The Singing Spring

At daybreak the telegraph key on Alma Reyes’s desk tapped like a woodpecker worrying an old cottonwood. She held the brass sounder steady with two fingers so the vibration didn’t walk it across the scarred pine. The heat would come later, but the town already smelled of dry leather and alkali, of beans simmered too long and coffee not strong enough. Out the open window, the main street of San Amaro lay quiet except for a stray dog chasing its shadow and a scrap of newspaper skittering like a pale lizard.

Alma flicked her eyes to the map that she kept under the blotter. She had traced the territory around San Amaro in pencil and thin black ink, little hatch marks for mesas, a dashed line for the cracked arroyo that split the town like an old wound. She’d grown up with that map-fever, with a compass in her pocket and questions that pulled like a current. The telegraph had become her job after her father’s passing; teaching school had filled the months before that. She wore her hair under a red scarf to keep the dust from settling, and the scarf turned the morning light warm against her cheek.

Spurs jingled in the street. A wagon rolled by with barrels lashed tight, branded with a P crossed by a thunderbolt. The sound of it made the dog flinch and duck. Alma watched from the shaded window as two men in new hats and dusty coats posted a handbill on the well’s stone lip. Their boots left deliberate prints like stamps in wet clay. One of them tore down an old notice, tossed it in the trough, and the wind slapped it against the plank wall of the mercantile.

Will Carter pushed in the office door with his shoulder, a broad man whose hands had more scars than a fence post. The door’s bell clinked. He smelled of forge smoke and horsehair and the clean iron tang that followed him everywhere. He tipped his hat and set a wrapped parcel on her desk.

'Biscuits,' he said, voice like a bass string tuned low. 'Before the day turns mean.'

Alma smiled. 'You just want the news.'

'I can trade biscuits for the world,' he said, but he leaned to look out the window at the men and the barrels. His jaw worked. 'Prichard’s brand.'

The telegraph keyed chatter from the north. Yuma. The wires had been noisy with drought talk all week. Alma tore the tape as it printed. Another town dry. Another ranch foreclosed. Words that meant thicker lines on her map, sections of the land that turned from bread-color to bone.

Will read the new handbill out loud. 'Water to be sold at the discretion of Prichard Outfit due to scarcity. Payment due at point of draw. No exceptions.' He crumpled his free hand into a fist that showed the whitened scars across his knuckles. 'No exceptions means sick children, old folks.'

Alma folded the tape and slid it into her ledger. 'Sheriff won’t stop him.'

'No,' Will said. 'Sheriff likes his whiskey cold, and Prichard’s shade’s the only cool shadow right now.' He stepped back, looking at her, and the lines at his eyes softened. 'You keeping well, Alma?' The way he said her name made it feel like a thing set gently on a shelf.

Men from the ranch outfit moved down the street in pairs, rifles shouldered lazy and loud. A boy crossed their path without seeing them, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He stumbled at the trough, dipped a tin cup, frowned when he found it dry, and took a half step as if he might lean into the stone and drink it anyway. Alma started toward the door, but Will was already there, his legs long, his boots quick. He pulled his canteen and poured until the tin rang full. The boy’s Adam’s apple worked like a pulley when he drank.

'Gracias,' the boy gasped, hair stuck to his forehead.

'Go home,' Will said. 'Stay inside until that sky changes.'

Out by the well, old Alcalde Moreno argued with the men in the fresh hats. His white moustache bristled. He jabbed his cane toward the posted paper. 'That well is town property. My father laid its stones before your boss knew this county had a name.'

'Prices are posted.' The taller of the pair smiled without warmth. 'The boss is taking care of things.'

Alma felt a heat askew just under her ribs. She stepped into the street with the wrapped biscuits in one hand, Will beside her like a wall. The taller man lifted a brow. 'Morning, miss.'

'You should take those barrels to the sick house first,' Alma said. 'If your boss is caring for folks.'

He looked at her scarf, at the wire scars etched on her fingers, at the pencil tucked behind her ear. 'You work the wire. You know what scarcity means.'

'I know what greed looks like when it hires a driver,' she said.

His friendly smile cracked. 'You be careful.'

'Always,' she said, and went back inside, heart tapping to match the telegraph key. The office felt suddenly too small, the map too simple. She touched the page’s four corners like putting a charm on it. The pattern of the arroyos, the old mission land to the south, the hills that rose like knuckles. She remembered her father’s story, told once when the lamp had burned low, about a spring in the canyons that sang when you found it. He’d laughed, but the shape of his laugh had been tender.

She had not opened his trunk since the funeral. It had dust patterns on the lid where the cloth had been folded. The iron lock clicked under her thumb like a promise with teeth. Inside, the smell lifted, old leather and smoke and a whiff of camphor. His surveying book lay on top, with notes in the margins, and beneath that, a folded scrap of vellum, brittle as a dead moth’s wing.

She eased it open on the desk. Ink marks traced a canyon cut like a fishhook, a little cross near the barb, and a loose circle drawn around it with the word cantar scrawled. Sing. She breathed once, twice, and the room felt as if it leaned.

Outside, the barrels were unloading. The handbill flapped. The boy ran with his cup. Will’s boots creaked as he shifted his weight. Alma laid her palm on the vellum, and in the corner of her eye the map on her blotter seemed to tilt its lines toward the little cross, as if one were a glass laid over the other.