Chapter 2
Three Strangers
They came in the late afternoon, when the heat had softened a degree and the shadows of the mesquite lay long across the yard. Amos was at the pump, washing the day's grit from his forearms, when the gelding lifted its head toward the gate and he heard, very faint, the sound of something that might have been a footstep deciding whether to be one. He dried his hands on his trousers and walked out from the well yard, and there they were, three women standing just beyond his gate, in the road dust, not touching the latch.
They were Apache, and they were exhausted in a way that went past tiredness, as if each had counted what strength was left and was spending it on standing upright. The oldest was perhaps sixty, white threading her dark hair, her face lined deep as river country, her dress patched at the shoulders and darkened at the hem with old smoke. The second was near thirty, broad-faced and steady-eyed, one hand resting lightly at the back of the third, who was no more than nineteen and swaying a little, her lips cracked, her eyes bright with the effort of not falling down in a stranger's road.
Amos lifted the latch and opened the gate wide. He said, "Water's this way," and nothing else, because the girl's need was plain and questions could wait until it was met, if questions were ever needed at all. He did not ask their names, or where they had come from, or what had driven them onto the Dry Creek road with no horse and dust to their knees. A man who has buried his family does not need a story to recognize trouble at his fence.
At the well he worked the pump himself. It squealed at the top of every stroke, and the youngest flinched the first time, then almost smiled the second, as the water came spilling cold into the tin cup he kept on the well curb. He gave the first cup to the girl, because her need was greatest, and she drank with both hands around it and her eyes closed, and when she lowered it there were tears standing that had nothing to do with weakness, so far as Amos could judge, and everything to do with water arriving in time. The woman of thirty drank next, slower, and the old woman last, though he had offered to her first. She shook her head and waited her turn with a dignity that made him look away so as not to embarrass it.
He filled the cup again and again. He brought out the bucket and let them wash the dust from their faces and hands and the backs of their necks. He went into the house β in and out quickly, like a man visiting β and came back with bread and cold beans and cheese in a cloth, and set it on the well curb without ceremony, and stepped back. They ate the way they had drunk, without waste and without greed, the oldest dividing the bread into three equal parts with fingers that did not tremble, though the rest of her might have wanted to.
"More water for the road?" Amos asked at last. The woman of thirty shook her head. They had no canteen to fill, he saw, and he went to the barn and found an old one of his, canvas-covered, still sound, and filled it at the pump and held it out. A silence followed that he understood perfectly. To take too much from a stranger can feel like owing, and owing can feel like danger. "It's extra," he said, which was not entirely true and entirely kind. "Pump don't mind."
The old woman took it then, with a small nod that carried more weight than thanks spoken aloud. She studied him a moment longer than the others did, her dark eyes moving from his face to the house, to the cottonwood behind it, to the two low stones under the tree that a stranger might almost have missed. Something changed in her expression, not softening exactly, but recognizing, as if a road she had been given directions to long ago had proved to be the road she was on. She said something, low, to the woman beside her, who did not answer.
They left as the sun touched the hills, walking north along the creek road the way they had come, the canteen at the young girl's shoulder. Amos stood at his gate until the dust of their going had settled. When he turned back toward the well, he saw it, lying in the dirt precisely where the old woman had stood at the gate: a woven bracelet, horsehair and dyed yucca fiber, turquoise and black strands worked together, with a single red diamond at its center. It had not fallen. Nothing about its place on the ground was an accident. It had been set there, carefully, at his feet, like a word left behind for a man who had asked for none.