Chapter 30
: The Well Endures
Spring came to the Cienega valley in 1878 the way it had always come, which is to say unconvincingly at first: a greening so faint along the arroyo banks that a man could talk himself out of believing in it, a few brave flowers in the sheltered places, the river running no higher but somehow less hopelessly, as if it too had heard news. The drought was not over. Everyone understood that. But it had been survived, and survival, in that country, was a kind of sacrament.
They rebuilt the well-house in the second week of April.
It was not a large structure โ it had never been a large structure โ a low roof on stone walls to keep the sun off the water and the dust out of it, with a door that latched against wandering stock. But the building of it took three days and the whole valley, because everyone who had drunk under the compact claimed a share in the work, and a share, once claimed, could not politely be refused. Settler hands and Apache hands passed the stones up the line together, and the stones themselves told the story to anyone who knew how to read a wall: the pale river rock from the Rawlins place, the dark basalt Nahlin's young men hauled down from the ridge, one great flat lintel stone that had been the hearthstone of the old Merritt house, carried up from the ruin without ceremony and set above the door, so that the house that had been burned out of spite stood guard, in the end, over the water it had died defending.
Josiah worked in the line like any other man. That was noticed, and approved of. Aiyana worked too, sleeves rolled, her hair braided back, arguing cheerfully with Ben Rawlins about the set of a cornerstone until Pearl, supervising from the shade with the gravity of nine years turning ten, ruled in Aiyana's favor, and Ben spread his hands and accepted the judgment of the court.
When the last stone was set and the roof laid, Nahlin spoke a few words over the place in his own tongue, which Aiyana did not translate, because some things are addressed to the land and the land requires no interpreter. Then Josiah took the tin cup from where it had hung all winter on a nail in his kitchen โ cleaned and brightened, its dents worn smooth as a river pebble โ and hung it on a new nail driven into the new stone by the well-house door, where any traveler could find it without asking, which had always been the whole of the law it lived by.
That evening the two peoples ate together under the cottonwood, and it was there, without proclamation or paper, that Aiyana and Josiah took their stand beside one another and were acknowledged. There was no ceremony the territory would have recognized. Nahlin placed his daughter's hand in the cowboy's callused one and said what he said; Clara wept openly and made no apology; Pearl danced a small, solemn dance of her own invention. What was acknowledged was not a wedding, exactly, and not merely a partnership of work, but the thing both peoples had watched grow at the well across three years of drought and enmity โ two people who had chosen, each at cost, to stand between their peoples and thirst, and who now chose, at no cost at all, to stand together. The valley accepted it the way it accepted weather: as a fact, arrived at honestly.
Afterward, when the fires were low and the guests gone to their homes and camps, Josiah and Aiyana walked once more down to the well-house in the dark. Far off to the west, over the black line of the mountains, the sky was doing something it had not done in longer than anyone cared to say precisely: thunderheads were building, tower on tower, lit now and then from inside by a far, silent flicker of lightning, too distant for thunder. The air smelled, faintly, impossibly, of rain on hot stone โ the smell the desert makes when it is remembering water.
"It won't reach us tonight," Aiyana said.
"No," Josiah said. "But it's practicing."
They stood a while in the companionable quiet. Then Josiah drew up one bucket for the night guard's horse, out of habit and rotation both, and set it down, and the water in it settled, and stilled, and took the lightning's far light and held it, trembling slightly, a small round sky in a wooden bucket in the dark. He hung the cup back on its nail. It rang once against the stone โ the small, bright, ordinary sound the valley had come to know as the sound of no one being turned away.
The well endured beneath them, deep and patient, giving to whoever came. And above the mountains the clouds went on building, and the cup hung bright on its nail, ready for the next stranger's hand.