if we do this wrong we do it wrong for everybody, your people and mine
together. Come here and look down it."
They stood at the curb together. Emmett worked the windlass and let the
bucket down the shaft he'd dug through caliche and stubborn rock the year he
turned forty, and they listened to it go, and the splash, when it came, was a
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long way down and a small sound.
"She's a good well," Emmett said. "She's the only one in two days' ride that
is, which I expect you already know. But she fills the way a cup fills under a
slow tap. I draw too hard, I get mud. I draw mud too long, I get nothing, and
nothing takes days to forgive. So there's hours, and there's order, or there's a
dry hole and three hundred of us standing around it explaining to each other
whose fault it was. I'd rather not attend that conversation."
"Tell me the hours," Tadan said. "Tell me all of it. I did not ride down here to
be agreed with. I rode down to learn the shape of the thing I am asking, from
the man who dug it."
So Emmett laid out his terms at the wellhead, one at a time, the way the chief
had laid out his own, and the chief weighed each one in silence before he
nodded, and neither of them hurried.
Water would be drawn at the yard's edge, by bucket and trough, nowhere else
on the place. No one drew but by the bucket, and the bucket moved in parties
Emmett called, so the yard never held more than it could hold. Rifles stayed
outside the fence, stacked, every one of them — a man could keep his knife,
Emmett said, he wasn't a fool and wasn't asking any man to be meat in
strange country, but no rifle crossed his fence line, not one, not for any
reason that had been invented yet. Families would come in parties and go
back in parties, across the creek, where the camp would be made — not in
his pasture, because his grass was his winter and his cattle would starve in
February for grass eaten in July. And the well would be drawn at stated
hours: at dawn until the sun stood two hands above the ridge, and again in
the evening, and the well would rest between, the way a horse rests, or it
would fail them all together.
23
When he had finished, Tadan was quiet. Then the chief spoke in Apache, a
long sentence, low, looking east toward the ridges, and Aponi answered
before Emmett understood she was there.
She had come down the slope behind the barn, walking, leading her horse,
her side bound under a clean cloth that showed at her ribs when she moved.
She was tall enough to look the chief in the eye without lifting her chin, and
she did.
"He says the hours are hard for the children at midday," she said in English,
to Emmett, though her uncle had not asked her to translate and some part of
the sentence had plainly been meant for her alone. "I tell him the well is not
his to be hard or kind. It is a well. It gives what it gives." She turned to her
uncle and spoke in Apache, and Emmett, who had freighted long enough to
own a scattering of the language the way a man owns a scattering of coins
from a country he passed through once, caught the words for children and for
sick. Then she faced Emmett again. "There must be a drawing at midday. A
small one. For the children and the sick and the ones who carry them. Not the
horses. Not the strong. I ask this myself, not as his tongue. As the one who
drank your water yesterday and knows what it is to need it at the wrong
hour."
Emmett ran the arithmetic the way he'd been running it since first light, the
numbers sitting in him like stones. "A short drawing," he said. "Midday.
Children, sick, and the old ones. One trough, filled once, and the well rests
after till evening. That's the whole of what's in her at noon, Aponi. I'm not
being stingy with a thing I don't own the whole of."
"You own the digging of it," she said. "That is what a well is. A hole belongs
to the earth. A well belongs to the man who dug down to the water and
stayed." She turned to her uncle and spoke again in Apache, longer this time,
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and Emmett heard the chief say something with the cadence of a concession
being made formally, for the record of the ridges.
"He agrees," Aponi said. "All of it. The fence, the rifles, the hours, the camp
across the creek. He says it is agreed the way a treaty is agreed, and his word
on it is the same word." And then, before Emmett could answer, she went on,
still in English, and this time he understood that she was correcting her uncle
in front of a stranger, and that the chief was letting her, and that both of those
facts were worth more than anything else that had been said at the well that
morning. "He said also, in his own talk, that we will stay until the season
turns. I correct him. We stay until Eagle Rock runs sweet again, or until we
find other water that does not kill. The season is not his to name, and a