Gertie Smith took the bucket, set Alvin down, and near filled him to the brim with hot fried bacon and good greasy biscuits. It was so much food that Al had to beg her to stop. “We’ve already finished one pig,” said Alvin. “No need to kill another just for my breakfast.”

  “Pigs are just corn on the hoof,” said Gertie Smith, “and you worked two hogs’ worth last night, I’ll say that.”

  Belly full and belching, Alvin climbed the ladder into the loft over the kitchen, stripped off his clothes, and burrowed into the blankets on his bed.

  The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.

  Over and over he whispered the words to himself as he went to sleep. He had no dreams or troubles, and slept clear through till suppertime, and then again all night till dawn.

  It was a week before Hank Dowser found his way back to Hatrack River. A miserable week with no profit in it, because try as he would he couldn’t find decent dry ground for them folks west of town to dig their cellar. “It’s all wet ground,” he said. “I can’t help it if it’s all watery.”

  But they held him responsible just the same. Folks are like that. They act like they thought the dowser put the water where it sets, instead of just pointing to it. Same way with torches—blamed them half the time for causing what they saw, when all they did was see it. There was no gratitude or even simple understanding in most folks.

  So it was a relief to be back with somebody half decent like Nat Smith. Even if Hank wasn’t too proud of the way Nat was dealing with his prentice boy. How could Hank criticize him? He himself hadn’t done much better—oh, he was pure embarrassed now to think how he railed on that boy and got him a cuffing, and for nothing, really, just a little affront to Hank Dowser’s pride. Jesus stood and took whippings and a crown of thorns in silence, but I lash out when a prentice mumbles a few silly words. Oh, thoughts like that put Hank Dowser in a dark mood, and he was aching for a chance to apologize to the boy.

  But the boy wasn’t there, which was too bad, though Hank didn’t have long to brood about it. Gertie Smith took Hank Dowser up to the house and near jammed the food down his throat with a ramrod, just to get in an extra half-loaf of bread, it felt like. “I can’t hardly walk,” said Hank, which was true; but it was also true that Gertie Smith cooked just as good as her husband forged and that prentice boy shod and Hank dowsed, which is to say, with a true knack. Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that’s the way of the world, the best way.

  So it was with pleasure and pride that Hank drank the swallows of water from the first clear bucket drawn from the well. Oh, it was fine water, sweet water, and he loved the way they thanked him from their hearts. It wasn’t till he was out getting mounted on his Picklewing again that he realized he hadn’t seen the well. Surely he should’ve seen the well—

  He rounded the smithy on horseback and looked where he thought he had dowsed the spot, but the ground didn’t appear like it had been troubled in a hundred years. Not even the trench the prentice dug while he was standing there. It took him a minute to find where the well actually was, sort of halfway between smithy and house, a fine little roof over the windlass, the whole thing finished with smooth-worked stone. But surely he hadn’t been so near the house when the wand dipped—

  “Oh, Hank!” called Nat Smith. “Hank, I’m glad you ain’t gone yet!”

  Where was the man? Oh, there, back in the meadow just up from the smithy, near where Hank had first looked for the well. Waving a stick in his hand—a forked stick—

  “Your wand, the one you used to dowse this well—you want it back?”

  “No, Nat, no thanks. I never use the same wand twice. Doesn’t work proper when it isn’t fresh.”

  Nat Smith pitched the wand back over his head, walked back down the slope and stood exactly in the place where Hank thought he had dowsed the well to be. “What do you think of the well house we built?”

  Hank glanced back toward the well. “Fine stonework. If you ever give up the forge, I bet there’s a living for you in stonecutting.”

  “Why thank you, Hank! But it was my prentice boy did it all.”

  “That’s some boy you got,” said Hank. But it left a bad taste in his mouth, to say those words. There was something made him uneasy about this whole conversation. Nat Smith meant something sly, and Hank didn’t know rightly what it was. Never mind. Time to be on his way. “Good-bye, Nat!” he said, walking his nag back toward the road. “I’ll be back for shoes, remember!”

