The Mortar
Line

Folks in Dry Fork will tell you the Golem felt nothing. I will set it down the way it happened. The morning Wade Keller rode back into the valley, the Golem stood on a ladder at the bank. He smoothed wet mortar into the brick with a worn iron trowel. He did it slow. He did it the way a man strokes a horse he is afraid of. Up the joint and down. He filled every gap, so no thin place could open in that wall. He had done it every dawn for longer than the town could say. Nobody thanked him. Nobody asked him to quit.

You want the wall before you want the men. That is right of you. The wall came first.

Down the road came Wade Keller on a borrowed roan. He was thin as the road and twice as dusty. Three years gone. The valley he rode back into was not the valley he had left. The Sweet River was a dry wash full of white stones. The grass had gone to wire. Cattle stood in the shade of nothing. They waited to be told what to do about it. A man does not need a calendar to read a drought. He reads it on the ribs of his neighbor's stock.

Wade had a thing in his coat that he kept touching. It was the Keller branding iron. It was cold, and the loop was worn smooth by his father and his father's father. He had carried it out of the valley the day he left. He had never once used it. Now he carried it home. He pressed it to his ribs through the cloth. You press a bruise like that, to be sure it still hurts.

He came up on the home place near noon. The gate was the first thing wrong. Somebody had nailed a wide pine board across it, square and level. They had burned three words into the wood with an iron. SOLD UNDER LIEN. The letters were straight. Whoever wrote them had taken their time.

Wade got down off the roan. He put both hands on the board and pulled. He was not a small man. He got his boot on the rail and threw his weight back. He pulled till the cords stood out in his neck. The nails did not give. Not a hair. They were driven flush and deep and set in a pattern, four to a side. A man who nails like that means the board to stay. Wade pulled until his hands tore. Then he stood there bleeding and breathing. He looked at three burned words he could not undo with his body.

A boy was watching him from the porch. Seven, maybe eight. Tom's boy. He had Tom's ears and Tom's still way of looking. He did not wave. Behind him in the doorway stood Della in a flour-grey dress. Her arms were folded like a woman holding a house up from the inside.

"You came," Della said. She did not make it sound like a good thing.

"I came," Wade said.

"Three years."

"I know how many."

She looked at the board on the gate. Then she looked at his hands. "You can't pull it off. The big one nailed it. Faro's man." She said it flat. "You'd want a claw bar, and even then."

Tom was in the ground past the barn under a wooden marker. Dead two winters, worked out on dirt that quit on him. Wade had not come for the funeral. That was the thing nobody in the doorway needed to say out loud. So nobody said it. It stood in the yard with them like a fourth person.

"How long," Wade said.

"The sale is set for the dark of the moon," Della said. "Three weeks. They post the valley's debts on the bank wall. They ring a bell, and they sell. The Keller place is on the list. So is half the valley." She unfolded her arms and folded them the other way. "Pa says you can't fight the bank. Pa would know."

"Where's the note held?"

"Where do you think."

So Wade rode into town with his hands wrapped in his own bandana. That is where I come into it, for I am the man who rings the bell. You can think what you like of me for it. I have thought worse.

Dry Fork in the third year of the drought had quit sweeping its own street. The bank was the one building that still looked fed. Faro had it built of fired brick. Every other front on the row was grey board. The brick was why the town half hated him and wholly needed him. He had money when no one had rain.

The Golem had come down off his ladder by then. He stood by the door, big as a barn beam. His hands and arms were grey to the elbow with dried mortar he never washed off. He had a face like a wall himself, seamed and patched. His eyes tracked you without heat. He held the trowel down along his leg. He always held it. Men said he slept with it.

Wendell Faro met Wade at the counter with both palms flat on the wood. He smiled around the gap in his front teeth. He was bald and soft and clean. He had a way of making a hard thing sound like a favor.

"Tom Keller's brother," Faro said. "I heard the wind blew you back. Sit. No? Stand, then." He set a single peppermint on the counter between them, white and round. He did that, I am told, for every man he ruined. A sweet for the children, he liked to say. No children ever got them. "You'll want to talk about the lien."

