THE WOMAN BESIDE THE CREEK

 The Hand in the Grass

Thomas Weller found her beside the creek just before the heat swallowed the afternoon whole.

The sun hung over the New Mexico Territory like a white-hot coin, bleaching the hills until the distant ridges seemed to float above the earth. There had been no rain in weeks. The grass had turned the color of old straw, and the creek that ran through Thomas Weller’s forty acres had shrunk to a narrow ribbon of brown water slipping between stones.

At first, Thomas thought the thing lying beside the bank was a bundle of hides.

Something a passing rider had dropped before sunrise.

He almost rode past.

Then the bundle moved.

A hand emerged from the grass.

It reached weakly toward the water.

Thomas pulled his horse to a stop.

For several seconds he did not breathe.

The woman lying beside the creek was Lakota.

Her dress was torn at the shoulder and stained with dust, sweat, and blood. A cut above her brow had dried dark along one side of her face. Her lips were split from thirst, and her black hair was tangled with burrs and pieces of grass.

Thomas stared at her.

His first instinct was fear.

His second was to look behind him.

There was nobody there.

The territory was quiet.

Too quiet.

Thomas had lived long enough in the West to understand that quiet could mean safety, but it could also mean that danger had already passed through.

A man could get killed for helping the wrong person.

Thomas had heard the stories in Fort Harrow.

Settlers burned out of cabins.

Cattle stolen in the night.

Hunting parties found dead in ravines.

Cavalry patrols returning with fewer men than they had left with.

And sometimes the stories were told as if every Lakota man was a killer and every white settler was an innocent victim.

Thomas had never believed the world was that simple.

He had seen white men make monsters out of anyone who frightened them.

He had seen men call cruelty necessity.

He had also seen innocent people die because they were standing on the wrong side of a line drawn by men sitting safely behind desks.

Thomas was forty-three years old.

He was a widower.

His wife, Clara, had died three years earlier from a fever that came in autumn and refused to leave. By the time the doctor arrived from Fort Harrow, Clara had already stopped recognizing him.

She left behind a rough cabin, forty acres of struggling wheat, six horses, and a silence so complete that sometimes Thomas spoke aloud simply to prove he was still alive.

He had come west because land was cheaper than grief.

He had been wrong.

Grief had followed him.

It lived in the empty chair beside the stove.

It lived in the blue dress folded inside the cedar trunk.

It lived in the way Thomas sometimes put two cups on the table before remembering there was only one person left to drink.

And now it was Clara's voice he heard.

A man’s soul is measured by what he does when nobody is there to praise him.

Thomas looked down at the woman.

He cursed softly.

Then he climbed from the saddle.

The woman’s eyes opened when he knelt beside her.

They were dark, fever-bright, and intensely alert.

She tried to move away.

Thomas immediately raised both hands.

“Easy.”

Her hand went toward the knife at her waist.

Thomas stopped.

He did not reach for his rifle.

“You need water,” he said.

She stared at him.

Thomas uncapped his canteen.

He poured a little water into his palm and held it out.

The woman hesitated.

Then she crawled forward and drank.

Not greedily.

Carefully.

As if someone had taught her that too much water could kill a person as surely as too little.

Thomas noticed that.

He noticed everything.

The bruising around her wrist.

The swelling along her ribs.

The cut on her forehead.

And the way she kept looking toward the eastern ridge.

Someone was chasing her.

Thomas knew it before she said a word.

“You alone?”

The woman did not answer.