The spring came up dry and early, which the basin took as a promise rather than a warning. Cottonwoods leafed along the arroyo before Easter, and the hens were laying again on the porch rail. Nate had been meaning to ask Deya for most of a winter, turning the question over the way a man turns a stone in his hand, waiting for its edges to smooth. She had heard him do it β heard the question living in him the way you hear a river running under ice β and one morning while she was mending his coat by the door she said, "It is time you asked me properly."
He asked her properly that evening, on the porch, and she laughed and said yes, and then she said, "But there must be the paper." He asked what paper. "The paper of your people," she said. "If I am to live in your house by your law, then your law must know my name."
So the paper came first, because she insisted on it. They rode to Fort Verde in the wagon, and the clerk at the county office β a pale young man with ink on his cuffs β read the declaration aloud twice, and Nate signed his name in his careful rancher's hand, and Deya signed hers with a mark she had practiced for three evenings until the line of it held steady. The clerk witnessed it, and the seal went down with a thud, and just like that the territory knew what the basin had known since winter. Nate paid the fee in silver, and Deya folded the paper into her saddlebag as though it were currency.
But the paper was only the territory's version. There were two more rites, and they mattered more.
The first was at the well. Nate had not planned it; Elder Kanoa planned it, which meant it was decided long before anyone spoke. At sundown on the third day after the Fort Verde trip, the ranchers and the families from the northern camp gathered at the stone well. The water ran clear as it always ran, and the tin ladle hung on the well-post. Elder Kanoa spoke first in his own tongue, then in English for the ranchers, and what he said was that water does not belong to the man who digs the well or the people who were there first, but to whoever keeps it clean and open. Then Deya drew up the bucket, and Nate drew up the bucket, and they drank from the same ladle, and everyone present drank after them. The coyote came down from the ridge in the middle of it β the same lean animal that had watched the well through the hard winter β and sat at the edge of the gathering and watched the whole ceremony with its head cocked, and when Elder Kanoa finished speaking, the coyote yipped once, short and sharp, and everyone laughed, and the laughing went around the well like water.
The second rite was at the northern camp, three days later. Nate rode out with his best shirt and his hat in his hands most of the way, feeling like a man going to ask permission for something he had already taken. The camp received him the way a camp receives a man it has already decided about: with food and with silence and with watching eyes. The old ones had built a small fire apart from the cookfires, and the rites were sung in a tongue Nate did not understand and did not need to understand, because Deya's hand was in his through all of it, and her hand was the translation. Someone gave him a braided cord of horsehair to wear around his wrist. Someone else β an aunt with Deya's eyes β put her hands on his shoulders and spoke to him for a long minute, and Deya said afterward that she had told him the names of the dead, so he would know who he was marrying into.
The wedding supper was back at Coldwater, because a supper had to be somewhere and the ranch house had the biggest table. There was beef and mutton and bread enough to feed a regiment, and somebody's fiddle came out, and the children of both peoples ran through the yard with tin cups of water from the well, spilling most of it and drinking the rest. Later, when the fiddle had quieted, Nate and Deya walked out to the well alone, and the coyote sat in the moonlight not twenty yards off, watching them the way it always watched the well β like a trustee making its rounds. Nate lifted the ladle off the post and drank, and handed it to Deya, and she drank, and he hung it back on the post, and the tin rang softly against the stone in the dark.
"Three promises," Deya said. "The paper, the water, the fire."
"Four," Nate said. "The well."
The coyote stood, stretched, and went up the ridge, and the night settled back over Stone Creek Basin, and the marriage was finished the way all good things in the basin were finished: plainly, in front of witnesses, with water.
Chapter 27
Chidi