Chidi was born in the late summer of 1884, in the ranch house at Coldwater, in the room that looked out toward the well. Deya's aunt came down from the northern camp to be there, and the neighbor's wife came up from down the creek, and between them the boy arrived without ceremony and with a full head of dark hair. Nate stood on the porch through the whole of it, the way men stand on porches during such things, and when it was over he came inside and held the boy and wept once, dryly, into the blanket. He opened the blue book that night and wrote: August 1884. A son. Chidi. Then he sat a long time with the pen in his hand, and finally wrote, under it: May he be worthy of the water.
The boy grew the way basin children grow: outside. By the time he was four he could ride the old mare bareback to the well and back, and by five he could draw the bucket without spilling, which Nate counted as the greater achievement. Nate taught him the ranch the way the ranch had taught Nate: by work. Fences in spring. Branding in summer. The tally in the blue book every Sunday evening, with Chidi sitting on the edge of the desk, swinging his legs, watching the columns fill. "Why do you write it down?" Chidi asked once, when he was six. Nate said, "Because memory argues with itself, but a book don't." Chidi thought about that for a week and then said, "Then I will keep a book too."
Deya taught him the other half of the world. She sang him the old songs while she worked β grinding songs, riding songs, a lullaby about a coyote that stole the moon's reflection out of a river β and he learned them before he learned his letters, so that the songs were the frame and the language hung on them like laundry on a line. She taught him the names of the plants along the arroyo, and which ones the water made bitter, and how to read weather in the shape of clouds over the western ridge. She taught him that a man could belong to two peoples the way a well could belong to two camps: not divided, but shared.
He learned to read in two languages. Nate taught him the English alphabet at the kitchen table, sounding out words from the territorial newspaper and from the blue book, which by then was filling with the compact's accounts β water shares, fence repairs, the cost of the new windlass. Deya's people had no written tongue, but the boy learned the Spanish of the vaqueros too, from the hired hands at branding time, and he wrote that down as well, in a mix of letters that was his own invention. At seven he kept his own small ledger β a stitched notebook Nate bought him in Fort Verde β and in it he recorded the things the blue book did not: how many swallows nested under the eaves in April, the day the coyote's mate appeared on the ridge, the word in his mother's tongue for the smell of rain before it comes. Nate looked through it once and said, "That is a book worth keeping," and meant it.
The two worlds were not always easy to carry at once. There were boys at the Fort Verde school, where he went for two winters, who called him half this and half that, the way children do when they are rehearsing the cruelties of their fathers. He came home quiet those winters, and Deya sang the coyote song until the quiet went out of him, and Nate taught him to mend a harness strap so fine you could not find the join. "A man is not half of anything," Nate told him, one night by the well. "You are the whole of both. That is harder, and it is better."
In the summer of his ninth year, the compact held its annual reckoning at the well β the ranchers and the northern camp, going over the water shares and the repairs, the way they had done every year since the agreement. Chidi stood beside his father with his small ledger in his hands, and when the argument started β as it always started, over who had drawn how much in the dry month β Chidi read from his book the dates the windlass had been repaired and who had been there, and the argument stopped, because the boy had written it down and the writing was true. Elder Kanoa looked at Nate across the fire that night and said, "Your son keeps the record now." Nate said, "He always did."
The coyote came down to the well that evening, with two half-grown pups trailing behind it, and Chidi sat very still on the well-post steps and watched them drink, and wrote it down in his ledger when he got home: The coyote brought her children to the water. So did we.
Chapter 28
The Interpreter