The court took the winter to unwind Garrett Sloan's empire, and it turned out to be a slower and kinder business than acquiring it had been, because it was done in daylight by men who had to sign their names. The straw companies were dissolved. The fictional buyers evaporated from the deed books like the fictions they were. Eleven ranches went back to the families on Thomas's list — or to their heirs, in the two cases where grief and distance had already done what Sloan only attempted — with their mortgages cancelled out of his disgorged estate, and the Okafor brothers came home from Tucson in a wagon with their mother's curtains wide open this time, and their mother looked at everything.
And in the spring of 1885, on the advice of the federal surveyors and over the signatures of the returned families, the territorial court chartered the North Valley Water District — the first of its kind in the territory — with the aquifer beneath the Cerros declared what Thomas Ellison had meant to file it as in 1881: a public trust, belonging to no man, administered for all of them.
The district's first board had been elected in the church that winter, with Widow Brandt — who had nominated herself, seconded herself, and dared the room to object — as treasurer, and Maren as chair, a post she accepted for exactly one term on the grounds that institutions, like fences, rot fastest around a permanent post. They had set the shares by need and acreage, argued about them for two full days, and written the whole settlement into a book any citizen could read at the courthouse for the asking, because sunlight, as the Reverend Ainsley observed in his opening prayer, was the cheapest disinfectant God had yet devised.
They drilled the great well in April, at the bowl in the hills where Sloan's secret rig had stood, with the whole valley up the mountain to watch, and Maren turned the first valve at the district's request — not, she insisted to the crowd, because it was hers, but because Thomas's handwriting was on the map and somebody's hand from his house ought to finish what his started. The water came up cold and furious and then settled into a great clear breathing flow, and it was piped and ditched and shared by surveyed right to every ranch on the list and half the town besides, and that summer — the summer after the worst drought in memory — Dry Fork had green gardens in August, and children played in water that ran in the street on water-days, and old men stood watching their troughs fill and shook their heads at the size of the world's surprises.
The silver took longer, because Maren insisted it be done in a way that could never be undone by the next Garrett Sloan. It was there — Ketch had told the truth — a rich vein system threaded through the rock under the aquifer, exactly where Thomas's figures pointed. The families on the list formed the Cerros Cooperative in the winter of 1885, each family holding an equal share that could not be sold outside the valley for fifty years — Widow Brandt's clause, adopted unanimously after she observed that money had caused quite enough trouble already without importing more — and the mine that opened in '86 was a modest, honest, well-timbered affair that paid wages in the open and dividends in the church hall every Christmas, and put a new roof on the schoolhouse and a second teacher in it, and a pump and a trough on Main Street with a brass plaque no bigger than a hand:
WATER IS NOT PROPERTY. — T.E.
"It isn't much of an epitaph," Maren said, the day they mounted it, standing back with Micah and Tomás in the street.
"It's the whole of one," Tomás said. "He wrote twenty-three names in a book and a river in blue ink, señora. A man is allowed a short epitaph after that much writing."
Garrett Sloan served his sentence in Yuma and was, by every report that drifted back over the years, a model of the only talent left to him: he ran the prison's commissary accounts, in a cell, for no wage, with his figures audited monthly by men he did not own. The valley did not speak of him often. It had better uses for its breath, now that its breath came with water in it. And in Dry Fork the story of the summer of 1884 settled into the shape the town tells its children: not of a monster, particularly, but of a fence that was cut, and a man who read the tracks, and a widow who kept a dead man's map in the ground until the morning the whole valley could stand in her yard and read it together.
Chapter 29
What He Stayed For