"I want to clear it," Wade said. "What's owed."

Faro told him a number. It was a bad number. It was the kind of number built to be a wall and not a door.

"The valley is dry," Faro said, gentle as church. "I did not make it dry. I bought the paper nobody else would touch, Mr. Keller. These men were a season from shooting each other over a creek. I am the reason this is an auction and not a range war. You may not believe that today. You will." He slid the peppermint an inch closer. "Bring me the sum by the dark of the moon. Then the Keller place is yours, clean. Bring me less, and it sells with the rest. Those are the terms. I do not move them for grief. If I moved them for grief I would have no bank. And then where would the grieving go."

Out by the door the Golem turned his head and looked at Wade. Slow. The way a wall might look at you, if it could. Wade looked back. For one breath something passed between them that neither one had a word for. Then the giant lifted the trowel and went back up the ladder. He found a joint that did not need filling, and filled it anyway.

Wade walked out without taking the peppermint. He stood in the dead street with his torn hands. The boy had ridden the rail of the gate to follow him to town. Now he sat on a barrel by the roan and watched. The young watch like that, once they have decided to learn a thing. Wade made himself a promise he had made before and broken. He said it low, to Tom, who could not hear him. He would get the money honest. He had thieved once. It had cost him everyone he had. He had stood at his father's grave and swore off it for good. He meant to keep the swearing this time, if it killed him. That is the kind of promise a man makes when he has nothing left to make it with but his mouth.

He did not know yet that the wall he had walked past had a word scratched in it. It was scratched low, where no one would ever look. He did not know the big man kept the word like a stone in his boot, to be sure he could still feel. Those things come later in the telling. For now there was a thin man, a dead street, and a number built like a wall. Step up close. This is where it turns.

Now. You have seen a man set out to do a hard thing the right way. It is not the part they put in the songs. But it is the part I respect, so I will give it to you whole.

Wade spent his first week selling all that was his, and a few things that were not quite. He drove the Keller cattle down the dry wash to the railhead. Twenty head of drought-thin stock. Their hides hung off them like wet wash on a line. The drive down the wash took the better part of a day. The dust came up white and got in the teeth and tasted of old chalk. The river stones rang under the hooves where water used to run. The buyer at the pens walked the line once. He looked at their teeth. He looked at the sky, as if the sky were a partner of his. Then he named a price.

It was a price that made Wade laugh out loud, a short ugly sound. The buyer did not change his face. He had heard that laugh from better men than Wade. "Drought price," he said. "Take it or trail them home." There was no home to trail them to. So Wade took it. A laughing man and a starving man can be the same man. The cattle would be bone by August either way.

He sold his father's saddle. He sold the good rifle and kept the bad one. Then he went to the men Tom had carried through hard winters, to ask after old debts. The first man looked at the floor and said the drought had cleaned him out. Maybe it had. The second man would not come to the door at all, and sent his wife, who would not lie well. The third man had the money. Wade knew he had it. The third man stood in his own doorway and said the dry years had made him careful. Then he shut the door soft, so it would not seem like a door being shut.

Wade stood on that step a long while. I will put this in plain, because it is the measure of him. He had it in him to kick that door off its hinges. He did not. He got back on the roan and rode on. A man is what he does not do as much as what he does.

He worked the dead place between his trips to town. He cleaned out the stone-dry well, in case the rain came, though nobody believed it would. He mended the very gate the board was nailed to, out of habit, out of nothing better. The boy handed him nails one at a time. Neither of them said the thing they both knew. You do not mend a gate they mean to sell.

Every few days he came to the bank and laid down what he had against the number. And every time, the Golem was at his work. He would be on the ladder, or beside the door, grey to the elbow, running that trowel along the brick. Wade got to where he watched the big man work. There was a thing in it worth watching. The giant would set a fresh brick. He would butter the bed with mortar. He would tap it level with the heel of the trowel. Then he would run his thumb down the line to feel for true. He did it tender. A man that size, and he set each brick like he feared to wake it.

