She knew he noticed because he didn't say anything either. And people who don't notice things have nothing to not say. On the fourth shared day, he arrived later than usual, and she had been digging for 3 hours already. She heard the horse and looked up, and something in the way he came off the saddle was different, more deliberate, like a man carrying a thing he'd decided to put down. He worked beside her for an hour before he said anything.
"I lost forty head in the dry year of '82." She kept digging. She had learned by now that Silas Ward said things in the order he'd worked out how to say them, and interrupting that order didn't help.
"I'd borrowed to expand the previous year. Wet season, grass was good, everybody was expanding. I thought I understood the range well enough to know when to pull back." He paused.
"I didn't pull back." "What happened?"
"The grass failed, and the water failed with it. I had to move cattle to leased range that was already half stripped. Sold off at bad prices to cover feed costs. By the time the season ended, I had about a third of what I'd started with." Another pause, longer this time.
"Martha left that fall." "Not because of the cattle. She'd been unhappy here for a while. But the failure made it easier for her to say the things she'd been holding." Evie stopped tamping and stood up straight.
He was looking at his hands on the shovel handle. "She went to Pueblo to stay with her sister," he said. "Died of fever there eighteen months later. I found out through a letter from the sister that took six weeks to reach me." She did not say she was sorry, because she'd noticed that Silas Ward did not respond well to condolence.
It made him tighten up. The way someone does when they're not sure that they've earned the softness. She said, "Is that why you tried to talk me out of the pots?" He considered that.
"Partly. Partly I just thought it was a long way to go on an old circular." "And now?" He looked at the row of clay mouths running across the dark earth.
"Now I'm still not certain it works," he said. "But I'm certain you thought it through." She picked up the shovel. He picked up his. They went back to work.
By the end of the second week, the eastern rows were complete. Evie checked every vessel by hand, running her fingers across the exposed mouth of each one, pressing slightly to test the soil compaction around the shoulder. Three she pulled and reset because the surrounding soil had a hollow sound when she tapped it, meaning the pack was too loose to hold moisture pressure properly. Silas watched her do this without comment, though she caught him looking.
"You're going to check every one?" "Every one, all three hundred." "All three hundred." He made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.
"How long is that going to take?" "As long as it takes." She pulled the third loose pot and began repacking the hole. "You can go home."