is not a contract.
And yet she had poured the fourth ladle back. He kept returning to that,
standing at his open gate in the dark, as a man returns to a stone in his shoe.
Enough is what I take. In eleven years no one had taken anything from
Emmett Cole — not Slade with his money, not the territory with its taxes of
loneliness, not even Martha's death, which had taken from him but was not a
person and could not be blamed. This woman had stood at the center of his
arrangement, dying of thirst in killing heat, with everything she needed in a
bucket at her feet — and she had taken enough, and poured back the rest, and
left his gate exactly as she found it, and walked out of his yard on her own
feet with her blood soaking through his cloth. She had treated his well as a
thing with an owner. She had treated him as a party, not an obstacle. No one
had done that for him in longer than he could tally, and it undid, thread by