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

Chapter 24

Healing

Healing, Amos learned, was not an event but a practice, like prayer or fence work — something you did badly on the bad days and did anyway. By the fifth week he could lift a bucket half full with the bad arm if he did not think about it first; thinking, he had found, was what made the hand shake. Dr. Pruitt rode out twice, pronounced the wound clean, and praised the nursing in a way that made Desba snort.

The women stayed. That was Amos's doing as much as theirs. When talk of leaving first crossed the supper table — the wash was safe now, the camp gone — he found himself saying, with an awkwardness that fooled nobody, that the east fence wanted rebuilding and he could not do it one-handed, and the roof leaked, and Ruth's garden had gone two years unplanted. Haseya had the grace not to smile until she turned away.

So the ranch rang, in those late spring weeks, with the sound of its own restoration. Kaya and two younger women reset fence posts along the east line, Kaya swinging the maul with a concentration Amos admired. Goyan, gaining strength, rebuilt the well curb with new stone and a mason's patience no one had known he had. Desba took charge of the garden with the air of a general reclaiming lost ground: beans, squash, corn in the old threefold pattern, and a row of Ruth's roses, found strangled under tumbleweed and cut back hard, which responded — as Amos might have predicted of anything Ruth had planted — by blooming all at once, deep red, in the second week.

Amos worked as he was able and learned, harder than any labor, to let work be done for him without keeping a ledger of the debt. That had been his sickness long before any bullet: the conviction that accepting help announced a failure. Ruth had argued with it for years. It took twenty-five women and one hole in his shoulder to finish the argument. He shelved preserves beside Haseya and held boards for Goyan. In the evenings he taught Kaya the constellations in English while she taught him the same stars in her own tongue, both correcting each other with solemnity and frequent failure.

Not all of them stayed. That, too, was healing, though it hurt in a different place. In the sixth week, the first families prepared to depart for the wash. Sela and her mother; old Bent Foot and his daughter's family; three widows who had decided to share one house and field as sisters. They loaded the wagon Amos insisted they take with seed, tools, salt, two of his mules on permanent loan, and barrels of water.

The morning they left, the yard filled before dawn. There were no speeches. Desba pressed a small woven bag into Amos's palm — cornmeal, she said, from the first grinding, so the house would remember the road went both ways. Sela's little boy, who had been silent at the camp's edge for two years, solemnly gave Amos a smooth white stone for luck and accepted a pocketknife in exchange with the gravity of a treaty commissioner. Then the wagon rolled through the gate that now stood open by habit, and the families walked beside it down the relief route — Ruth's route, cleared and marked again — toward the wash and the work of beginning.

Amos watched until the dust settled. His shoulder ached. The yard behind him felt, for a moment, emptied in a way that recalled other leavings, and he stood in that feeling and let it pass through instead of bolting the door against it. It did pass. That was the new thing. Grief still visited, but it had stopped pretending to own the house.

"They will be back for the first harvest," Nascha said from beside him. She had stayed, with eleven others who had chosen, for now, to remain through the season — some because their homes needed more than one family's hands to raise, some, though none said it plainly, because Dry Creek itself had become a place they were not finished with.

"I know," Amos said. "I am learning to let people go without practicing for losing them."

"That," Nascha said, "is the whole of the medicine, Amos. The shoulder was only where it showed."

That evening he walked to the cottonwood without his sling, for the first time, and stood between the graves while the light went. He told Ruth about the garden. He told Tommy about the little boy and the stone, which now sat on the mantel. Then he walked back to a house with lamps lit and supper waiting and other people's voices in it, and the walk back — he noticed it as he made it, like a man testing a healed bone — did not feel like leaving them behind.

Chapter 25

Families at the Well