Chapter Twenty-Three
The Greene Porch across the Creek, Collins Ranch, and Bozeman, Montana Territory
Ben was at his own porch step across the creek with a coffee cup in one hand and his pipe gone cold in the other when Wade came up the path on the gelding at nine.
“You’ve come earlier than I looked for,” Ben said, setting the cup down at the board.
“I couldn’t wait any longer.” Wade swung off the gelding and set the reins at the rail.
“Set the wool out, then.” Ben got up off the step. “I’ll fetch the coffee.”
He came back from the kitchen with a tin of coffee, pressed it into Wade’s good hand, and lowered himself onto the porch step beside him. The two of them looked at the piece of dark wool laid out on the rail in the cold morning sun.
“Your father bought the Dawson quarter off old man Dawson in fifty-eight,” Ben began.
The corner of the wool moved a fraction at the rail in the cold air.
Wade set the coffee tin down at the porch board.
“You’re saying Jameson.” Wade held his face flat.
“I am saying the wool is from Morrison’s bolt, to my eye.
I am saying the piece was cut clean at the seam and not torn off in a scramble.
I am saying the horse at the willow carried the white off-forefoot Alice marked on Jameson’s bay at the post office Wednesday last.” Ben leveled his pale eyes at the wool.
“I am saying a hat set dry on a bank is a hat meant to be read, and the man who set it there meant for you to read it and meant for you to have not one word of it that would stand at the Gallatin courthouse. I cannot prove a syllable of it. I can tell you what my eye tells me, and my eye tells me Jameson stood at the willow at the bend at two o’clock this morning and rode home before the frost was off the grass.
He believes there is something under that ground, is the rumor. His daddy believed it.”
Wade looked at the wool a long count.
“The southeast quarter is grass and a dry wash and a rose at the chapel wall my father set for my mother. There is nothing under that ground a man would put a ball at a fence for. There is nothing under it at all.”
“There is nothing under it that you know of.” Ben’s voice came low and even.
“That is a different sentence than there is nothing under it. I have had a letter at the office this fortnight from a circuit judge at Helena I served beside in the war. The Dawson account at the Bank of Bozeman has run low across the last two years. The note old man Dawson took up against the home place in fifty-eight has gone eleven months unpaid. Jameson is six weeks from losing the whole of the place his father bought. Set a man six weeks from the loss of everything in front of the one piece of ground his father swore, across the whole of his boyhood, had something put under it, and you have set a fuse, brother. You have only to wait.”
Wade went still at the step, the coffee gone cold at his good hand.
“My grandfather was a Methodist circuit preacher who came up the trail with a wagon and seven silver dollars, Ben. He had little business putting anything under any ground in his life.”
“I am not telling you that he did, Wade.” Ben drew the cold pipe to his lip out of long habit and set it down again.
“I am telling you Jameson believes he did. I will be at your south fence at first light tomorrow. We’ll walk the whole line together.
We’ll set up a watch at the cottonwoods, and we will say small of it at the supper table, on account of your woman and your child having had fright enough. ”
Wade picked the wool up off the rail at last and folded it into the inside of his good coat against his chest.
“She is not mine yet, Ben. To keep from the fright, I mean. Not by the book at the back of the chapel.”
“She is mine to worry over until the book is signed.” The corner of Ben’s mouth pulled.
“Alice has decided the matter, and I have learned that Alice deciding a thing is a law of nature and the resistance of it merely delays the inevitable. Ride home. Bolt the door. I will be at the south fence at the first light of the morning.”
***
Wade rode the gelding home along the creek at a working trot.
The sun had climbed the eastern ridge to a thin, clear gold.
The cottonwoods at the bend stood in the last bright leaf they would carry past the coming frost. The bays at the corral lifted their heads at the sound of him.
Patience came down off the porch at a slow trot, set her grey shoulder briefly at his boot, and went back to her station at the corner of the kitchen garden.
He swung off the gelding and set the reins at the porch rail.
Through the kitchen window, framed in the late-morning gold, Zoe stood at the iron stove with Sadie at the rug at her feet.
The two of them had their heads bent together over the linen, and the line of Zoe’s shoulder had eased, and the household had been put back to the order it had been in on any other morning.
Wade came up the porch step. His boot stopped at the top board.
At the third row of squash in the kitchen garden, at the foot of the spent, grey vines, a pale grey hat had been set down on the dark soil with the brim turned up and a single sprig of late mountain sage stuck through the band like a feather in a Sunday brim.
The hat had no place in the squash bed.