Chapter 29
: Letting Go
The grave stood on the rise behind the ranch house that was no longer there, where the chimney still lifted its blackened stones out of the greasewood, and Josiah went up to it in the late afternoon with the journal in his coat pocket and no errand in the world but the one he had been postponing for five years.
He had read the book through twice since Sloan returned it. The early pages were a young wife's pages: accounts of seeds and weather, irritation at his silences rendered funnier than they deserved. The later pages were the record Sloan had used โ the offers, the refusals, the growing certainty of what manner of man pressed them. But the last page he had never been able to finish. Twice he had closed the book on it like a door on weather.
He sat down in the dust beside the stone he had cut himself, with her name and the dates and nothing else โ all he had been able to think of that was true enough. Now he opened the book to the end.
The final entry was dated three days before the fire. Her hand, always neat, was hurried by nothing; she had written it, he thought, the way she did everything, as if it mattered that it be done properly. She wrote of a traveler she had watered at the well, a man whose name she never learned. And then she wrote the sentence Sloan had not read aloud, the sentence that was not evidence, that was only hers:
I have refused the colonel again and feel no pride in it, only tiredness. A man like that believes water is a thing to be held, and because he holds it, to be feared for it. But I have watched this well five years now. It gives to the traveler and the enemy and the child alike, and it has never yet run lower for the giving. Water, like love, dies when it is hoarded. What we keep, we lose. What we pour out, God and the deep earth give back. If this book is ever all that is left of my opinions, let it be left standing for that one.
Josiah read it three times. Then he put his forehead against the cool side of the stone, and he grieved โ not the hard, locked grieving of the years between, the kind a man does while mending fence so that no one can say he stopped, but clean and helpless and at last unashamed, the grief of a man who has stopped arguing with the fact of it. He told her about the arrest, because the telling seemed owed. He told her about the compact, and the cup going around the circle. He told her he had forgiven Micah Trent at a store counter with his voice shaking. The greasewood ticked in the heat, and a lizard regarded him from the stone and was not afraid of him.
"I kept it all dammed up," he said at last, to the stone, to the valley. "Thought keeping was the same as honoring. It isn't. You knew it in one page and it took me five years and a marshal to learn it." He closed the book and put it back in his pocket, against his heart, where it would stay โ not as a wound stays, but as a tool stays, carried because it is useful.
He walked down in the long light feeling emptied and, in the emptiness, strangely lighter, as a field feels after rain it has finally been allowed to take.
That evening, as he was barring the well-house, a rider came down the road in the dusk โ one man, one tired horse, leading nothing, owning nothing that showed. Josiah knew him by sight: a lean young hand named Colter who had ridden for Voss two seasons and been turned off without wages when the arrests came.
"Well's on rotation," Josiah said, not unkindly. "Camp hours start at moonrise. But no man's turned off thirsty at this gate. That was true before there was a paper and it'll be true after the paper's dust."
He drew the bucket up, filled the tin cup, and then โ because the horse's head hung, because the man's canteen, when he shook it, gave back the hollow rattle of an inch of warm water โ he filled the canteen too, to the brim, and stoppered it himself.
"Where you headed?" he asked.
"Anywhere a man isn't known by his last employer," Colter said. "Much obliged." He drank, mounted, and then paused with the canteen heavy at his saddle horn, a fortune in that summer. "Voss would've charged me a dollar for that and taken it out of wages he never paid."
"Then it's a poor world that only learns from Voss," Josiah said. "Ride safe."
He watched the rider diminish into the violet dusk until horse and man were one moving speck and then nothing, and he hung the cup back on its nail, and the small bright ring of it against the stone seemed, that night, less like a habit he had kept than like a promise he had finally heard.