The ride home was six miles of wind and white sun, the saddlebags empty and slapping light, and Sadie composed the report as her father would want it: facts first, no tears in it. No supplies. No credit. Beck's offer, and its price. Pruitt's boy riding east yesterday — the smith had let that slip. A column coming, then, in days. Twenty years of neighborliness, gone in three days of talk — talk with a smile behind it and silver conchos catching the sun.
Her father was mending harness on the porch when she rode in. He looked at the empty saddlebags, then at her, and read the whole of it off her the way he read weather off the ridge.
"Well," Caleb Rourke said. "Then it's a good thing the tanks don't run on credit." He patted the sorrel's neck and began, unhurried, to unsaddle. "Come tell me all of it at the table, daughter. We'll eat what's in the house — there's enough. There's always enough, if a man counts right."
From the lower tanks, faint across the evening, came the sound of the Kahlin camp settling: a woman singing a child down to sleep. Sadie stood a moment in the yard of her cut-off ranch and listened, and thought that San Miguel had chosen its side of the line, and so, God help them all, had the Rourkes.
Chapter 11 — The Camp at the Tanks
By the third morning, the camp at the tanks had settled into something that was not peace, exactly, but had the shape of it.
The Kahlin drew their water before the ranch stirred, in an order Caleb had not set and did not question: the old ones first with their clay pots, then the women with skins and gourds, then the horses led down two at a time to the lower basin so the drinking water stayed clean. Whoever had arranged it — Makya, or a custom older than Makya — it worked the way a good fence worked, without anybody having to stand over it.
Caleb stood at the trough with a bucket in his hand and watched a people he had been raised to fear do their morning chores. A woman scolded a boy in the Kahlin tongue. Somewhere a baby cried and was hushed. It sounded, God help him, like any camp on earth.
"You are up early to stare," Tomás said, coming out of the barn with a cigarillo unlit between his fingers.
"I am up early to water stock," Caleb said. "The staring comes free."
Mid-morning, Sihas came up the path from the camp with a woven basket on her arm and two girls trailing behind her like ducklings. She did not knock at the house. She set the basket on the porch step, nodded once at Sadie, and stood waiting with the patience of a woman who had decided courtesy would happen whether anyone was ready or not.
Sadie lifted the cloth. Corn cakes, still warm. Dried meat, cut thin as paper. A little clay pot of something dark and sweet-smelling.
"Tell her thank you," Sadie said. "Tell her she doesn't have to feed us. Tell her — " She stopped. "Tell her the cakes smell like my mother used to make. Because they do."
Tomás spoke, halting, with long pauses where the words would not come. Sihas listened with her head tipped, and then she answered at some length, and at one point she put her hand flat against her own chest and then pointed, gently, at Sadie.
"She says a house is known by whether the hungry are fed at it," Tomás said. "She says her sister's son lives because of this house. She says — " he fumbled, shrugged, "— the rest is about you having your mother's face in your eyes. I do not have the words right, but the meaning is kind."
Sadie, who had faced down a boycott and a mob's gossip without blinking, had to look at the basket hard. "Well," she said. "Tell her the coffee's real, even if it's the last of it, and she's to sit."
They sat on the porch, three generations of women and one old man translating, and the girls drank coffee with sugar and giggled at the taste.
The children were the first true bridge, the way children always are. By afternoon they had discovered the trough, and the trough, to a child of six, was clearly a small sea put there for splashing. Caleb found two boys and a girl up to their elbows in it, shrieking with laughter, while the stock looked on in outrage.
His first instinct was order: drinking water was drinking water. His second was Elena's voice, years gone, saying that a child wet was a small price for a world working right.
"Tomás," he called. "Tell them the lower basin's for swimming, and I'll show them where the water runs out over the rocks. Tell them the trough's for horses, and horses are poor swimmers and jealous besides."
It took some doing, and the translation of "jealous horses" cost Tomás a full minute, but the migration was accomplished, and an hour later Caleb was standing in the lower basin's outflow with his trousers rolled, being shown — by a girl of perhaps seven, with great seriousness — the correct Kahlin way to skip a flat stone across still water. He was, he admitted, doing it wrong. He had been doing it wrong, apparently, for forty years.
"She says your wrist is stiff as an old man's," Tomás reported from the bank.
"Tell her my wrist has seniority," Caleb said, and the girl laughed before the translation arrived, as people do when the joke is in the face and not the words.
In the barn, Asto fretted. That was the hard part of the day, visited morning and evening: a young man built for distance, lying in straw while his body took its own slow time. The graze along his left ribs had closed clean and pink; the cut on his right forearm, bound in Sadie's linen, still wept if he forgot and used the hand. He had forgotten, reaching for a water cup, and Sadie had found the binding spotted and read him the law in two languages, neither of which he needed translated.