He was up long before the light, the way he had been up on the other morning that had divided his life into before and after — but this time there was no dread in it, only work, done at the pace of a man who knows what the day is for.
He milked the cow in the dark. He fed the stock, forked down hay for the new horses — the bay gelding stood blowing through his nose at the strangeness of the barn, and the sorrel mare, Mila's sorrel's near twin in color, ate like she had been born in the place. He drew two buckets at the well and topped the trough to the brim, though the yard was still blue with shadow, and he set the dipper on its nail, handle out, the way Ingrid had taught him a man's yard should wait for company: ready.
Nils came out yawning with his boots unlaced and took in the full trough, the curried team, his brother standing in a beaded vest at five in the morning, and said nothing at all — which for Nils was a speech, and a good one. He laced his boots, took the axe, and went to split wood at the far side of the yard, out of earshot of the well, with the courtesy of a brother who had grown all the way up in one winter.
She came out of the gray east as the first light touched the windmill wheel.
Not along the road — across the bottom, the way her people had always come, the sorrel picking through the new grass with the dew flying off her feet. The camp behind her across the creek was already stirring: smoke going up straight, horses moving, the day's march assembling itself in the half-dark. Mila rode into the yard and down from the saddle in one motion, and her horse went — knowing the place, having drunk there in another life of danger — straight to the trough.
Erik took the windlass himself. Some things a host does with his own hands. The rope creaked, the bucket came up dark and shining and cold from sixty feet of earth, and he poured for the trough first, for the sorrel and for the bay gelding Nils led out from the barn without a word and then left again. The two horses drank side by side, blowing and sighing in the first light, one band-bred and one band-bred, and the windmill woke above them and began its slow turning, catching the first of the sun on its rimed-bright wheel.
Mila stood with her hand on the well curb. She did not drink this time. She had come, it turned out, not for the water but for the well — which is a different thing, and they both knew it.
"The band moves in an hour," she said. "Three days to the summer grounds. In the fall, when the grass cures, we come down this road. In the spring, up it again. That is the shape of our year, Erik Halvorsen."
"It is a good shape," Erik said. "A man can set his gate by it."
"And the gate?" she said.
"The gate will be open." He hung the bucket and set his own hand on the curb beside hers, not touching, the width of one honesty apart. "And the well will be kept sweet. I am not a man who says large things, Mila. I have tried it and the words come back to me like bad coin. But a well I can keep. A gate I can keep. The seasons I cannot keep — but they keep themselves, and they bring what they bring, up and down this road."
"They bring us," she said. "Spring and fall, Erik. That is what they bring."
"Then I will be here in the spring and the fall," he said. "With a full trough."
She looked at him then, in the growing light, this Norwegian farmer in the vest her hands had made in the days she healed under his roof, with his dead wife on the hill above them and his brother splitting wood at a brother's distance and her people moving like a river's beginning across the creek — and she smiled the rarest of her rationed smiles, the one that reached all the way.
"Water that does not ask a man's nation," she said. "My father said it of the well. I say it of the keeper." She gathered the sorrel's reins. "Drink for me in the winter, when the road is shut. I will think of the trough full, and the wheel turning."
"I will keep it from freezing," he said. "It is what a well is for."
She mounted. The camp across the creek was on its feet now, the herd bunching toward the coulee road, her father's tall figure visible for one moment against the lightening sky. Mila lifted her hand — not in farewell, Erik understood, but in the other thing, the thing that has no wave because it is not an ending: in arrangement, in promise, in the plain terms of a road that runs two ways and a gate that stands open on it. Then she rode down to the creek crossing, and the Red Willow band took her into its moving heart, and the valley filled with the sound of horses, going up the road into the summer.
Erik stood at the well until they were out of sight. Nils came and stood with him, axe on shoulder, and neither of them spoke, because the morning was saying it: the sun up full on the windmill wheel, turning slow and certain over the yard; the trough brim-full and shining; two horses — the bay gelding and the bright sorrel mare — drinking deep in the first light, in a yard where no gun had ever again been raised past the well, on a farm that had learned, and meant to remember, what water is for.
The End