Outside, the windmill turned in the dark, pumping up cold water into a trough no thirsty traveller would be allowed to taste.
Chapter 7: What Silas Lost
That night, when the digging was done and the camp had settled into the thin sleep of the thirsty, Silas Hart sat by the cold ashes of a cook fire and opened the oilcloth bundle from his saddlebag.
Inside lay a notebook bound in cracked leather, its pages swollen from old damp, and a brass compass whose face had split years before, though its needle still swung true. He held both the way another man might hold a letter from the dead. Joseph Bane, set to watch him, watched from the dark and said nothing, for even a suspicious man knows grief when he sees its shape.
"Your father made that book," Joseph said at last.
"My father, and his father in the margins," Silas said. "Thomas Hart. Scout, digger, and the stubbornest man in any territory he set foot in. He taught me water before he taught me letters. Said a man who can read stone will never be lost."
He turned the pages with care. Here was a sketch of a cottonwood's roots, there a note in a firm, slanted hand: Bees do not lie. Where they drop low at evening, dig. And again: Cool earth under ash holds its counsel.
"You speak of him as a dead man," Joseph said.
"He is." Silas's voice did not rise. "Six winters gone. Fever took him outside Prescott, and half of what he knew went into the ground with him — including a thing he tried to tell me at the end. He kept speaking of a spring his friend had sworn him to guard. A place they had closed together, long ago, to keep it from men with silver in their eyes. He said, When the people are dying, Silas. Not before. I thought it was rambling."
"And now?" Joseph asked.
"Now I am in a camp where children lick the dew off stones at dawn, and I am not so certain it was rambling."
He closed the notebook, and for a while there was only the night wind worrying the dead fire. When he spoke again, it was to the dark, and to what the dark had taken.
Her name had been Clara. Clara with wheat-coloured hair she braided tight for travel, and a laugh that could shame a mockingbird, and hands never still — mending, kneading, planting beans in a tin cup on a wagon seat because she believed a journey was no excuse to stop growing things. She had ridden west beside him not as baggage but as partner, reading the sky the way he read the ground.
The year the rains forgot Kansas, they had joined a wagon party bound for better country. One by one the wells on the trail had failed them — green scum here, cracked mud there, a pump that gave sand. Silas had scouted ahead, farther each day. On the fourth day without water fit to drink, he found a seep in a canyon wall, a dark weeping in the rock, and filled both canteens drop by patient drop, and rode back through the night by starlight, certain he was in time.
He had not been in time. Not for Clara. The fever that rides on thirst had taken her at dusk, in the wagon bed, with her bean plant still green beside her head. She had given her share of the last water to a neighbour's baby on the wagon behind, every spoonful, and told no one, not even him. He learned it from the neighbour afterward, weeping, holding the living child.
"I dug her grave with these hands," Silas said to the ashes. "After that I could not stay anywhere a well ran easy. I dug for other folks. Widows, forts, little towns with names bigger than their hopes. A man who was too late once spends his life trying to be early."
Joseph was quiet a long time. Then, rough as a man unused to gentleness, he said, "The boy Tomi lost his mother last winter. Saya raises him. That is why she looks at you the way a hawk looks at weather. It is not hate, digger. She has buried enough."
"I know it," Silas said. "It is why I will not lie to this camp about what the ground says, even when the truth is poor. A false hope kills more surely than thirst."
He wrapped the notebook again in its oilcloth and laid the compass on top before tying the bundle. The needle trembled, settled, and pointed into the dark toward the mesas — and beyond them, though he could not have said why, his thoughts went to the burned grove no one in camp spoke of without lowering their voice.
"Sleep, then," Joseph said, rising. "Tomorrow Saya takes you to walk the north ground. She does not yet know she will. Taklish decided it an hour ago."