The Well Belonged to the Thirsty: A Widowed Cowboy, Twenty-Five Women at His Gate, and the Promise His Dead Wife Left Behind

Chapter 1

The Empty House

Amos Delaney woke in the barn before the light had made up its mind. The straw tick under him rustled when he sat, and the old gelding in the nearest stall shifted and blew through its nose, as if to remind him that one living thing at least expected breakfast. He was forty-four years old, broad in the shoulder still, though thinner than he had been, and he dressed in the cold without a lamp. Two years he had slept out here among the tack and feed sacks, and not once had he slept a night through in the house.

The house stood thirty paces off, whitewashed once, now the color of dust. He passed it on his way to the well every morning and did not look at its windows longer than he had to. A man could keep a roof patched and a door hung straight and still not live under it. That was housekeeping, not living. Living required a voice at the table. He kept the place the way a man keeps a promise he no longer understands, because stopping would be an admission he was not ready to make.

Behind the house, under the cottonwood, were the two graves. He went there after he had drawn water, as he went every morning, with his hat in his hand whether he remembered taking it off or not. The larger stone said Ruth Delaney, and under her name, Beloved Wife, and the dates that a stonecutter in Fortuna had charged him four dollars to cut clean. The smaller stone said Thomas Amos Delaney, Aged Four Years. Tommy had died in the winter of 1880, when the fever took half the children between Dry Creek and the border. Ruth had died the following spring, in 1881, of the same patient fever, as if it had come back to finish emptying the house. Amos stood a while with nothing to say that he had not said on a hundred other mornings, and then he put his hat on and went to work.

The pump at the well squealed. It had squealed since the autumn before Ruth died, a thin iron cry at the top of every stroke, and she had teased him that it was calling her name. He had meant to fix it with a new leather and a little tallow, and in the way of meant things in a grieving house, it had never been done. Now the sound was part of the morning the way the rooster would have been, if he had kept chickens. He worked the handle until the water came cold and clear from the deep vein under Dry Creek, filled the bucket for the house, the trough for the stock, and the basin where he washed his face and hands. The water was good. That was the strange fortune of the Delaney place. Springs failed all along the creek that dry spring of 1883, wells in Fortuna had to be deepened, yet his well held, steady as a heartbeat under stone.

He fed, he watered, he forked clean straw and carried out the soiled. He mended a stretch of fence on the north line where a heifer had worried the wire loose, and he did it slowly and well, because work done badly had to be done again and work done well filled an hour without questions. He checked the few cattle left to him — thirty head where once there had been ninety — and found the lame cow no worse. He ate beans and salt pork standing at the barn door at noon, looking out at land that needed rain. The sky was a hammered blue, without mercy or cloud in it.

In the afternoon he rode the boundary, not because any neighbor disputed it, but because riding gave the day a shape. Six miles to Fortuna if a man needed flour or nails or news; Amos needed none of the three often. The town could keep its talk. Out here the talk was wind in dry grass, the pump's squeal, a hawk turning far above the wash. He had been a man who laughed easily once, Ruth had said so, but the memory embarrassed him now, like a coat that belonged to a younger brother who had moved away.

Evening came as it always came, too long in arriving and then too sudden. He lit no lamp in the house. He ate in the barn doorway while the light went amber over the hills, washed his tin plate at the pump, and laid out his bedroll on the straw tick as the first stars showed. Somewhere a coyote tried a note and thought better of it. Amos lay down in his clothes, listened to the gelding settle, and stared up at rafters Ruth had once hung with dried herbs. He did not pray. He had not found the words since the second grave was filled. He slept the way a man crosses a river on stones — carefully, and waking often, and grateful only to reach the other side by morning.