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

Chapter 19

Fever and Hands

They laid him in his own bed, in the room where Ruth had died two springs before, and Amos in his clearer moments found a strange comfort in that, as if the house itself knew the road and would walk it with him. The cavalry surgeon, a methodical man named Price, probed the shoulder, found the ball had passed through flesh without striking bone, declared him fortunate in the dry, disgusted tone surgeons reserve for the living, and left powders and instructions. After that, the house belonged to the women.

Nascha organized his care the way she had organized the flight of twenty-five women across a waterless country: completely, and without waste. Shifts were set. Broth appeared at hours Amos could not track. Cool cloths came and went on his forehead. Someone — he never learned who — kept the lamp trimmed low and the door curtain drawn against the afternoon glare, and in the doorway, always, there seemed to be a figure, sitting, watching, so that no hour of the night found him alone when the fever climbed.

The fever took him on the second night and held him for two days in a country that was neither sleep nor waking. In that country Ruth was alive, and it was always the good years. He saw her at the well in her blue dress with the sleeves rolled, laughing at something he had just said, though he could not hear his own joke. He saw her at the table teaching Tommy his letters, the boy's tongue caught in the corner of his mouth with concentration, a whole unbroken lifetime of evenings stretching ahead of them both, golden and ordinary and gone.

"You're late with the water, Amos," Ruth said in the dream, not unkindly, setting down her bucket at the gate. "There's people at the fence. There's always people at the fence, love. That's why we dug where we dug. You remember why we dug where we dug."

He tried to tell her the well had held. He tried to tell her the paper had held, that her name on the registration had stood up in the yard like a fence no hired man dared ride through. He tried to tell her about Nascha, about twenty-five women and a dipper of water and a tall brother with rope burns on his wrists, and in the dream Ruth only smiled and put her cool hand — cool as well-water — against his burning forehead, and said, "Then it's working. Then let it work, and you rest."

Waking was harder. Waking was pain in the shoulder like a coal banked under the skin, and thirst, and the ceiling beams swimming. But waking also had hands in it. That was the thing he carried out of the fever when it finally broke before dawn on the third day: the memory of hands. Nascha's hands changing the dressing with a surgeon's economy and a sister's gentleness. Old grandmother hands, spotted and certain, spooning broth between his lips. A young girl's hands, braiding nothing, just holding his good hand in both of hers while she told him, gravely, in her halting English, about the new foal in the corral, so that he would have something ordinary to come back to.

The ranch, in those days, held its breath in the particular way of a household that has decided a man will live and is quietly willing it so. The freed men took over his chores without being asked — fences walked, stock fed, wood split and stacked in a pile so neat it looked like an argument. Goyan slept on the porch outside Amos's window, a blanket over his shoulders, and rose at every sound. Aldous came each evening with news in a low voice meant not to trouble the house: Ferris in irons at Fortuna, the company's office seized, more names coming out of the seized books every day.

On the morning the fever broke for good, Amos woke clear-eyed to find Nascha asleep in the chair beside his bed, her head tipped forward, one hand still resting open on the blanket's edge where she had fallen asleep mid-vigil. He lay a long while looking at the morning light and listening to the yard come alive outside — water drawn, low voices, a child's laugh, his own rooster announcing a day Amos Delaney had very nearly not seen. Carefully, so as not to wake her, he moved his good hand across the blanket until it covered hers.

"You were supposed to be resting," she murmured, without opening her eyes.

"So were you," he said, and his voice, though weak, was his own again. "Reckon we both failed."

She opened her eyes then, and smiled the smile of a woman who has carried a heavy thing a long way and set it down at last. "Then we are even," she said. "Sleep now. When you wake, my brother is waiting. He has something of yours to give back to you — something you lost before you ever knew it was gone."