  Nat laughed and waved. “I’ll be glad to see your ugly old face when you come!”

  With that, Hank nudged old Picklewing and headed off right brisk for the road that led to the covered bridge over the river. That was one of the nicest things about the westbound road out of Hatrack. From there to the Wobbish the track was as sweet as you please, with covered bridges over every river, every stream, every rush and every rivulet. Folks were known to camp at night on the bridges, they were so tight and dry.

  There must’ve been three dozen redbird nests in the eaves of the Hatrack Bridge. The birds were making such a racket that Hank allowed as how it was a miracle they didn’t wake the dead. Too bad redbirds were too scrawny for eating. There’d be a banquet on that bridge, if it was worth the trouble.

  “Ho there, Picklewing, my girl, ho,” he said. He sat astride his horse, a-standing in the middle of the bridge, listening to the redbird song. Remembering now as clear as could be how the wand had leapt clean out of his hands and flung itself up into the meadow grass. Flung itself northeast of the spot he dowsed. And that’s just where Nat Smith picked it up when he was saying good-bye.

  Their fine new well wasn’t on the spot he dowsed at all. The whole time he was there, they all were lying to him, pretending he dowsed them a well, but the water they drank was from another place.

  Hank knew, oh yes, he knew who chose the spot they used. Hadn’t the wand as much as told him when it flew off like that? Flew off because the boy spoke up, that smart-mouth prentice. And now they made mock of him behind his back, not saying a thing to his face, of course, but he knew that Nat was laughing the whole time, figuring he wasn’t even smart enough to notice the switch.

  Well, I noticed, yes sir. You made a fool of me, Nat Smith, you and that prentice boy of yours. But I noticed. A man can forgive seven times, or even seven times seven. But then there comes the fiftieth time, and even a good Christian can’t forget.

  “Gee-ap,” he said angrily. Picklewing’s ears twitched and she started forward in a gentle walk, new shoes clopping loud on the floorboards of the bridge, echoing from the walls and ceiling. “Alvin,” whispered Hank Dowser. “Prentice Alvin. Got no respect for any man’s knack except his own.”

  1989

  Pageant Wagon

  Deaver’s horse took sick and died right under him. He was setting on her back, writing down notes about how deep the erosion was eating back into the new grassland, when all of a sudden old Bette shuddered and coughed and broke to her knees. Deaver slid right off her, of course, and unsaddled her, but after that all he could do was pat her and talk to her and hold her head in his lap as she lay there dying.

  If I was an outrider it wouldn’t be like this, thought Deaver. Royal’s Riders go two by two out there on the eastern prairie, never alone like us range riders here in the old southern Utah desert. Outriders got the best horses in Deseret, too, never an old nag like Bette having to work out her last breath riding the grass edge. And the outriders got guns, so they wouldn’t have to sit and watch a horse die, they could say farewell with a hot sweet bullet like a last ball of sugar.

  Didn’t do no good thinking about the outriders, though. Deaver’d been four years on the waiting list, just for the right to apply. Most range riders were on that list, aching for a chance to do something important and dangerous—bringing refugees in from the prairie, fighting mobbers, disarming missiles. Royal’s Riders were all heroes, it went with the job, whenever they come back from a mission they got their picture in the papers, a big write-up. Range riders just got lonely and shaggy and smelly. No wonder they all dreamed of riding with Royal Aal. With so many others on the list, Deaver figured he’d probably be too old and they’d take his name off before he ever got to the top. They wouldn’t take applications from anybody over thirty, so he only had about a year and a half left. He’d end up doing what he was doing now, riding the edge of the grassland, checking out erosion patterns and bringing in stray cattle till he dropped out of the saddle and then it’d be his horse’s turn to stand there and watch him die.

  Bette twitched a leg and snorted. Her eye was darting every which way, panicky, and then it stopped moving at all. After a while a fly landed on it. Deaver eased himself out from under her. The fly stayed right there. Probably already laying eggs. This country didn’t waste much time before it sucked every last hope of life out of anything that held still long enough.

