Chapter Seven
Collins Ranch, near Bozeman, Montana Territory
Zoe had written four versions of the letter to Brody, and three of them were balled up on the kitchen table.
Dear Brody,
Are you well? Bonnie? I hope so. I am sitting at a kitchen table in Montana that is older than I am, beside a sourdough starter named Lazarus who is twenty-three years old and takes the whole business very seriously.
I find I am beginning to consult him on matters of importance, and the consultations have been going as well as can be expected.
Zoe paused. She looked at what she had written.
“Lord,” she murmured, “that is a reasonable opening.”
Her hand was steady on the page now.
She drew a breath, dipped the pen again, and wrote on.
The ranch is beautiful in a way that Albany is not. The mountains here are very large and very close. Mrs. Keller didn’t exaggerate on any of the relevant points. The country is cold already, which I am told will get considerably worse by November, and the rooster…
The kitchen was still and warm. The loaf was on its second rising under the cloth.
The kettle had been pushed back from the hot edge of the stove.
The brass lamp on the table threw its small steady light across the fourth sheet of paper and the small heap of balled-up attempts at Zoe’s left elbow.
Outside, the cottonwoods at the bend had begun to turn at their tops.
The screen door at the back of the kitchen gave its low creak.
Zoe knew the creak. The creak meant Sadie was coming in from the chicken yard. It was followed by the small flat sound of two boots being toed off at the mat and the small wet sound of two hands at the basin.
The two hands at the basin went on a count longer than usual.
“Sweet girl,” Zoe called, without turning, “the soap is at the back of the basin if you are looking for it.”
“I have the soap,” Sadie called back.
Zoe set down her pen and waited.
A small warm shoulder pressed against Zoe’s right elbow, and the smell of chicken yard and pine soap came up off the top of a yellow head.
“Auntie Zoe,” Sadie said, leaning forward to inspect the page from the side.
“Yes, sweet girl?” Zoe answered, sliding her arm a careful inch to make room for the small head at her shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing a letter to my brother.”
“Oh,” she said. “What does it say?”
“At the moment, sweet girl,” she replied with a dry edge, “it says very little, as someone keeps asking me what it says.”
Sadie considered this. Her tongue pressed once against the inside of her cheek. Her chin came down a fraction.
“I could ask quieter,” she offered.
“That would be a kindness.”
Sadie blew a small puff of breath at a loose strand of hair and climbed onto the chair beside Zoe, tucking her feet under herself and leaning her chin on the table. She was quiet for approximately fifteen seconds.
“What is a rooster doing in the letter?”
“Roosters can be in letters, Sadie. Letters have no rules about roosters.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Which rooster?”
“The large red one from the south side of the barn. He and I had a disagreement yesterday morning.”
“Tell me,” she said firmly.
Zoe set her pen down again. She folded her hands on the table.
Lord, she thought, I am trying to write a letter, and You have sent me a small interruption. I will trust this is intentional on Your part. You do seem to have a view on my correspondence.
“I went out at six in the morning with that list of mine,” she said aloud, “which seemed like a very straightforward errand. I had got as far as the south end of the kitchen garden, not even to the eggs yet. I was on the cabbages when that rooster came out at me from behind the bean row as though he owned the state of Montana.”
“He does,” Sadie informed her seriously. “He has always thought so.”
“He gave me no adequate warning. One moment, I was minding my own business. The next, I was running through the yard with a rooster the size of a small horse behind me.” Sadie dissolved into giggles in a helpless, delighted wave.
She slid off her chair and bent double at the table’s edge with her hands pressed to her face.
“Sadie,” Zoe said, hand at hip, chin lifted, the corner of her mouth giving the whole performance away at once.
“I’m so sorry,” Sadie managed between laughs. “I’m so sorry, Auntie Zoe.”
“I am sure you are.”
“Where did you run to?”
“The side of the house,” she went on, dropping her voice low. “Where I stood, sweet girl, for some considerable time, with my back to the wall and my list held above my head as though it would offer some kind of protection. He stopped at the gate post. He fixed me with a single yellow eye.”
