Chapter Sixteen
Collins Ranch and Bozeman, Montana Territory
By Tuesday morning, Sadie had recovered enough to be bored, and the boredom turned out to be the most perilous phase of her convalescence.
“Auntie Zoe,” she announced from her nest of quilts, in the carrying tone of a small monarch addressing the court, “I have been in this bed for two days and one half, and I believe I am cured.”
Zoe set down the porridge bowl she had carried up and pressed the back of her hand to Sadie’s forehead.
The skin was cool and dry. Two mornings earlier, the same skin had burned against her palm at the kitchen table. This morning at half past seven, the small girl was sitting up against three pillows and complaining of boredom.
Zoe kept her hand at the small forehead a count longer than the temperature reading required.
Thank You, Lord, she said inside herself. Thank You for the cool skin. Thank You for the dry forehead. Thank You for the bored voice.
She drew her hand back.
“The doctor said Tuesday at the earliest, sweet girl, and Tuesday has only just arrived. We’ll let it settle in before we make any large claims.”
“I’ve counted the boards on the ceiling,” Sadie continued, undeterred. “There are forty-one. I’ve named the knots in the pine. The large one above the window is called Bartholomew. I’ve taught Henrietta to climb onto the windowsill, which she does poorly, and I’ve composed a hymn.”
“You have composed a hymn.”
“I have. It’s about a chicken who fears the Lord. Would you like to hear it?”
“I’d like nothing in the world more,” Zoe answered, settling onto the edge of the bed with the bowl in her lap. “But you will eat three spoonfuls of porridge between each verse, because the doctor also said the leg mends faster on a full stomach, and I happen to believe him.”
Sadie ate her three spoonfuls. She sang the first verse of the hymn, which scanned poorly and rhymed Henrietta with better, and Zoe applauded with her whole heart and dabbed at the corner of her own eye with the cuff of her sleeve, and pretended the dabbing had to do with the steam off the porridge.
The leg was healing. The swelling had gone down.
The two small punctures above the ankle had closed clean, with no red streaking up the calf to frighten anyone.
Doc Reeves had come Monday morning before his rounds and pronounced himself satisfied and accepted a wedge of pie in lieu of a fee.
The household had begun, by slow degrees, to breathe again.
The breathing wasn’t entirely easy.
Zoe had noticed the change in the men without anyone naming it for her.
George rode the fence line twice a day now instead of once and he carried a rifle in the saddle scabbard where there had been no rifle before.
Wade had ridden into Bozeman on Monday. He had come back late.
His face was shut and the skin around his eyes had gone grey.
Ben had ridden out from town that same afternoon and sat at the kitchen table with him for an hour with the door closed. The two of them had spoken in the low register men used when they had small wish to be overheard by women or children.
Job and Patience slept on the porch now. The back door, which had stood unbolted every night of Zoe’s first three weeks on the ranch, was bolted at dusk.
No one had told Zoe a single word about the fence post.
She had let the question go unspoken.
Two days at the side of the bed had left a small, steady knot at the front of her ribs.
“Auntie Zoe,” Sadie said, midway through her porridge and the third verse. “Will you fetch my sampler? I want to work the next bit while my hands are bored.”
Zoe rose to fetch it from the dresser, and that was the moment she heard Wade’s boots on the third stair from the top.
He paused in the doorway with his hat in one hand and a flat brown paper parcel under his other arm. The red ribbon at the top of the parcel had gone slightly crushed at the corner from two days at the back of the kitchen shelf.
Zoe set the embroidery hoop down on her knee.
Her hand stilled on the linen. Her free hand came up briefly to the side of her own neck and stopped at the collar of her dress.
Wade was at the threshold of the small bedroom, his great frame filling the doorway, his hat in one hand, his pale blue eyes finding Sadie first and then finding her in the bedside chair.
Her breath caught once at the back of her throat.
“Uncle Wade!” Sadie’s face lit. “You’ve come to visit me. I’ve composed a hymn. It’s about a chicken.”
“I heard the chicken hymn from the bottom of the stairs,” Wade replied, and the corner of his mouth moved. “Henrietta should consider whether she wishes to be famous.”
“She does wish it. We have discussed it.”
He crossed the room and lowered himself onto the chair beside the bed and set his hat on his knee.
His eyes moved down to the parcel. His thumb moved once at the red ribbon, slow and uncertain at the knot, before he set the whole of it down on the quilt over Sadie’s lap.
“This is for you,” he said. his hand staying flat on the brown paper a moment longer before it came away.
