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

Chapter 4

Twenty-Five

They were at his gate at first light, and Amos, coming out of the barn with the feed bucket in his hand, stopped so suddenly that the gelding behind him bumped its nose against his back. Twenty-five women stood in the road beyond the fence, in the gray hour before sunrise, silent, in a loose double line that stretched past the mesquite and out of easy sight. Their clothes were patched and smoke-stained, the hems dark with old ash, their shoulders carrying bundles no bigger than loaves of bread. There were old women bent over sticks, and girls barely women, and one young mother — he could tell by the way the others made a space around her grief — with empty arms held close against herself. Not one made a sound. It was the silence of people who had learned that noise could be punished.

At their head stood a woman of about thirty-eight, straight-backed where the others had been bent by the road, with a stillness that was not surrender but command. Her face had the patience of stone that has decided to outlast a river. Around her wrist, as she raised one hand to still a murmur that had not quite begun, Amos saw a bracelet like the one on his shelf: horsehair and yucca fiber, turquoise and black, a red diamond at the center, though hers was older. He understood then that the bracelet at his gate had not been payment. It had been an introduction, sent ahead by three women who had gone back into the dark to bring the rest to a place they first had to be sure still remembered them.

Amos set down the feed bucket. He walked to the gate without hurrying, because hurrying might frighten them, and because a man opening his gate to trouble ought to do it like he means it. He lifted the latch and swung the gate wide, all the way back against the fence, and stood aside. "Come in," he said. "Water's at the well. You're welcome to it." His voice sounded rough to his own ears, unused to sentences that long before breakfast. The woman at their head studied him for a long moment, and whatever she was weighing — his face, his solitude, the graves under the cottonwood that her eyes found and left again without a flicker — it settled. She spoke once, quietly, over her shoulder, and the line began to move.

They came through his gate the way water finds a channel, orderly and without crowding. The leader came last but one, pausing before Amos as she passed. "I am Nascha," she said, in English worn smooth as a river stone, each word placed. "My mother knew your wife." It was not an explanation. It was a key turning in a lock four years rusted, and both of them heard it turn. "Then you're doubly welcome," Amos said, and she inclined her head and went on toward the well, where her people were already gathering in a ring that left the pump handle free, the oldest women seated first on the stones of the curb.

He worked the pump for them himself at first, because the handle was tall and the squeal of it, that thin iron cry, startled the youngest each time until an older girl laughed once, softly, and the fear went out of it. Then Haseya — for the woman of thirty from yesterday was among them, and Desba the old one, and Kaya the girl, all three watching him now with something easier in their faces — took the handle from him with a look that asked permission and received it, and the work settled into a rhythm of her pumping and the women drinking, cup by cup, in an order no one announced and everyone obeyed.

They drank carefully. That was what he would remember afterward, more than the number of them or the smoke on their clothes. No one gulped beyond need, no one splashed, no one spilled. A cup passed hand to hand and came back empty and was filled again, and what was left in any cup was tipped into a palm and drunk from the palm, the last drops shaken into a mouth rather than the dust. Kaya poured a little into the hollow of Desba's hands so the old woman could wash the road from her face, and that was the only water used for anything but drinking. These were people who understood water the way sailors understand rope, Amos thought: not as a thing the world owed them, but as the difference, measured in cups, between the living and the dead. He filled the trough, the bucket, the canteen and a second one besides, and when the drinking was done they sat in the shade of his barn and cottonwood, twenty-five women in the smoke of some trouble he had not yet been told, and nobody, yet, said the word for what had happened to them.