  Deaver figured to do everything by the book. Put Bette’s anal scrapings in a plastic tube so they could check for disease, pick up his bedroll, his notebooks, and his canteen, and then hike into the first fringe town he could find and call in to Moab.

  Deaver was all set to go, but he couldn’t just walk off and leave the saddle. The rulebook said a rider’s life is worth more than a saddle, but the guy who wrote that didn’t have a five-dollar deposit on it. A week’s wages. It wasn’t like Deaver had to carry it far. He passed a road late yesterday. He’d go back and sit on the saddle and wait a couple days for some truck to come by.

  Anyway he wanted it on his record—Deaver Teague come back saddle and all. Bad enough to lose the horse. So he hefted the saddle onto his back and shoulders. It was still warm and damp from Bette’s body.

  He didn’t follow Bette’s hoofprints back along the edge of the grassland—no need to risk his own footsteps causing more erosion. He stuck out into the thicker, deeper grass of last year’s planting. Pretty soon he lost sight of the gray desert sagebrush, it was too far off in the wet hazy air. Folks talked about how it was in the old days, when the air was so clear and dry you could see mountains you couldn’t get to in two days’ riding. Now the farthest he could see was to the redrock sentinels sticking up out of the grass, bright orange when he was close, dimmer and grayer a mile or two ahead or behind. Like soldiers keeping watch in the fog.

  Deaver’s eyes never got used to seeing those pillars of orange sandstone, tortured by the wind into precarious dream shapes, standing right out in the middle of wet-looking deep green grassland. They didn’t belong together, those colors, that rigid stone and bending grass. Wasn’t natural.

  Five years from now, the fringe would move out into this new grassland, and there’d be farmers turning the plow to go around these rocks, never even looking up at these last survivors of the old desert. In his mind’s eye, Deaver saw those rocks seething hot with anger as the cool sea of green swept on around them. People might tame the soil of the desert, but never these temperamental, twisted old soldiers. In fifty years or a hundred or two hundred maybe, when the Earth healed itself from the war and the weather changed back and the rains stopped coming, all this grass, all those crops, they’d turn brown and die, and the new orchard trees would stand naked and dry until they snapped off in a sandstorm and blew away into dust, and then the gray sagebrush would cover the ground again, and the stone soldiers would stand there, silent in their victory.

  That’s going to happen someday, all you fringe people with your rows of grain and vegetables and trees, your towns full of people who all know each other and go to the same church. You think you all belong where you are, you each got a spot you fill up snug as a cork in a bottle. When I come into town you look hard at me with your tight little eyes because you never seen my face before, I got no place with you, so I better do my business and get on out of town. But that’s how the desert thinks about you and your plows and houses. You’re just passing through, you got no place here, pretty soon you and all your planting will be gone.

  Beads of sweat tickled his face and dropped down onto his eyes, but Deaver didn’t let go of the saddle to wipe his forehead. He was afraid if once he set it down he wouldn’t pick it up again. Saddles weren’t meant to fit the back of a man, and he was sore from chafing and bumping into it. But he’d carried the saddle so far he’d feel like a plain fool to drop it now, so never mind the raw spots on his shoulders and how his fingers and wrists and the backs of his arms hurt from hanging onto it.

  At nightfall he hadn’t made the road. Even bundled up in his blanket and using the saddle as a windbreak, Deaver shivered half the night against the cold breeze poking here and there over the grass. He woke up stiff and tired with a runny nose. Wasn’t till halfway to noon next day that he finally got to the road.

  It was a thin ribbon of ancient gray oil and gravel, an old twolane that was here back when it was all desert and nobody but geologists and tourists and the stubbornest damn cattle ranchers in the world ever drove on it. His arms and back and legs ached so bad he couldn’t sit down and he couldn’t stand up and he couldn’t lay down. So he set down the saddle and bedroll and walked along the road a little to work the pain out. Felt like he was light as cottonwood fluff, now he didn’t have the saddle on his back.

