The Fence That Kept Home In: A Drifting Cowboy, Two Orphaned Sisters on Cottonwood Creek, and the Night He Slept Whole for the First Time in Ten Years

"No," Elias said. "No debt." He thanked them for the supper because his mouth required something true to do, and took his bedroll out to the porch, and lay listening to the house settle, and to the two low voices inside that stopped, after a while, in a way that told him his words were being carried gently and set down somewhere out of his hearing. The fence stood complete in the dark. He had built it to keep things safe. It had not occurred to him to ask what it might keep in.

Chapter 20

The Night Watch

That night Elias did not take his bedroll to the porch. He took his rifle and a blanket to the barn loft instead, and settled into the hay by the open loft door with his back against a beam, where the whole yard lay below him in the dark and the pass road showed as a pale thread running north between the pines. If the smoke came at dawn — three columns together — he wanted to be already watching when it did, and already placed.

The hours of a watch are long ones, and a man fills them with whatever his life has given him to fill them with. For ten years Elias had filled them with one night. It came to him now, as it always came, in pieces that had worn smooth as handled stones: the emigrant camp at Red Willow Crossing settling down in the spring dark, the Hennessey wagons in their half-circle; Abram's voice across the fire, easy, trusting a hired man's judgment; young Micah asleep in the wagon bed with his boots still on; and then the stock breaking — the thunder of them going off in the dark, the loose horses stampeded on purpose, though he had not known it was on purpose until it no longer mattered. Himself riding out after them, the way the trap required. The shots behind him. The ride back through the sage at a gallop that was already too late, and the camp as he found it, and the things a man does not stop seeing because he has closed his eyes.

He let it come. He had learned, somewhere along the Cottonwood Creek weeks, that the night's facts did not change for being refused a hearing. Abram Hennessey. Micah, nine years old, who had asked Elias that evening whether cowboys were afraid of anything, and to whom Elias had said, Nothing worth naming, son — a sentence he had been paying for ever since. Ollie Ferris, the teamster, who had died with a wagon wrench in his hand, fighting with the wrong tool because the right one had been drawn away chasing horses.

In the loft, the dark pressed close and ordinary: hay smell, horse smell, Cinder shifting below and sighing, an owl working the creek. Somewhere toward midnight Elias understood — not all at once, but the way a fence line gradually shows true when you sight down it — that he was sitting the watch differently than he had sat every watch for ten years. He was not listening for his punishment. He was listening for horses that had not yet come, on behalf of people still living, in a place he had helped to make ready. The gun across his knees was a tool again, not a penance. His hands were warm. When his head nodded once, sharply, toward sleep, he let himself stand and walk the cold off and take up his post again — not in disgrace at having nearly slept, but the way any watchman does, because the watch was his and he meant to keep it well.

Near dawn the sky in the east went the color of wet ash, and the foothills stood up black against it. Elias was watching them, and watching the road, when the sound came — faint, far, and unmistakable to a man who had spent his life around horses. Hooves. Many of them, muted by distance and soft ground, moving somewhere beyond the pines to the north. Not the loose scatter of a herd grazing. A body of horses, held together, traveling.

He was on his feet with the rifle up before the sound had finished reaching him, every sense drawn to a point, counting without wanting to, placing it — a mile off, perhaps more, and moving slow, and not — he held his breath and listened with his whole body — not turning. Not yet. The sound thinned and was gone into the general silence, the way a stone's rings go out of a pond, and the dawn widened, and no smoke rose anywhere.

Elias stood in the loft door and watched the light come, and named the thing that was happening in him, because naming things had become, lately, the only way he knew to keep them honest. He was not afraid of the old failure anymore. The watch had proven that, hour by hour, all night long: he had stood ready beside the living without the dead crowding between him and his work. What he was afraid of — standing there with the rifle cooling in his hands and the ranch waking below him, a lamp going on in the cabin, the sisters' day beginning in the house he had told them he would leave — was simpler and harder than the old fear had ever been. He was afraid of going. Of the road taking back the man who had finally, somewhere along a cedar fence line, been allowed to stop.