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

By early summer the well yard at Dry Creek had become a place people planned their journeys around, the way Ruth had always said water planned people and not the other way round. Amos rose before first light to draw the first bucket and set the dipper on the curb, and more mornings than not he was not the first there. Mormon settlers headed for the San Pedro drank beside two Apache brothers driving goats to their sister's rebuilt house at the wash, and the talk — cautious at first, then ordinary — was of weather and whether the rains would remember them this year.

He had not signed anything to make it so. The yard had become the trust in practice before it became it on paper: travelers watering stock at the long trough outside the fence, so no one need ask permission for a necessity; the sign Goyan had carved at the gate, in letters Amos had painted — WATER FOR ALL WHO COME IN PEACE; the ledger where Haseya recorded not debts but arrivals, departures, news carried onward. The yard had rules now, enforced mostly by Desba's eye: water for any living thing, no liquor, no weapons drawn, disputes to the cottonwood shade and a hearing over coffee. It worked the way Ruth's arrangements tended to work — so simply that people mistook it for nature.

Amos found his life re-entering the present tense by small doors. One June morning he caught himself planning the autumn roundup aloud with Goyan — not remembering roundups past, but planning which pastures to rest. He laughed at supper at something Kaya said, surprised at its ease. He ordered seed for next spring in quantities that assumed a next spring. When Dr. Pruitt remarked that he looked ten years younger, Amos said, "No. I look my age at last, instead of older," and the doctor nodded as if that were the precise diagnosis.

Children who had hidden behind their mothers' skirts in March raced around the well curb in June, Apache and settler together. A Fortuna widow, traveling to her brother's claim, stayed three days and left a cutting of her yellow roses, which Desba planted beside Ruth's red ones on the theory that the garden had room for both sorrows. Travelers began leaving things as often as they took them: coffee, a mended saddle, a story. The well gave water. The yard, Amos understood, gave back the habit of expecting kindness from strangers, which the Territory had spent years training out of everyone.

One evening Nascha found him at the gate, watching the road. "You are looking for Captain Aldous," she said. It was not a question. The petition lay in Ruth's desk, in the folder with the loose red tape, where Amos had placed it after Aldous left — not hidden, as the letter had been, but kept, the way a man keeps a tool he is not yet finished deciding how to use.

"Not yet," Amos said. "But not no, either. I used to think signing would be the end of the story. Her story. Now I think she meant it as a beginning I had to arrive at under my own power, or it would only be another grave I was tending." He looked at the yard — the trough, the sign, the two peoples drinking side by side in the long light, Goyan showing Sela's boy how to cup water without spilling, the boy's face grave with the importance of the lesson. "It is already true, Nascha. The paper will only tell the world what the yard can tell anyone who rides in. When I sign, I want it to be because I have seen it true with my own eyes — so it is my word, and not only my promise to her."

"Then she built better than the lawyers," Nascha said. "A trust that begins before it is signed cannot be unsigned."

He laughed, and the sound was easy this time, and his own. Below them the dipper went from hand to hand in the dusk — an old Apache grandfather drinking deep, a settler girl holding it steady for him, neither finding anything remarkable in the other anymore. Amos thought of Ruth, who had registered a well and written a letter and planted roses she would not see bloom twice, who had believed the future was a thing you could prepare for other people like a meal or a road. He thought that grief, finally, was not the opposite of that belief. It was the proof of its price — and the yard full of living voices was the proof of its worth.

"Come to supper," Nascha said.

"I am coming," Amos said, and found, with a quiet astonishment he kept to himself, that he was speaking of more than supper, and that the road between the gate and the lamplit house, which he had walked for two years as if through deep water, was only a road again, and short, and his.

Chapter 26

The Pump Repaired

The pump had squealed for three years, and Amos had let it squeal.