Sadie’s pale blue eyes went down to the parcel. The line between her brows set deep. She lifted her face up to her uncle and held the look a count longer, and then her eyes came back down to the parcel and stayed there.
“It’s not my birthday,” Sadie said carefully, as though warning him of a possible error.
“It’s not,” Wade agreed. “Open it.”
Sadie’s small fingers worked the red ribbon loose. The brown paper fell back.
Sadie read the words. She read them twice, her lips moving over apologies. Then, she lifted her face to her uncle. Her chin had begun to tremble.
“What are you sorry for, Uncle Wade?” she asked, the trembling now reaching her voice.
Wade set his hat down on the floor beside the chair. He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, and he brought his face level with his niece’s. When he spoke, his voice had gone low and rough in a register Zoe had heard from him only twice before.
“I have been sorry for a long while, Sadie, and I have done a poor job of saying it. I was short with you at the creek when you were grieving your mother, and I have been short with you a great many other times when what you needed was a gentler hand. You lost your mama and your papa in one afternoon. You came to live with an uncle who knew how to mend a fence and break a horse and bring in a herd, but who did not know how to mend the things that mattered more. I am sorry for it. I am going to do better. This is a small beginning. I know it’s small, and I’m giving it to you anyway. ”
Sadie looked at him for a long moment.
Then she set the embroidery hoop aside with great care, reached up with both her small arms, and she wrapped them around her uncle’s neck.
She pressed her face into his collar, and Wade gathered her off the quilt with both his enormous hands and held her against his chest. Over the top of her yellow braids, his pale eyes closed.
Zoe turned to the window and gave them the privacy of her back.
Zoe pressed Sadie’s unfinished sampler against her ribs and breathed slowly through the ache that had risen in her chest and refused, for a moment, to do anything sensible at all.
Lord, she prayed silently, I came West to find a place where a woman of twenty-six could be wanted.
I begin to suspect You have given me a place where I am, instead, very thoroughly needed, and I find the second thing sits even better than the first, and I did not see that coming, and I imagine that was rather the point.
Thank You. I am still frightened about the fence post. We will discuss the fence post later.
Behind her, Sadie’s voice, muffled against Wade’s collar, said, “Uncle Wade, you’re squashing the hymn out of me.”
“My apologies to the hymn,” Wade answered, the corner of his mouth pulling once at her in something that was almost a laugh, and he set her gently back among the quilts.
***
Once the supper dishes were washed and dried and returned to their places, Zoe carried two cups of coffee out to the porch. Wade had taken up the watch he had kept every evening since Sunday, standing at the rail with his rifle propped beside the door and his eyes moving slowly.
She held one cup out to him.
He took it. His fingers brushed against the back of hers at the rim of the cup, and the warmth of his thumb settled briefly above the place her own had set the moment before.
Zoe’s breath caught in the back of her throat.
The contact stayed for the count of two, and then his hand drew back with the cup, and the warmth at the back of her own knuckles stayed where it was for a count longer than the warmth had small business staying.
Their eyes met above the rims of the two cups.
“She’ll sleep through, I think,” Zoe said at last. “She wore herself out on the hymn. There are now four verses.”
“I look forward to hearing them,” Wade answered, the dry edge gone warm at the back of his voice.
“You may regret that,” she warned, a smile in her voice.
“I may.” He drank his coffee. The corner of his mouth moved. “I generally do, where Sadie’s views are concerned. I hear them anyway.”
Zoe wrapped both hands around her own cup and looked out at the dark pasture.
Wade was a foot and a half to her left. The warmth of his coat came across the small space between them. She took a sip of her coffee.
It did little good. The warmth at her left was a warmth the coffee could not compete with. She turned the cup slowly in her cold hands and watched the steam climb off it.
“The gift you gave her this morning, Wade,” she said. “The apologies you had Morrison write on the wrapping.”
Wade was quiet for a long moment.
“I’m not good at the saying of things,” he said finally. “I’ve told you that before.”
“You have,” she agreed.
“I find I’m better at the buying of thread.”
A small laugh escaped her into the cold air. “Then you and I are well matched, Wade Collins, because I am better at the saying of things than at almost anything else. Between the two of us, we may yet raise that child into a person who expects to be loved.”
The words were out of her before she had fully measured them, and she heard them land in the dark.
The two of us. Raise that child.
Warmth came up the back of her neck and climbed to the bridge of her nose. Her hands closed tight around the coffee cup at the rim. Her right thumb pressed flat against the tin and stayed there.
She kept her eyes very steady on the south fence.
She felt him refuse to look at her with equal care.