"It is better to ask," Evie said, and meant it straightforwardly. "Tell Hiram to come see me after the harvest. There'll be something for him." Ruth nodded. She turned to go, then stopped.
"He's not a bad man," she said, and she wasn't apologizing, just stating a fact she thought deserved to be stated. "I know he isn't," Evie said. "He was frightened in April. We were both frightened. Fear makes people use whatever weapon's easiest to pick up."
"I know that, too." Ruth left through the back gate. Evie stood at the well and looked at the rope in her hands and thought about what Ruth had said about fear and weapons and the things people pick up when they're frightened. She thought about Hiram laughing outside the mercantile, loud and public and aimed. And she thought about the $46 and the road ditch and Silas wrapping her hand in the dark by lantern light.
And she thought about what it was worth, all of it. She thought about Ruth Bell in the fall with a root cellar that ran out in November. She dropped the rope back down the well.
The social balance of the valley changed in the second week of August in a way Evie had not entirely anticipated, which was that her green field stopped being something to watch from a distance and became something people needed in the direct, immediate, physical sense of the word. The Pruitt family's well failed, not dropped failed.
The water table retreated below the effective draw depth of the hand pump, and Asa Pruitt came to her with his hat in his hands and asked if he could bring a cart twice a week to draw from her well. She said yes and charged him nothing and noted in her ledger that the well was now serving two properties daily requirements, which changed her draw schedule. The Hendricks family's cistern ran out. Tom's wife, a silent and capable woman named Dorothea, who Evie had never spoken to at length, appeared at the gate with two children and two large barrels. Evie showed her where to draw and told her the morning hours were the best time for the water temperature and asked only for what she could repay in labor.
Dorothea came back on the third visit with a bushel of her own preserved tomatoes, six jars of put up vegetables from two seasons ago, and a day of fence repair work from her eldest son. She said nothing about the exchange. She just set the tomatoes down and picked up the empty barrel and got to work. This is how a valley pays its debts, Evie thought. Not always in money and not always with words.
Silas arrived on a Wednesday in the middle of all this and found two neighboring families drawing water and a third family's older daughter helping with the bean harvest prep and Evie in the field working on row maintenance with an expression that was several degrees past tired. He waited until everyone else was gone. Then he said, "You're running a community water station now, apparently. How much reserve does your well have?" She told him the draw rate and the estimated depth.