CHAPTER 4
The Weight of Leaving
The first hundred miles passed in a state Callie could only describe, turning it over in her mind against the rhythmic jolt of the northbound coach, as a kind of suspended disbelief — the sense that she had not truly left Santa Fe at all, that her father's disapproval might yet materialize at the next rest stop and pluck her bodily from the coach and deliver her home to face the consequences of her considerable audacity.
It was only somewhere past the second day, watching the familiar red hills of home give way to a starker, wider landscape she did not recognize, that the disbelief began, gradually, to loosen its grip and permit something closer to genuine hope to take root in its place.
She had never traveled alone before in her entire life, a fact that struck her with some force somewhere around the third night, lying in a rented room above a rail-stop hotel with her door carefully bolted and her small case of savings tucked beneath her pillow, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a town she had no acquaintance with whatsoever, and finding, rather to her own surprise, that the fear she had expected to feel had been largely crowded out by a fierce, unfamiliar exhilaration — the particular giddy vertigo of a woman discovering, for the first time in her adult life, that her own decisions belonged entirely to herself.
She thought, more than once during those long traveling days, of Don Rafael Alvarado, whom she had met formally only twice, both occasions supervised closely by her father and conducted with all the warmth of a business transaction, which she supposed, in the most literal sense, it had been.
She remembered his cold, assessing eyes, the way he had spoken to her as though she were a piece of property whose particulars he was confirming rather than a woman he intended to marry, and found that each mile of distance between herself and Santa Fe brought a small, private relief that she did not examine too closely for fear of feeling guilty about the magnitude of it.
She thought, too, of her mother, dead these eight years now, and wondered, not for the first time, whether her mother might have understood this flight better than her father ever would — her mother, who had herself been matched to Esteban Reyes through a similarly practical arrangement of family interests, and who had spoken to Callie, in the private hours before her death, of a life she had wanted for her daughter that bore little resemblance to the life Esteban seemed determined to arrange for her instead.
Be braver than I was, mija, her mother had said, in words Callie had carried close for eight years without properly understanding their full weight until this very week.
Don't let anyone else write the whole of your story, however kindly they mean it.
The final leg of the journey, from the rail terminus into the Wyoming Territory proper, brought Callie through mountain country considerably more dramatic than anything her native New Mexico had prepared her to expect — steep, pine-forested slopes and narrow passes that made her grip the coach's leather strap with white knuckles, and a particular quality of light, thin and clear and somehow larger than any sky she had known in Santa Fe, that struck her, watching it through the dusty window, as unexpectedly beautiful in a manner she had not anticipated feeling about a place she'd chosen chiefly out of desperation rather than genuine desire.
“First time to the territory?” asked her traveling companion, a weathered rancher's wife returning from a family visit, noting Callie's evident fascination with the passing scenery.
“It is. I'm bound for Goldpine, to take up a position there.”
“Goldpine. Fine little town, for a mining camp. You'll be working the mine, then, or the mercantile?”
“Neither, in fact. I'm to keep house for a rancher named Nathaniel Cross.”
Something crossed the woman's weathered face, quick and assessing, the particular look Callie was beginning to recognize as the universal expression of territorial women confirming that they possessed some relevant intelligence worth sharing.
“Cross Ranch. I know of it, by reputation if not close acquaintance.
Good land, well-managed, though the man's had a run of hard luck with housekeepers, from what I hear tell.
Lost his wife some two years back, a lingering illness, terrible thing, and's been managing two young children and eight hundred acres more or less alone ever since, save for whatever help he's hired and subsequently lost to marriage.
You'll want to go in with your eyes open, dear, same as any position out here. The children, particularly the little one, have had considerable practice learning not to trust new arrivals.”
“I understand as much,” Callie said, absorbing this new information with the same careful attention she had begun to apply to every fragment of intelligence she gathered about her uncertain destination. “I mean to earn that trust patiently, however long it takes.”
“That's the right attitude for it, I'd say. Children can smell impatience on a person same as horses can, and they'll test you considerably harder if they sense you're wanting quick results rather than genuine care.”
Callie turned this counsel over for the remaining miles, watching the landscape grow steadily wilder and more beautiful as the coach climbed toward Goldpine, and found herself, despite every genuine uncertainty attending her situation, feeling something she had not permitted herself to feel in some years of careful, dutiful daughterhood: the fierce, unfamiliar sensation of a woman walking toward a life she had chosen for herself, however uncertain its particulars, rather than one chosen carefully for her by someone else entirely.
