Nate had been failing for a year, the way old men fail: not all at once, but in the small surrenders. He gave up riding the far fence line first, then the near one. He gave up the stairs to the loft. By the summer of 1900 he did most of his ranching from a chair on the porch, and the chair got moved, day by day, a little closer to the well β first to the shade of the cottonwood, then to the well's own shadow, until by August he was sitting with his back against the stone, the ladle hanging on the post above his head, watching the water and the ridge and the coming and going of the basin as though it were a play put on for him.
He was seventy-three, and he knew the shape of his own ending. He had Chidi write the will at the kitchen table, in the clerk's plain hand, and he signed it, and Deya witnessed it, and Elder Kanoa β who was older than Nate and showed it less β witnessed it too. The will was short, the way Nate's sentences had always been short. The ranch, the house, the stock, and the well went to the compact council, to be held in common for the ranchers and the camps of Stone Creek Basin, the well forever protected as commons, the water forever open. "They will fight over it when I am gone," Nate said. Chidi said, "They will try." Nate said, "The books will hold them." He meant the blue books, filed in the territorial archive in Chidi's hand, and they both knew he meant them.
In the last week he stopped eating much, and Deya stopped trying to make him, and they sat together by the well in the evenings, the two of them, the way they had sat through eighteen years of evenings. She sang sometimes, low, the old songs, and he listened with his eyes closed, and the coyote's grandson β a lean young animal, the image of the one that had watched the well through the hard winter β came down in the dusk and lay at Nate's feet, the way a dog lies, and Nate rested his hand on its head without opening his eyes, and the animal stayed.
Chidi had ridden in from Fort Verde when the word came. He sat with them those last evenings, and on the second-to-last one Nate asked him to bring the fourth blue book β the one still being written β from the house. Chidi brought it, and Nate took the pen, and in a hand that shook only a little, he wrote the last entry he would ever write: September 1900. The water is clear. The shares are paid. I have kept the record true. He closed the book. He said, "File it with the others, son."
He died on the third evening, sitting by the well at dusk. There was no struggle in it. Deya was beside him, and Chidi, and the coyote's grandson at his feet, and the tin ladle hanging on the well-post above them all, catching the last of the light. One moment he was breathing, and the next he was not, and the basin went on β the water running, the cottonwoods moving, the ridge going purple in the west β the way the basin always went on, indifferent and faithful at once.
Deya did not weep. She sat with his hand in hers until the light was gone, and then she stood, and she took the tin ladle down from the well-post, and she placed it in his hands, folding his fingers around the handle the way you fold a man's hands around something he will need on a journey. "For the road," she said, in her own tongue, and Chidi, who understood, did not translate it, because some things are not for carrying across.
They buried him on the rise above the well, where he could watch the water the way he had watched it in life. Elder Kanoa spoke, and the ranchers stood with their hats off, and the people of the northern camp sang, and Chidi read from the first blue book β the winter entries, the compact, the shares β because it seemed to him that the record was the truest eulogy a man like his father could have. The coyote's grandson sat on the ridge through the whole of it, watching, and did not come down until the people had gone.
The ranch passed to the compact council, as the will said. The council met at the well that autumn, with Chidi interpreting, and the first thing they did was vote the well protected commons in perpetuity β which it already was, in every way that mattered, but now it was written, and writing, as Chidi had learned, is how the law remembers.
Deya kept the house. She kept the porch chair, too, though she never sat in it. She sat by the well instead, in the evenings, in the place where Nate had sat, and the ladle went back on the post β a new one, tin, hung by Chidi's own hand β and the water ran clear, and the basin went on.
Chapter 30
Two Stones