One noon a brick slipped from the hod. Wade caught it before it cracked on the steps and held it up. The Golem looked at the brick in Wade's torn hands. Then he looked at Wade. He did not take it for a moment. Then he set down the trowel. He took the brick in one grey hand and held it the way you hold a thing that is alive. "Careful," the giant said. His voice came up from somewhere deep and unused, like a bucket from a dry well. He set the brick. He ran his thumb down the joint. "Careful," he said again. He said it to the wall, or to himself, or to the brick. Then he picked the trowel back up. That was the whole of it. But Wade carried it off with him. A man who has only one word will spend it where it counts.

Inside, Faro counted Wade's money twice. He made it sound like a kindness both times. "You are nearer than I thought you would get," he said. He meant it as praise. He praised it the way you praise a dog for nearly clearing a fence. Then he turned the ledger so Wade could see. He showed him a second line under the first, small and neat. Interest. Carrying cost. The drought had moved the cost of money, Faro explained, the way it had moved the cost of water. He could no more help the one than the other. The number had grown while Wade chased it. It had grown almost exactly as much as Wade had brought in.

"You are chasing a thing that runs as fast as you do," Faro said. He was not unkind. "I tell you that as a courtesy. Most men I let find out at the bell."

"Move the date," Wade said. "A week. I will have it in a week."

"I moved it once already," Faro said. "Forward, not back. The buyers from the territory come on the dark of the moon. They will not come twice in a dry year." He spread his soft hands. "I am the only man in this valley who tells you the truth about your money. You hate me for it. I have made my peace with that. It is the cost of keeping the doors open." He set out the peppermint. "A sweet?"

Wade left it on the counter, white and round, the way he always did. He walked out past the wall.

Here is a part I did not see, and only later pieced together. Take it as a man's best telling and not as gospel. That same week, out at the home place, the boy took to following his uncle. He did not say much, the boy. But he turned up. He held the roan while Wade worked. He watched Wade fail, and did not seem to think the less of him for it. That is a thing only a child can do. And Della, who had not forgiven Wade and would not, started leaving a plate for him on the step. They did not speak of Tom.

One night she spoke to him anyway. He was washing at the trough, and she came out with the lamp. "Tom waited for you," she said. She did not say it cruel. That was the worst of it. "The first dry year. He kept your bunk made. He told the boy his uncle would come and help us turn it around." Wade stood with the water running off his hands. "Then he stopped telling the boy that," Della said. "And then he stopped getting up of a morning." She went back inside. She left the lamp on the rail. That is a thing a woman does when she is not done being angry, but is done holding the dark over you. Wade did not sleep that night either.

But one evening Wade sat greasing the bad rifle on the porch. The boy came and sat beside him. "Pa said you were the fast one," the boy said. "Said you could open any lock in the county." He said it like a thing he had been saving up. "Said you went bad because you were good at it."

Wade did not answer for a while. The light went down red over the dry wash. "Your pa talked too much," he said at last. That is what a man says when a thing is true and he cannot stand it being said.

That night Wade lay awake with the brand iron cold on his chest. He did the arithmetic he had been refusing to do. He had sold the herd, the saddle, the good rifle, and his name's worth of pride. He was a third short. The number was still growing. The moon was thinning toward dark. Honest had a floor, and he had hit it. There was money in this valley. Real money. It sat behind one fired-brick wall, in a vault a grey giant re-pointed every dawn, so that no thin place could ever open in it. Wade lay there and looked at that wall in his mind. He told himself he was only looking. A man tells himself a great many things in the dark. The worst of them are the ones that turn out to be plans.

A man crosses a line the way the sun goes down. You cannot name the moment it happened. You only know the light is gone, and you are standing in it.

Wade went to Quint Ives on a Tuesday with his hat in his hand. Quint was Della's father, the boy's grandfather. Years back he had been a safecracker, one of the best in the county. Then he hung up the trade, before Wade was grown, and never once looked back at it, or so he said. These days he lived in a dugout at the edge of town. A leather patch covered the dead socket. He had a way of tilting his blind side toward a thing to hear it better. Wade found him peeling a potato, and he did not stop peeling.

