Chapter 28: Water in the Cistern
On the third morning after the breaking of the seal, Saya woke before dawn to a sound she had to lie still and name, because her ears had forgotten it: water, moving where it pleased, chuckling over stone outside her door like a neighbour glad to be home. She rose and went out barefoot into the cool dark, and the ground under her feet was damp. In Caldera Flats, after seventy-one days of burning, the ground was damp.
The cistern stood full to its stone lip, black and shining under the last stars. Along the channel, in the rows the women had kept faith with all summer, the gardens were drinking. Bean leaves that had curled grey were uncurling. The squash vines Joseph's mother tended had lifted their heads in the night, and Old Marta was already among them with a gourd, watering each root slow and solemn, talking to the plants as her grandmother had, as if coaxing shy children to eat.
"It is not a flood that saves a garden," she told Saya. "It is a little water, every day, from a source that does not fail. Like kindness. Like kin."
The horses found their strength first, as animals do. The camp's thin ponies now waded gladly at the trough Silas and Joseph had dug below the cistern and drank till their bellies rounded, then lifted dripping muzzles to the sun and snorted like colts. Marshal Ward's grey gelding drank nose to nose with Tomi's little mare, which the boy considered a great honour and reported to everyone at breakfast.
Bragg was hauled away that morning, in a wagon between two deputies, his remaining men riding ahead under parole to answer in Tucson for what they had done. He did not look back at the valley he had schemed to own. Perhaps he could not bear to. The dust settled, the trail emptied, and the camp breathed out a breath it had held since long before Silas Hart rode in.
Then came the work that is not danger, only life, and ten times sweeter for it. The channel banks were shored with stone. A second trough was dug for the cattle of neighbouring smallholders, who came in shyly by ones and twos, Apache and Mexican and white, leading thin animals, and went away with full barrels and fuller hearts, and no price named. Word travels faster than any horse in a dry country, and soon travellers were timing their journeys by the Flats, certain of water.
The children rediscovered an occupation none had had strength for: play. Tomi and a troop of others dammed a side trickle with pebbles, launched fleets of mesquite-bark boats, fell in to their waists, and came out shining and scolded and laughing. Saya, watching from the garden rows with her hands in the wet earth, felt something loosen in her chest that had been knotted since she was a girl. She planted extra rows that day, beans and corn and squash together, the three sisters, in ground her people had nearly been forced to abandon.
"You plant as if you mean to stay forever," Silas said, carrying stone for the bank, his sleeves wet to the elbow.
"I plant as if my grandfather's grandfather was right to stay," she answered. "This valley held us before any railroad had a name. It will hold our children's children, if we hold the water the way it asks to be held. Shared. Guarded. Never sold."
Silas nodded and set his stone true, and neither of them said what else had changed, though Joseph, passing with a timber on his shoulder, grinned at them both like a man who has decided silence is wasted effort.
That evening Taklish walked the length of the channel alone at sundown, leaning on his stick, stopping to watch the water run clear over every stone of its road. The old chief had buried a wife in this valley, and raised children in it, and very nearly watched it die. Now frogs had found the lower pools, a sound so fine and unlikely that half the camp went out after supper just to stand and listen to frogs singing in a place that had been an oven a week before.
"No clouds," Joseph said, looking at the clean red sky. "And none needed. Is that not a strange thing to say in Arizona?"
"The rain belongs to the sky," Taklish said. "It comes and goes as it pleases, and men are fools to curse it. But the spring belongs to patience. It was here under the burning earth the whole time we suffered, waiting for hands that would open it without greed." He turned back toward the fires, where Silas sat mending a harness with Tomi asleep against his side, the boy's wooden cup, full and forgotten, tipped in the dust. "We almost lost it by fearing each other. Remember that longer than you remember Bragg."
The water ran on through the dark all night, under the stars, needing no one's leave, and the cistern at dawn stood full again, brimming, patient, and clear.