Sadie’s mouth made a flat line, but her shoulders had begun to shake.
“And what did you do?” she demanded.
“I considered my options,” Zoe answered solemnly. “I had three. Climb the rose trellis, which seemed beneath my dignity. Engage him in single combat, which seemed beneath his. Or wait for the Lord to intervene, which seemed the soundest theological position available at the moment.”
“Which did you choose?”
“I prayed,” Zoe added, laying her hand over her heart in the manner of a witness sworn in at a courthouse.
“I closed my eyes, sweet girl, and I said, Lord, there is a list to be finished and a rooster to be reasoned with, and I would appreciate a strategy. And when I opened my eyes, the Lord had not sent your uncle, because your uncle was already standing six feet away with his hand on the gate post.”
Sadie’s eyes went round.
“Uncle Wade was there the whole time?”
“Uncle Wade was there the whole time,” Zoe confirmed gravely.
“Did he help?”
“He did not, sweet girl. Your uncle stood at the gate with his hand on the post and observed the proceedings like the second act of a play he had already paid the ticket for.” She paused. “He did, in fairness, raise an eyebrow at the rooster on my behalf.”
A small wet hiccup of a laugh escaped Sadie. She pressed both hands over her mouth, her shoulders shaking now.
“And what did the rooster do?”
“The rooster,” Zoe answered, “was unmoved by your uncle’s eyebrow. The Lord, however, was moved by my second prayer, which was less polite than the first.”
Sadie’s laugh reached a new altitude.
“Uncle Wade chased the rooster?” she asked breathlessly.
“Uncle Wade looked at the rooster,” Zoe said firmly. “That was all he did. He looked at the rooster, and the rooster went back to his fence post.”
“He does that,” Sadie confirmed with deep satisfaction. “He can look at anything and make it behave.”
Zoe folded her hands in her lap and elected to say nothing further on the subject of Wade Collins and his capacity for making things behave.
“All right,” she said, returning to her letter. “Let Auntie Zoe write.”
Sadie climbed back onto her chair.
Zoe picked up her pen.
She set the pen down a moment, looked once at the hair come loose at the side of Sadie’s head, and read the paragraph back.
The rooster on the south side of the barn is a tyrant of the first order and Wade put him in his place with a look. I have decided this is the most impressive thing I have seen since arriving in Montana, and the mountains here are considerable.
Zoe held the page a moment.
Then she drew a careful line through the paragraph, and another line under it, and she dipped the pen and began again.
Brody, there is a small girl at my elbow as I write this.
Her name is Sadie. She is eight years old and her hair is the color of a cornfield in late August. She has a hen by the name of Henrietta who has the run of the kitchen.
Sadie reads two books a week. Sadie sings in a key of her own invention.
Sadie set down a green thread next to a blue thread on the front of my embroidery hoop last Tuesday and told me they were the color of a creek bed in May, and she was right.
She has lost her mother and her father, Brody. I find I had no business going east of the Hudson in twenty-six years of my life because I appear to have been due here.
Her pen stopped.
Sadie, who had been watching the page from the side, lifted her face.
“What does it say now?”
Zoe set her pen down again.
“It says, sweet girl,” she answered, “that I appear to have been due here.”
Sadie rose up to peer at the letter. The small, unfinished tea cup at Zoe’s elbow went sideways.
Tea hit the letter. Zoe watched it happen. She watched the ink begin to blur at the bottom half of the page.
“Auntie Zoe,” Sadie said, with an expression of pure and absolute sorrow.
“Yes, Sadie?” Zoe answered.
Sadie was very still at her left elbow. Her eyes were on the spread of tea at the edge of the page.
“I am very sorry,” Sadie said, low.
“I know, sweet girl,” Zoe answered, her voice gone gentle. She reached for the cloth on the back of her chair.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know that, too.”
Sadie’s lower lip pulled in between her teeth. Her thumb worked at the cuff of her own sleeve.
“Can you still send the letter?” she asked.
