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

Chapter 5

Men Calling Themselves Soldiers

Nascha told it in the shade of the cottonwood, late that morning, when the women had rested and the heat had driven every living thing to the nearest shadow. She sat with her back straight and her hands folded, and Amos sat on the well curb across from her, and she spoke the way a person lays stones across a river — one at a time, testing each before trusting it with weight. Desba sat near enough to add a word now and then in their own tongue, which Nascha carried into English without pausing, and Haseya stood behind them, watching the road, though nothing moved on it but heat.

"The land at the wash was ours," Nascha said. "Not by a paper in a courthouse. By living. By graves older than the town of Fortuna, by corn planted and gathered, by the water our grandmothers carried from the same pools where our girls carried it this winter. A place is yours when your dead are in it. Your wife understood this. She saw our stones." Amos thought of the two graves not twenty paces from where they sat, and said nothing, and Nascha went on.

In the winter just past, she said, strangers had come to the wash with instruments on tripods, and chains, and a man who read aloud from a paper no one had agreed to and told them the land had been measured and found to belong to the Hollis Mining & Land Company. Garrett Hollis's name was spoken over their cooking fires like weather coming. Then, in the first weeks of spring, the men came back — thirty or more, with rifles and hats alike and a flag they planted by the largest dwelling, as if a flag could do the work of a deed. "They called themselves soldiers," Nascha said. "They wore no uniform that any true soldier would own. Some had pieces of one. A coat. A stripe torn from a sleeve. They were company men, paid by the week, but they wanted us to say the word soldiers, because soldiers cannot be argued with. A thief can be argued with. That is why they chose the word."

What followed, she told without raising her voice, and it was worse for the quietness. The men gave the people one hour to take what hands could carry from homes their families had built across generations. Then the torches went in — roof by roof, the winter stores, the drying racks, the loom of Desba's niece. "They burned it the way a man burns brush," Nascha said, "looking at the next one while this one caught." The smoke in the women's clothes had crossed twenty miles with them. Amos could smell it still, faint and bitter, under the cottonwood.

Then the men were separated out. Every husband, father, grown son, every boy tall enough to be lied about. They were roped at the wrist in lines, and a company man with a book wrote down their names or the names he chose for them, and they were marched north toward the company's camp in the hills, where Hollis's mines were said to eat men and pay their widows in paper. A few older men who could not keep the pace were cut loose on the road, and two had crawled home to ashes and died of it, and their names Nascha spoke aloud, slowly, so that they were said somewhere that morning if nowhere else. The little children had been taken to the wagons, "for schooling," the man with the book had said, and the mothers' screaming had been answered with a rifle butt and a promise that good behavior would be rewarded with news. Nascha's folded hands tightened once, the only crack in her. "We are twenty-five," she said. "We walked away into the hills when the wagons turned east. We hid by day. We had no water for the last day and a night. Then Desba remembered your wife's words, spoken at this gate. If trouble ever comes, come to this ranch. So we sent three ahead, to learn whether the promise had died with the woman who made it."

The silence afterward was the loudest thing Amos had heard in two years of quiet. The pump ticked. A fly worked the rim of the tin cup. He looked at the bracelet on Nascha's wrist — turquoise and black, one red diamond — and then at the house, at the locked desk inside it that he suddenly understood he might have to open, because Ruth, who had hidden these people's kin in his barn and fed them at his well, would have kept something of that summer: names, perhaps, or a letter, or a reckoning. He looked at the road to Fortuna, six miles of dust, at the end of which a marshal wore a star over a company wage. "You'll stay," he said at last. It was not a question, and Nascha, who had tested every stone before trusting it, set her weight down on that one and nodded, once, like a woman closing a bargain older than either of them.