"No," Quint said.

"You don't know what I came for."

"I knew when I saw your face in the door. You have got the look your brother had. The look he wore the day he signed Faro's paper. A man about to do a smart thing that will cost him everything." He set down the potato. "I quit that life, son. I quit it the year I lost this eye. I told God and my dead wife both that my hands were done. They are done."

"They will put Della and the boy off the land in three weeks."

"I know whose land it is," Quint said, low. "It is my girl's. You think I do not lie awake on it?" He turned his good eye on Wade. It was wet and furious. "Do not come into my house and use my own blood on me."

So Wade told him the rest. He told him about the number that grew. He told him about the second line in the ledger. He told him about the date that only moved forward. He told it plain and let it sit on the dirt floor between them. And Quint Ives, who had sworn off, who meant it, sat there and felt his hands wake up against his will. They woke the way an old dog's legs run in its sleep. That is the cruelest thing about a trade. It does not leave when you tell it to. It waits in the hands.

Quint sat a while with the lamp between them. "Your brother asked me once," he said. "The first dry year. Asked me to crack Faro's box and call it even." He shook his head slow. "I told him no. I told him a man who steals his land back does not own the land. He owns a debt to his own self instead, and that one never comes due in a way he can pay." He rubbed the patched socket with one knuckle. "Tom listened to me. You see where listening to me got him. In the ground, and his boy on a wagon come the dark of the moon." He was quiet a moment. "So maybe I had it wrong. Maybe a man should steal. I have had thirty years to settle it, and I have not."

"One time," Quint said at last. He hated himself out loud as he said it. "For the boy. Not for you. I want that understood. I am not doing a single thing for you." He looked at his own hands like they belonged to a man he did not trust. "You want to know how I lost the eye?"

"Della said a charge went off early. A vault in Kansas."

"Huh," said Quint. "I tell most folks a horse kicked me. Cleaner story." He did not say which was true. He never did say, not that night and not after. I have come to think he had told both versions so long that he no longer knew himself. A man is allowed one lie he keeps even from his own self.

"We take the Keller paper," Wade said. "That, and nothing else. Not one dollar of the valley's money. I did not ride home to rob my neighbors." Quint looked at him a long moment with the one good eye. "Listen to you," he said. "Drawing a line down the middle of a crime." "It is my line," Wade said. "I will keep the one I still can." The old man shook his head. He did not argue it again.

They planned it across two nights at the dugout. The boy slept in the corner. The lamp was turned low. Quint drew the bank from memory in the dust of the table. The counter. The back room. The vault with its iron door. The trouble was the door. The worse trouble was the giant. The Golem slept in the bank. He re-pointed the vault at dawn, every dawn. That meant the small hours were the only window. Between the last lamp in town and the first grey light, there was a door of dark to slip through.

Quint made Wade walk the bank in his head until he hated it. Which board of the back porch gave under a boot. How many steps to the counter in the dark. Where the giant slept, which was on a cot set against the vault wall itself, so that even in sleep he was a part of it. "He wakes at grey light," Quint said. "Every grey light, to point his mortar. We are out before grey light, or we are not out at all."

Quint had a stick of powder. He had kept it oiled and wrapped for thirty years, in a tin, against the day he could not feed himself. He held it up in the lamplight like a relic. "This is the whole of it," he said. "One charge. It is older than your nephew. It has been kept dry as a sermon. We get one try at the door. If the powder is good, we are in soft and quiet. If it has gone off, we are two fools in a brick box with a giant." He wrapped it back up tender. He wrapped it the way the Golem set his bricks. I have always thought the two old hands were more alike than either would have cared to know.

Here is a thing they did not plan for. You cannot plan for a child. The boy was not asleep. He heard every word, two nights running. Children hear the things you are most sure they sleep through. He heard that the bank held the paper that would take his home. The boy was Tom's son, and he had Tom's still way of deciding a thing alone. He made up his small mind to do something about it himself, and he told no one. That choice was already walking toward the dark of the moon, to meet them all.