Zoe looked at the tea-soaked bottom half of the page. She tilted it slightly, letting the worst of the tea run off the edge and onto the floor, where it became Sadie’s next project with a cloth. She held the letter up to the window light.
Brody could read the top half.
The bottom half was somewhat abstract.
She reached for a fresh piece of paper.
Brody, I am well. I am more than well. I will write again next week.
She folded the letter, stained page and all, and slid it into the envelope.
“Are you angry?” Sadie said, cloth in hand, already mopping up the tea. Her voice came up small and uneven.
Zoe lowered herself onto one knee at the edge of the tea stain with a second cloth in her hand.
Sadie did not lift her face. Her two small hands worked the cloth in a flat circle on the boards, in the slow, steady manner Zoe had used at the dishpan an hour before.
Zoe’s hand stilled on her own cloth.
“About the tea?” she asked gently.
“Yes,” Sadie answered, her voice gone smaller.
Zoe lowered her own cloth to her knee. She ducked her head a quarter inch to find the small face under the yellow hair, and she waited until she had the eyes she had been looking for before she answered.
“No,” she replied. “Accidents are not worth anger, Sadie. We said so on Wednesday, your uncle and I. I believe it is still true on Friday.”
Sadie came up from the floor with the cloth and her face very careful.
“You and Uncle Wade said that together?” she asked softly.
“Your uncle was wrong,” Zoe answered. “He told me he knew it. The two of us came round to it together.”
Sadie held the damp cloth and looked at her for a long moment with the same pale blue eyes Zoe had been noticing on Wade’s face at the supper table.
“Good,” she said quietly.
Zoe sealed the envelope.
***
She found Wade at the corral gate.
The afternoon wind made her shawl flutter. Wade turned at the sound of her step. The brim of his hat tilted up an inch as he found her face.
“Wade.”
“Zoe.”
She held the envelope out at the length of her arm.
He set his free hand on the top of the gate post. His other came across the small gap between them, slow and unhurried, and his fingers touched hers at the corner of the paper.
Her glove was between, but the warmth of him came through it anyway.
Her breath caught once at the back of her throat and stayed there.
Her hand stayed at the corner of the envelope.
Wade’s stayed, too.
Eventually, he took it from her. His fingers brushed the inside of her wrist as they went, and the brush lingered at her wrist long after his hand had drawn the envelope away.
Wade looked down at the tea stain which had seeped through the corner of the envelope.
“Sadie.” Zoe’s word came lower than she had pitched it.
“I had assumed,” he said dryly.
“Will you send it with George this afternoon? He’s riding to the hardware store.”
“I will.”
“Thank you, Wade.”
He looked at the envelope, then her face. The corner of his mouth pulled.
Then he opened his coat one-handed, tucked the envelope down into the inside breast pocket against the line of his heart, and his palm pressed flat at the outside of the pocket for a count of two before it came away.
Zoe turned back toward the kitchen.
She felt his eyes on her back the entire way to the kitchen door.
Her cheeks stayed warm. Her hands stayed careful at the edges of her shawl.
Twice in the thirty paces between the corral and the porch step, her right boot tried to turn her shoulder a quarter inch back toward him, and twice she made her right boot reconsider.
The pulse at the side of her neck beat steady and hard.
She reached the back step.
She set her hand on the iron latch.
She turned the quarter inch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him at the corral gate with his hand still at the outside of his coat pocket and his eyes still on her. She lifted the latch and went inside.
She kept her face away from the window.
Her back rested against the closed door for a count of three.
Lord, she breathed, her eyes closed, the day is not over and the work is not finished and the kitchen smells of tea and pine soap and a great deal more besides.
I had no intention of standing at a corral gate this afternoon with my breath caught at the back of my throat.
I had no intention of walking back in the same condition.
I have no wish to be dishonest about either of them with You.
Twenty-six days remaining.
I have walked back from many things in my life, Lord, and a corral gate in this condition is a new entry on the list.
She opened her eyes.
Lazarus burped contentedly in his crock at the back of the stove. Sadie’s pen scratched at the table. The kettle began to sing.
Zoe crossed to it.