  First he went south toward the desert till the saddle was almost out of sight in the haze. Then he walked back, past the saddle, toward the fringe. The grass got thicker and taller in that direction. Range riders had a saying: “Grass to the stirrup, pancakes and syrup.” It meant you were close to where the orchards and cropland started, which meant a town, and since most riders were Mormons, they could brother-and-sister their way into some pretty good cooking. Deaver got sandwiches, or dry bread in towns too small to have a diner.

  Deaver figured it was like all those Mormons, together they formed a big piece of cloth, all woven together through the whole state of Desert, each person like a thread wound in among the others to make a fabric, tough and strong and complete right out to the edge—right out to the fringe. Those Mormon range riders, they might stray out into the empty grassland, but they were still part of the weave, still connected. Deaver, he was like a wrong-colored thread that looks like it’s hanging from the fabric, but when you get up close, why, you can see it isn’t attached anywhere, it just got mixed up in the wash, and if you pull it away it comes off easy, and the cloth won’t be one whit weaker or less complete.

  But that was fine with Deaver. If the price of a hot breakfast was being a Mormon and doing everything the bishop told you because he was inspired by God, then bread and water tasted pretty good. To Deaver the fringe towns were as much a desert as the desert itself. No way he could live there long, unless he was willing to turn into something other than himself.

  He walked back and forth until it didn’t hurt to sit down, and then he sat down until it didn’t hurt to walk again. All day and no cars. Well, that was his kind of luck—government probably cut back the gas ration again and nobody was moving. Or they sealed off the road cause they didn’t want folks driving through the grassland even on pavement. For all Deaver knew the road got washed through in the last rain. He might be standing here for nothing, and he only had a couple days’ water in his canteen. Wouldn’t that be dumb, to die of thirst because he rested a whole day on a road that nobody used.

  Wasn’t till the middle of the night when the rumble of an engine and the vibration of the road woke him up. It was a long way off still, but he could see the headlights. A truck, from the shaking and the noise it made. And not going fast, from how long it took those lights to get close. Still, it was night, wasn’t it? And even going thirty, it was a good chance they wouldn’t see him. Deaver’s clothes were all dark, except his t-shirt. So, cold as it was at night, he stripped off his jacket and flannel shirt and stood in the middle of the road, letting his undershirt catch the headlights, his arms spread out and waving as the truck got closer.

  He figured he looked like a duck trying to take off from a tar patch. And his t-shirt wasn’t clean enough for anybody to call it exactly white. But they saw him and laid on the brakes. Deaver stepped out of the way when he saw the truck couldn’t stop in time. The brakes squealed and howled and it took them must be a hundred yards past Deaver before they stopped.

  They were nice folks—they even backed up to him instead of making him carry the saddle and all up to where they finally got it parked.

  “Thank heaven you weren’t a baby in the road,” said a man from the back of the truck. “You wouldn’t happen to have brake linings with you, young man?”

  The man’s voice was strange. Loud and big-sounding, with an accent like Deaver never heard before. Every single letter sounded clear, like the voice of God on Mount Sinai. It didn’t occur to Deaver that it was the man might be making a joke, not in that voice. Instead he felt like it was a sin that he didn’t have brake linings. “No, sir, I’m sorry.”

  The Voice of God chuckled. “There was an era, before you remember, when no American in his right mind would have stopped to pick up a dangerous-looking stranger like you. Who says America has not improved since the collapse?”

  “I’d like a bag of nacho Doritos,” said a woman. “That would be an improvement.” Her voice was warm and friendly, but she had that same strange way of pronouncing every bit of every word. Jackrabbits could learn English hearing her talk.

  “I speak of trust, and she speaks of carnal delights,” said the Voice of God. “Is that a saddle?”

  “Government property, registered in Moab.” He said it right off, so there’d be no thought of maybe making that saddle disappear.

  The man chuckled. “Range rider, then?”