The night came. The moon was a fingernail, and then it was nothing.

Wade stood behind the bank with the brand iron cold on his chest. His heart went like a fist on a door. He tried one last time to find the swearing he had made to Tom. He could not find it. It had gone the way the river went. It left only the shape of where it had run. For three weeks he had told himself he was only looking at the wall. Now he had a powder man, and a dark moon, and his hand on a fired-brick corner. The looking was over.

He put his palm flat on the wall, on the very joint the giant had smoothed that morning. It was true and seamless. There was not a thin place anywhere. It was a wall built by a man who knew what it was to be left open. Wade did not know that yet. He only felt how good the work was. "I am sorry," he said. He said it to Tom, to the wall, to nobody. Then Quint set the charge against the vault door. They lit it. And the valley held its dry breath.

The powder failed. Thirty years dry, and it failed at the one moment a man would trade his soul to have it true. It went up with a fat wet cough. Not a crack. A sick orange puff that bloomed and died. It left the iron door standing there, unbothered, scorched and shut and laughing at them. The sound was not loud. That was worse than loud. It was small.

"Gone," Quint said. He stood with his old hands open and useless. His one eye streamed. "It is gone. The powder is gone." Thirty years he had kept it dry against this very hour. And the trade that had waited so patient in his hands had nothing for him now. It had only the knowing of how badly they were caught.

Then a lamp came up behind them. The giant was there.

He filled the back-room door. He had the trowel in his hand the way another man holds a gun, down along his leg. The lamp threw his shadow up the wall and bent it across the ceiling. Quint went grey. Wade stepped in front of the old man without deciding to. That is the truest thing I know about Wade Keller. His body chose before his head did. And it chose to stand in front of someone.

"Out," the Golem said. One word, up from the dry well. "Out."

"We are going," Wade said. "Old man first. He is nothing to do with it." He kept his torn hands open and wide. "It is me. It was me."

The giant did not move from the door. And it would have ended there. Two thieves walked out into the dark, and a town none the wiser. Except that a small voice came from inside the vault.

It came thin through the iron. It was the boy. He was in the vault.

He had come the evening before with the deliverymen and their sacks of flour. He had slipped behind the counter while Faro counted his sweets. Only a small still child can move like that. He had got the iron door open the one way a child gets a thing open. By mischief, and by luck. He had pulled it to behind him, so no one would find him before he found the paper. And it had latched. It latches from the outside. A child does not know that a door can do that to him. He had been in the black behind a foot of iron for the best part of the night. The air in a sealed vault is a candle. It burns down. Now he was calling, and his voice was very small, and getting smaller.

Everything that had been a clash of wills in that room stopped being one.

Wade went at the door with his hands and broke his hands on it. Quint worked the dial. He put his ear to the cold iron. He tilted his blind side to it and listened for the fall of the tumblers. His old fingers could no longer feel them. His face when he pulled back told the whole of it. "I can't," he said. "Boy, I can't. My hands will not. I cannot hear it true no more." Thirty years of a trade, and it had left him at the door. It leaves every man at the door, in the end. The honest gear had failed. The crooked gear had failed. The boy was burning down behind the iron. There was nothing left in that brick room but bodies and a wall.

And the wall is where I told you to look.

The Golem set down his lamp. He looked at the iron door. Then he looked at the brick beside it. The brick he had laid. The joints he had smoothed that very dawn, so that no thin place could open. He had been told a thing once. It was the week they dug him grey and breathing out of the Quartz mine. Faro had taken him in and given him a wall to keep and never a name. Someone, that first week, had scratched four words into the green mortar. They scratched it low, in the back corner of the vault wall, where only the keeper of the wall would ever read it. THIS WALL WILL BURY YOU. He had read it every dawn since with his thumb. He had kept the warning like a stone in his boot. He had thought it meant the bank would be his grave.

He understood it different now. A child's voice was going out behind the iron. A wall does not care which side of it you stand on. A wall buries whoever is sealed inside it. He had built this one too well.