“May I ask,” the rancher's wife said, some miles further on, with the particular careful delicacy of a woman broaching a subject she suspected might prove sensitive, “what brings a young lady so far from her own people, to take up housekeeping in a territory she's never seen?
I don't ask to pry, only that I've seen a good many women pass through on this road, and I've learned to recognize the particular look of someone running toward something rather than merely traveling for its own sake.”
Callie considered how much to reveal to this kind stranger, and found, weighing the woman's evident good faith against her own considerable caution, that some measure of honesty felt owed in return for the woman's generous counsel.
“I am running, in a sense, from an arrangement my family made on my behalf that I found I could not accept.
I don't say this to invite pity, only to explain why a woman with so little practical experience would travel so great a distance for so uncertain a position.”
“I'd not offer pity, dear, only respect.
It takes considerable courage to refuse an arrangement your own family's set their heart on, whatever the particulars.
I'd wager you'll find this territory rather more forgiving of that kind of courage than wherever you've come from.
Out here, a woman's judged considerably more by what she does than by what her family's arranged on her behalf.”
This small kindness, offered without judgment or excessive curiosity, settled something in Callie's traveling anxiety that she had not realized needed settling, and she spent the remaining miles toward Goldpine in a companionable quiet with her fellow traveler, watching the mountains grow ever closer and finding, in their stark, unfamiliar beauty, a promise of the fresh start she had risked so very much to pursue.
The coach made a brief stop at a way station some hours before reaching Goldpine proper, and Callie stepped down to stretch her travel-stiff limbs and take what refreshment the modest establishment offered, finding herself, in the brief pause, overtaken by a wave of doubt so profound it nearly buckled her composure entirely.
She was, she realized, standing alone in an unfamiliar way station in a territory she had never before visited, having fled her entire family and her whole known life on the strength of a schoolgirl friendship and a single letter describing a position she had no practical qualification whatsoever to fill.
The magnitude of her own recklessness, held at bay these several days by the sheer momentum of flight, threatened suddenly to overwhelm her entirely.
She found a quiet corner of the way station's small common room and sat with these doubts a while, working through them with the same methodical care she had once applied to her more theoretical education under her governess's tutelage, weighing each fear in turn against the plain, unavoidable fact that whatever waited for her in Goldpine, it could not possibly prove worse than the certain misery of Don Rafael's household.
By the time the coach was ready to resume its journey, she had settled her nerves sufficiently to climb back aboard with something approaching her earlier resolve, though the doubt itself did not entirely vanish, only receded to a manageable distance, ready to resurface, she suspected, at any future moment of genuine testing.
The rancher's wife, noting Callie's returned composure as she reclaimed her seat, offered one final piece of counsel before their paths would diverge at the Goldpine crossing.
“Whatever doubt you're carrying, dear, I'd wager it's rather less about whether you can manage this new position and rather more about whether you deserve the fresh start you're chasing after.
I've seen that particular doubt on a good many faces passing through this territory, and I'll tell you what I've learned watching it resolve, one way or another, in every case — the women who convince themselves they deserve better generally find it, and the ones who stay convinced they don't, generally don't. The deciding, near as I can tell, happens well before the actual circumstances ever properly sort themselves out.”
“That's rather profound counsel from a chance-met stranger on a stagecoach, ma'am.”
“I've had considerable time to think on such matters, making this same crossing more times than I can properly count. Take it or leave it as you find useful, dear, but I'd wager, watching you these past hours, that you're rather more the deserving sort than the doubt currently has you believing.”
Callie carried this small kindness with her through the final miles into Goldpine, finding in it an unexpected wellspring of courage that would serve her considerably, in the difficult weeks ahead, whenever her own doubt threatened to resurface with particular force.
As the coach finally crested the last rise before Goldpine's valley properly opened before them, Callie found herself offering a silent, wordless prayer of gratitude for having found the courage to undertake this considerable journey at all, whatever uncertainty still awaited her at its conclusion, understanding that whatever the coming weeks demanded of her, she had already accomplished the hardest part simply by choosing to leave rather than remain and quietly endure a life not genuinely her own.