She headed it simply: The Days of the Trouble — and under it she wrote what had been spent, and what had been given, and by whom. The Kahlin's gifts of meat and corn she entered as carefully as any coin. The blanket she entered too, though it had no price: One blanket, woven, deep red — from Makya. Kept by the door.
When she closed the book the ranch house was quiet, and through the window she could see Asto on the porch with his splinted arm across his knees, watching the tanks go dark, a guest who had become something for which her ledger had no column at all.
Chapter 28 — The Stone at the Tanks
The stone was a slab of the same granite the tanks were cut in, flat as a table top and thick as a Bible, and Caleb had hauled it down from the outcrop on the stone boat in the cool of a morning three weeks gone, before his better judgment could object to the weight. Since then it had lain on two sawhorses in the barn's shade, and on the evenings when the day's work let him, he had gone out with a chisel and a three-pound hammer and cut letters into it, a few at a time, the way a man writes a letter he intends to be read after he is gone.
Asto had watched the first evening, from the barn door, his arm still in its splint.
"What does a stone need with words?" he had asked. "The water says it."
"The water says it to whoever's listening," Caleb said, blowing granite dust off the line. "The stone says it to whoever comes when I'm not here to listen for them. Men forget, Asto. Towns forget — you saw how fast. I want it cut where forgetting has to work harder."
Three days, Makya had said, when he left his nephew on the porch. The wound had kept its own calendar, as wounds do: the rib graze closed clean, but the knife cut in the forearm had wept and sulked for a fortnight before it knitted, and twice Sadie had packed it with Sihas's poultice and threatened Asto with the tone she used on the mules. He had submitted with the dignity of a scout under orders. He had not been idle — a man can shell corn one-handed, and mend harness, and sit a quiet horse around the home pasture by the third week — but the ride home was sixty miles of desert, and Caleb would not hear of it until Asto could draw his arm back to a bowstring's pull, or near enough that pride and honesty shook hands somewhere in the middle.
On the last morning — for they had both known it was the last morning when they woke — the stone was finished, and the letters read clean in the raking light:
WATER FOR ALL WHO COME IN PEACE — 1881
"You cut the words deep," Asto said, running his good hand over them.
"Deep enough to outlast the man who cut them," Caleb said. "That's the only kind of deep worth cutting."
They set it together at the head of the tanks, where the track from San Miguel came down off the granite shoulder and every traveler reached the water by the same path the Kahlin column had taken at dawn so many weeks before. Tomás dug the footing and mixed a pad of lime and sand; the stone boat brought the slab down with the mule stepping careful as a dancer; and at the end the three of them set their shoulders to it — Caleb, Tomás, and Asto with his healed side favored and his good arm doing the work of two — and walked it upright into its bed, and packed the earth and rubble at its foot, and stood back.
Sadie came down the path with the blanket over her arm — not Makya's; a plain one, against the evening cool later — and read the stone aloud, because a thing set in letters asks to be heard once in a voice.
"'Water for all who come in peace,'" she read. "'Eighteen eighty-one.'" She looked at her father. "It's missing something."
"What's that?"
"Your name," she said. "A man reading it in fifty years won't know whose rule it was."
"That's the point of it, Sadie. If it needs my name to hold, it isn't a rule. It's a preference."
Asto was quiet a moment, and then he did a thing Caleb would remember longer than the stone-setting itself. He took his own waterskin from his shoulder, unstoppered it, and poured a measure of tank water slowly onto the earth at the stone's foot — not a waste, in that country, but a sealing, the way other men sign with a seal of brass. "Among my people, a thing spoken before water is bound," he said. "Now it is spoken."
They ate at noon under the cottonwood, and Asto saddled the little bay gelding the Kahlin had left for him, and checked his rifle and his bundle with the unhurried ritual of a man who has packed for distance all his life. His side pulled when he mounted — Caleb saw it, and Asto saw him see it, and neither of them mentioned it, which was their whole friendship in one gesture.
"Your mother will ask if we fed you," Sadie said.
"Tell her—" Asto grinned, and for a moment he was twenty-one and unshot and entirely himself. "Tell her your daughter guarded the meat with a rifle and I was afraid to eat my fill. She will know it for a lie and love it for one."
He turned at the gate and looked back once — at the stone, at the trough, at the low house with the blue door where he had been carried in half-dead of thirst in another season of his life. "Tokani," he called.
Caleb raised a hand. "Ride easy, Asto."