He took up the trowel. Not to seal. The point went into the dawn-fresh joint, the soft new line he had smoothed that morning. He leaned his whole grey weight on it. The joint gave, because he had made it, and he alone knew where it ran thin. One brick came free. Then a second.

He did not pry at the iron door. That door was made to defeat men. He went at the wall instead, the wall made by his own hand, which answered to his own hand. He worked fast now, and not tender. The trowel bent in his grip. His grey arms ran first with mortar dust and then with blood.

He tore his own true wall open course by course. A wall built to last a hundred years came down in the time it takes to dig a grave. Brick after brick came away in his bleeding hands. He passed them back without looking. Quint hauled them clear, so no man would turn an ankle and stop. The hole grew from a crack to a gap to a mouth a man could reach through. The boy's voice got thinner. Wade got his torn hands in beside the giant's and pulled. Quint hauled the broke pieces back and away.

They opened a hole low in the wall, into the black of the vault. The dead air sighed out of it. The smell of it rolled into the room. Old paper, and lime dust, and the sour breath of a child who had been sick in the dark. Wade would know that smell for the rest of his life. Wade reached in past spilled deeds and Faro's strongboxes. He reached past the whole paper weight of the valley's debt. He got two fistfuls of the boy's shirt. He dragged him out into the lamplight, gone blue and limp. The giant put one grey hand on the small chest and pressed. Careful. Careful. It was the only careful he had. The boy coughed. He threw up. He breathed. He cried. That is the sweetest ugly sound there is. A child being sick is a child alive.

In the spill of paper at their knees lay a thin square card, water-stained. The giant's tearing had shaken it loose from behind the mortar. It had been hidden in the same back corner as the warning, all those years. It was a christening card. A name in old ink. A date. A town a thousand miles east. Wade picked it up, for his were the only steady hands. He looked at it. He looked at the giant. The giant was looking at the card the way a starving man looks at bread through glass. He could not read. He had never once in this valley been called a thing but the name the town gave him.

"Xavier," Wade said. He said it plain, the way you hand a man his hat. "Your name is Xavier Tull. It says it right here. You had a name before this place. You had a whole life before this wall."

The giant's seamed face did not change all at once. It changed the way a wall changes when the first true rain hits it. The dark spreads slow through the dry. He had crossed the one line he had sworn to keep. The line of true mortar. The wall he was built to hold. He had crossed it to pull a child into the light. And now a thieving stranger was handing him back his name out of the rubble of it. He opened his mouth. The dry well worked. What came out was not the one word. "Xavier," he said. He said it like a man tasting water after a dry country. "Xavier."

Quint looked away from it. A man that old does not care to be caught with his eye gone wet. "Xavier," the giant said a third time, soft, like he was teaching the word to his own mouth. He held the card in two grey fingers, as if it might tear. He had pulled a child out of a wall with those hands, and now they shook over a square of paper.

Out front, a lamp. Faro's voice, climbing the dark. "What in God's name. What have you done to my wall."

They will tell you in Dry Fork that the bank fell down. It did not fall down. One wall of it came open, low, a ragged mouth of brick. The whole paper weight of the valley spilled out into the lamplight on the floor. But you tell a thing the way it felt. And what it felt like was a wall coming down. So that is how they tell it. I have stopped correcting them.

Faro came into the back room in his nightshirt, a lamp in his hand. He looked at the hole in his bank. He looked at the deeds on the floor. He looked at the boy, alive, in the arms of a giant he had bought cheap and worked grey. And for the first time in his three years over our dry valley, Wendell Faro had nothing soft to say. He understood, I think, exactly what it had cost him. It was not the money. It was that the town would hear how it happened. It was that the keeper had opened the wall.

"You will hang," Faro said to Wade, finding his voice. "Both of you. Breaking. And theft. The boy in there is the proof of it."

"The boy in there is proof your vault near killed a child," Quint said. He stood up to his full small height. He had brick dust in his one good eye. "You want to ring that bell in front of the whole valley, Wendell, you go ahead and ring it. Tell them how it went. Tell them whose wall it was."

