Chapter 1
The Blue Book
The cold woke him first, the way it always did, seeping through the wool blanket and into the bones of the cabin before the stove had a chance to argue. Nathaniel Gentry lay a moment with his eyes open, listening for the wind. It had not risen in the night. That much he knew before he ever reached for the blue book.
The book lay where it always lay, on the plank table beside the lamp, tied shut with a length of faded string. It was not a large thing, nor a handsome one: a cloth-bound ledger, its blue gone dusty at the corners, its spine cracked in two places from the thousand openings of years. Eleven years he had kept it, give or take a day or two, and the pages in the back were still blank and waiting, which struck him some mornings as either a mercy or a joke.
He lit the lamp, pulled the blanket around his shoulders, and untied the string.
"March," he wrote, and paused, and asked the dark outside the window what day it was, the way a man might ask after a neighbor. "March the second, 1881."
He ruled the small columns the way he always did: weather, wind, water, chores, visitors, hours. The pencil was short and stubbed from years of use, and he sharpened it with his pocketknife, blowing the shavings into the stove where they flared and died.
Weather: clear, cold, stars out. Wind: none to speak of. He dressed and read the tin cup of the rain gauge though no rain had come. The sky above Stone Creek Basin was gunmetal still, the stars thinning at the edges. He spat into the dust, breathed, and went to the well.
The stone well stood at the center of the yard the way a heart stands in a body. It was older than the cabin, older than the fences, older than anything Nate could claim to have built with his own hands. The former owner, a man named Hollis Farr's father, had set it there when the territory was still half rumor, and it had never once failed β not in the dry year, not in the year the grasshoppers came, not in the year the grief came. Nate had measured it every day for eleven years. He lowered the weighted line and counted the knots and read the water level against the chalk mark on the stone lip, and wrote it down: three and three-quarter fathoms to the surface, same as yesterday, same as last month.
Water: steady. Well never fails. It was the one entry he had never once had to amend.
He walked the fence line in the long pale light before the sun crested the ridge, counting posts, mending wire where the wind had worried it. Ten head of cattle, one mule named Job who bit when he was bored. The chores filled the column the way they always did: fence wire, mended gate hinge, salted the cattle, swept the porch, checked the beans. Visitors: none. He left the hour columns blank until evening, when he would fill them honestly: up at five, supper at six, in bed by nine.
By noon he worked with his coat off, and by evening the wind came up from the west, the way it did in March, carrying the smell of dust and juniper. He cooked beans and cornmeal, ate standing at the stove, and washed the single plate and the single fork.
The grave was behind the cabin, under the cottonwood. Two stones there: his wife, dead of the fever eleven years come autumn, and the infant boy who had not lived long enough for a name that mattered to anyone but them. Nate had written their names in the blue book once, on the day of each burial, and never again β not because he forgot, but because the ledger was for what changed, and that had not changed, not one single day of it.
"Evening, girl," he said, kneeling at the well.
The coyote came the way she always came, low and silent from the arroyo, her ribs showing, one ear notched from some old fight. She stopped at the edge of the yard, waiting, as she had waited every evening for three winters. Nate set down the scraps β beans, cornmeal, a strip of gristle β on the flat stone he kept for that purpose, and stepped back, and stood with his hands in his pockets while she ate, quick and wary.
When she was done she stood a moment, looking at the well, then at him, then at the darkening ridge, as if she were reading the ledger too. Then she slipped back into the arroyo, and the dark took her, and the stars came out over Stone Creek Basin, thick as spilled salt.
He wrote the evening entries by lamplight: supper at six, fed the coyote at seven, wind from the west, all quiet. He tied the string around the blue book, set it square on the table, and sat a while on the porch, listening to the wind in the cottonwood.