Chapter 3 — The Woman at the Well
He found her at dusk, coming back from the far pasture with the light failing and the first thin stars pricking through in the east, and if Bjorn had not stopped dead at the well yard gate and set his hackles up, Erik might have walked past the trough without seeing her at all.
She lay along the trough's shadowed side where she had fallen, half under the windmill's platform, one arm flung out toward the water she had not reached. A Lakota woman. Her dress was torn and dust-caked, her feet were wrapped in rags that had once been a blanket, and the rags were dark at the toes with walking. Her hair had come loose and lay in the dirt of his well yard. When Erik knelt and turned her face gently toward the lamp he had fetched, her eyes opened — barely, the lids cracking like the mud of his creek — and she looked at him with the exhausted clarity of a creature that has decided, some miles back, that it is going to die, and is only waiting to be told where.
"Water," she said. In English. Clear as a bell. "Please."
Afterward he would think about the order in which he did things, and about how little thinking there was in it. He did not go for Nils. He did not go for his rifle, which stood inside the door. He went down on his knees in the dirt of his own well yard, slid one arm under her shoulders, and lifted the dipper from the trough with the other hand, and he gave her water the way you give it to anyone who has gone three days without — a little, and wait; a little, and wait — though he did not yet know it had been three days. Her throat worked. Some ran down her chin and darkened the dust beneath her, and her flung-out hand found his sleeve and held it, not weakly.
"Slow," he said. "Slow, now. There is enough. The well is deep. It does not go empty."
"Three days," she said, when she could. "Three days afoot. I was—" Her eyes went past him, to the dark beyond the yard, and something moved in her face that was not thirst. "I walked to warn them. I lost the way in the dark."
Her left sleeve was torn away at the shoulder and bound around the upper arm with a strip of cloth — another sleeve, by the look of it, ripped from the same dress — and the binding was stiff and black with dried blood. Erik saw it when he lifted her, and saw too how she guarded that arm, and how the strength went out of her all at once when the water reached her, the way a man sits down hard when the long carry is done. She was young — twenty-six, perhaps, though the three days had aged her — and even filthy and hurt and emptied out, she had a straightness to her, a bones-deep dignity that the prairie had not been able to take off her in three days of trying.
"Bjorn," Erik said to the dog, who was watching with his whole body, "go and fetch Nils. Go on." Bjorn ran. Erik gathered the woman up — she weighed almost nothing, and what weight there was seemed all in the arm that held his sleeve — and carried her into the sod house and laid her on Nils's bed, because it was nearer the stove. Nils came pounding in with the lantern held high and stopped in the doorway with his mouth open.
"She was at the well," Erik said. "She has been shot, I think, in the arm, and she has walked three days. Nils — put the kettle on. And get my grandmother's quilt, the good one, off my bed."
"Shot?" Nils said. "Erik—"
"I know what I said." He was already cutting the stiff binding away with his belt knife, careful as a man defusing something. "Kettle first. Questions after. She is a guest at my well, Nils. That is the whole of it until she tells us different."
The wound, when he got the cloth off, was a furrow: a bullet had grazed the outside of her left upper arm, tearing a channel through the flesh an inch long and mercifully shallow, and she had bound it herself, walking, with her torn sleeve. It was angry and dirty but it had not mortified. Erik washed it with boiled water while she watched him through half-closed eyes, and when the pain bit she did not cry out; she only found his sleeve again with her good hand, and held on.
When it was clean he bound it fresh with linen boiled and dried for just such uses — a farm keeps such things the way a ship keeps rope — and she bore the tightening of it without a sound, though the sweat stood on her face. He gave her water again after, a spoonful at a time, and then set the cup where her good hand could find it in the night. Her feet, when he drew the ruined rags off them, were cut and blistered to the point of wonder: she had walked three days on those, over gumbo and dry creek gravel and the stubble of cut hay fields, and the rags had worn through the soles of her moccasins and then worn through themselves. He washed her feet too, because his mother had washed the feet of a tramp in Bergen once and given the man her brother's shoes, and some things a man does because they were done in his hearing when he was small.
"Your name," Erik said, working. "Tell me your name, so I do not have to call you 'woman' in my own house."