And here the season did the thing the season does. No man can plan for it. Every man takes the credit for it after. It rained. It had not rained in the valley for the best part of three years. It chose that black hour to begin. Soft at first on the tin. Then hard. The green-grey weight of it came down the dead wash in a brown rope of water. It filled the Sweet. It drummed on the brick. The drought broke over Dry Fork while a banker stood in his nightshirt in the ruin of his own wall. You may call that justice. I call it weather. The two look the same from close enough.

There was no auction on the dark of the moon. You cannot sell a valley out from under itself the week the rain comes back. Not when the whole town has heard that the bank's wall ate a child. Not when they have heard that a grey giant tore it open to give the child back. Faro had built his power on being the only dry thing in a drowning country. The rain took that from him surer than any law could. The territory buyers turned their wagons at the swollen wash. They did not come twice in a wet year, just as he had promised. Only now the promise fell on him. The valley's paper sat there, spoiled and spilled. The men who owed came to stand in the mud and look at it. A thing had changed that does not change back. They had seen the wall opened. A wall that can be opened is a different thing to live beside than a wall that cannot.

The Keller place was not bought back with money. It was not stolen, either, in the end. I know that matters to Wade more than it will ever matter to anyone else. It was simply not sold. The bell never rang. The rain came. A giant crossed his line. A man can spend his whole life trying to earn back what he cost the people who loved him. Or trying to steal it back. And he can find, in the end, that the thing was given. Given in the dark, by the last hand he would have asked. Wade has not made his peace with that. I do not think he is meant to.

In the wet grey before dawn Wade knelt in the rubble. He started, with no sense to it, to stack the fallen brick back into the wall. Course on course. He fitted each one to its broken bed, the way he had watched the giant do it. He worked as if he could close the mouth in the bank. As if closing it would put the years back. As if it would put Tom back in the ground unworked. As if it would make him a man who had come home in time. "Tom," he said once, to a brick. Just the name. His torn hands shook. He set three bricks. They would not hold without mortar, and he knew it, and he kept setting them anyway. Grief is a thing the hands do when the head cannot. Then Xavier Tull crouched down beside him, huge and grey and bleeding and free. He put one hand over both of Wade's and stopped them. Gentle. It was the only gentle he had.

"Leave it open," Xavier said. Three words now. The dry well was filling. He had a name, and he was spending the air it bought him. "Leave it open."

So Wade left it open. He stood up in the rain. He took the brand iron out of his coat. The cold Keller iron he had carried out of the valley, and carried home, and never once used. He looked at it a long while. Then he gave it to the boy to hold. That is a different thing than using it. The boy took it in both hands, like a thing that was alive.

Xavier walked out through the hole in the wall he had built and broken. He walked out into the first rain to fall on the valley in three dry years. The warning had been wrong. Or it had been right, and he had outlived it. From close enough the two are the same. He did not die outside the walls. He had been told he would. He walked into the wet world a named man, and he did not look back at the bank. Not once. That is the last any of us saw of the Golem. There was no Golem anymore. There was a man named Xavier Tull, walking east, toward a town a thousand miles off, on a card, in old ink.

He left the trowel. He set it down on the wet brick of the broken wall. The worn iron trowel he had carried so long that men said he slept with it. He left it there for the next hand. Wade found it in the morning. He kept it. He is a mason now, if you can feature that. The fast-handed Keller who could open any lock in the county. He builds walls for the valley. And he builds them, they say, with one thin place left in every one. Low in the back. A spot where a man could get a thumb in and pull, if he ever had to. He says he does not do it on purpose. I have watched him work. He does it on purpose.

The rest of the valley still owed the bank, mind you. The paper dried, and Faro pressed it flat, and the debts did not vanish with the drought. But the men who owed had stood in the mud and watched a wall come open. They did not forget the lesson of it. That is a reckoning still rolling toward Dry Fork, and I will give it to you another night. For now the rain is on the tin. The wash is running. The bell is quiet. Step back from the wall. Mind the wet brick. That is the end of what I can tell you true.