Part 3
She was across the yard with a flashlight before she’d decided to go. In the well house the pump was howling against nothing, and the pressure gauge sat on zero. She threw the breaker and the silence rang.
She sat on an upturned bucket in the dark for an hour, because the man who’d sold her the place had once said a deep well sometimes just needed to catch its breath. When she flipped the breaker back on, the pump caught. The gauge crawled up. The water came back, thin and grudging, and she stood in the kitchen and filled every pot and bucket she owned before it could change its mind.
It was still a well. It was just a tired one.
Garrett came out the second Friday in August, in a truck someone had washed that morning.
He didn’t bring a ranch hand or a realtor, and he didn’t pretend he was passing by. He parked by the barn, leaned against the fender, and looked at the horses in the east pasture for a while with what looked to Laurel like real appreciation. He knew what he was looking at. He pointed out that Banjo was carrying himself better through the back, and that Dottie had finally quit favoring the near fore. He was right about both.
Then he told her he’d been thinking about her situation and wanted to make it simpler. He had an offer on the place. He named it. The figure was low enough that he must have run her numbers as carefully as he’d run them at Kimball’s.
He laid out his reasons one at a time and did not raise his voice, and every one of them was true.
“Your well’s going,” he said. “In a dry year that’s not a repair bill. That’s what the place is now. Any appraiser who walks into your well house writes it down that way.”
“It’s running.”
“For now.” He tipped his head at the east pasture. “And you’ve got eighteen head on ground that’ll carry six. A bank sees that before it sees anything else.” He let it sit. “Winter hay’s going to cost you more than summer hay did. Land’s been soft a year, and it’ll stay soft through fall. You hold out for a better season, you’ll be selling into a worse one with more on the card.”
“Better you sell it to me in August,” he said, “than watch somebody auction it off the courthouse steps in March.”
“No,” Laurel said.
He nodded like he’d expected it. He said he’d check back when she needed him more than she did today, and he got in his clean truck and drove away.
September finished what July had started. The well never quit completely. It went to a stuttering flow that needed an hour’s rest after every twenty minutes of pumping, and it couldn’t keep the troughs ahead of eighteen horses through ninety-degree afternoons. Laurel called a water hauler out of Marlow, and the first load cost three hundred twenty dollars for three thousand gallons. Careful, with nobody running a bath and no dishes done in the sink, three thousand gallons lasted her twelve days. She bought a used 275-gallon poly tote off a guy in Mountain Home, strapped it into the bed of her pickup, and started hauling from Bea Halvorsen’s spigot two miles down the county road. Bea wouldn’t take money for it. Laurel left a case of canned peaches on her porch anyway.
Evenings became a loop of gravel: Bea’s spigot, the county road, her own gate, the troughs, and back again, four times. On the full runs the tote sloshed against the cab glass behind her head; on the empty ones it boomed like a drum over every washboard. Tess fell asleep in the passenger seat most nights with her cheek against the door. When Laurel pulled in, the headlights caught the eyes of the horses waiting at the gate, all of them now, even the ones who’d been afraid of her in June.
Twice that month, coming back loaded at dusk, she passed Garrett’s white Dodge pulled onto the shoulder below her west hill, engine idling, nobody getting out. She figured he was checking fence. The Ashby fence line was a mile north.
On a Tuesday a man from Weiser called about Banjo. He’d heard about the gray gelding from somebody who’d heard it from the farrier. Good mind, good feet, young enough. He offered four thousand dollars and said he’d haul him himself.
Four thousand dollars was twelve water loads. It was the hay deficit through Christmas with something left over. Laurel told him she’d call back, and she went out and stood in the east pasture while Banjo came over and shoved his nose into her jacket pocket for the cracked corn he knew was there. She stood there until the light went. She didn’t call the man from Weiser back that night, or the next, and on Thursday he called her and said he’d found another horse.
She didn’t tell anyone she had nearly sold him. She told herself she’d been too tired to decide, which was partly true.
Garrett asked her once at Kimball’s whether she’d priced drilling a new well. Thirty-one thousand, she told him. He winced on her behalf and said that sounded about right for this valley. Every Saturday he stayed exactly as kind as a witness would need him to be, and every Saturday the number in her ledger went down and the number in his offer looked a little more reasonable.
The fourteenth of September was a Monday. Laurel came out at twenty to six to start the pump and found the west fence down.
A brace post she’d been meaning to reset since spring had finally let go in the night and dropped three strands of wire flat in the dirt. There were tracks in the dust going through the gap. One set. Her chest went tight, because the county road ran along that side of the property and a horse on that road in the gray dawn was how people got killed, and horses too. She grabbed a halter off the nail by the barn door and ran.
At the gap she stopped. The tracks didn’t turn toward the road at all. They went straight up the hill, through the rock and the cheatgrass, in a line so direct it looked drawn with a ruler…
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