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

Chapter 3

The Bracelet

He picked the bracelet up before supper, carrying it the way a man carries a message he cannot yet read. It was light, lighter than it looked. The horsehair gave it spring, the yucca fiber strength, and the weaving was fine, patient work, turquoise and black strands passing over and under until the red diamond at the center seemed to hold the whole pattern accountable. Amos turned it in his fingers by lantern light. He was not a man who owned ornaments. He set it on the shelf above his bedroll, beside Ruth's Bible, and in the morning it was the first thing his eye found.

Over breakfast it worked on him, the way a stone works in a boot. He found himself remembering a thing he had not let himself remember whole in two years. The winter of 1879, four winters back, Ruth had ridden out alone toward Redbank Wash to carry medicine to a settler's wife, and her horse had thrown her on the stones and left her with a broken leg and the sun going down and no rider expected until morning. Three Apache women had found her there. They had splinted the leg with yucca stalks and cloth torn from their own dresses, built a fire, kept the coyotes and the cold off, and in the morning carried her on a litter of branches to where help could be met. Ruth had come home gray-faced and laughing at her own foolishness, and for weeks she would say, "I owe a debt I can't pay in money, Amos." The following summer she had paid it in the only coin she valued: water and food given freely at this ranch to Apache families, and two nights of hiding in this very barn, when riders with hard faces had been asking questions in Fortuna. "If trouble ever comes," she had told them at the gate, "you come to this ranch. You hear me? You come here." She had made Amos repeat the promise back, not because she doubted him, but because she believed a promise spoken aloud by two people was stronger than one kept by one.

He had forgotten. That was the shame of it, sitting there with the bracelet turning in his hands. Not deliberately, not cruelly — grief had simply buried it under two graves and a thousand mornings of chores, the way flood sand buries a fence line. He looked toward the house, and at the window of the room where Ruth's desk still stood with its drawer locked, a drawer he had never opened since her death because her private things were hers still, in his mind, and because he feared what ordinary objects could do to him: a ribbon, a letter, a dried flower reducing a grown man to weather. The key hung on a nail by the kitchen door. He did not go and fetch it. Not yet. The bracelet lay across his palm like something still being decided.

That day he rode to Fortuna for salt and lamp oil, and the town had an air he had not felt before — a new tightness, like a held breath. A fresh-painted sign had gone up on the old assay office: Hollis Mining & Land Company, in gilt letters. Men he did not know stood in twos and threes with the look of wages about them, company men, not cowhands. At the general store, Pete Latham leaned close and said the company was buying claims and water rights all along the wash, paying in paper that might be money someday, and that Garrett Hollis had come down from Prescott with surveyors, lawyers, and a certainty that the territory owed him its minerals. "Buying," Pete said, "is the polite word he's using this month."

Coming out, Amos saw Marshal Doyle Ferris on the boardwalk, watching a company wagon loaded with chain and timber roll past, and Ferris nodded to the driver — not a lawman's nod to a stranger, but the familiar nod of a man greeting his own errand. Amos had known Ferris ten years and never thought much of him, which came back now as a warning. A lawman a man never thinks about is a lawman whose real employer he has never asked after. Ferris's star caught the light as he turned into the company's office, not his own.

He rode home slowly, the bracelet in his shirt pocket against his heart, where its light weight seemed to grow heavier with every mile. At the gate he dismounted and stood a long while, looking at the well, the house, the cottonwood, the two graves, as if the place were a sentence he had been reading wrong. Ruth had made a promise at this gate. Three women had come to it yesterday, dying of thirst in a dry spring, and the oldest of them had remembered the way to a ranch she had perhaps not seen in years. A man does not owe the dead their promises, some would say. Amos led his horse in, unsaddled him in the gathering dark, and knew, with the tired certainty of a man accepting weather, that he believed otherwise.