Chapter 2
The years did not pass on the West farm so much as grind, like a millstone. Slow, heavy, never stopping.
Samantha grew despite them. At ten, she could carry two full pails from the well without spilling.
At twelve, she could turn a whole hog’s worth of lard in an afternoon, alone, with the kitchen so hot the windows ran.
By fourteen, there was no task on the place she had not done.
She had cut hay. She had pulled a calf that came wrong.
Three nights running she had sat up with a sick horse while Mr. West slept, because the horse was worth money and she was not.
Nobody thanked her. She stopped expecting it about the time she stopped expecting a second helping.
The loft over the kitchen was still hers. It had grown smaller as she grew, or seemed to, until she slept with her knees drawn up under the roof slope. Mrs. West had never climbed the ladder to look at it. That suited them both.
And somewhere in those years, without asking anyone’s leave, the girl off the train became beautiful.
Samantha did not know it first. She had no glass in the loft, and the one in the kitchen was cracked across.
She knew it the way a person knows the weather is turning, from the change in other people.
Men at the feed store stopped talking when she came in.
Boys who had once thrown clods at her on the school road now went red and stared at their boots.
At church, where she still stood at the back with Mrs. West’s hand on her shoulder, she began to feel a different kind of looking. It was not the sidelong look she had known since eight. It was hungrier than that, and it made her hold herself very still.
She was dark-haired, clear-eyed, and tall.
Hard work had not coarsened her. It had only made her strong, quick, and quiet in her movements, as a deer is quiet.
Her hands alone told the truth about her life.
They were rough, with the knuckles cracked in winter and the nails worn short. She kept them folded when she could.
Mrs. West noticed the change before Samantha did. Her thin mouth went thinner. She said nothing to the girl about it. But she began to send her to the barn when callers came, and to keep her from town on market days.
Then the young men began coming to the gate.
They came shyly at first, on one excuse or another. A borrowed harrow to return. A question about a bull. One brought a pail of blackberries his mother had sent. He stood in the yard turning his hat around while he asked whether Miss Samantha might like them.
She was in the glasshouse when he came, and she heard Mrs. West answer him from the porch.
“There’s no Miss Samantha here,” the woman said. “There’s the girl. She’s at her work. You can leave the berries or take them back, whichever suits your mother.”
The boy left the berries. He did not come again.
None of them came again, not once Mrs. West had spoken to them.
Some she sent off with a word. Others Mr. West met at the gate with the dog beside him and said nothing, which was worse.
And where the Wests did not trouble themselves, the county did the fencing for them.
A boy would go home and mention the West girl to his mother.
The mother would say the words. Off the train.
Bad stock. You never know what you’ll get with that sort.
Then the boy would think again, and stay home.
Samantha understood the reason for it before she was seventeen.
It was not that the Wests were guarding her virtue.
They had never guarded any part of her. It was that a girl who worked from before light until after dark was worth more than any three hired men.
She cooked, cleaned, nursed the sick stock, and asked no wages.
And a girl like that, if she married, would be gone.
Some farm boy would carry her off to a place of his own, and the Wests would have to pay somebody.
So the gate stayed shut. And the county’s tongue kept it shut, without the Wests lifting a finger.
She was fenced. That was the plain truth of it. Fenced as sure as the hogs.
There was one soul on the West farm who did not treat her so.
Old Amos had been the hired man since before Samantha came, since before Nathan West was born, for all anyone could tell.
Nobody knew his age. He was bent nearly double, with white whiskers that stood out from his jaw like frost on a fence rail.
His eyes were kind and tired, set deep in a face the color of a saddle.
He slept in a room off the barn, and he ate at the kitchen table, though at the far end.
He was worked as hard as she was, and paid very little more.
On that first day, he had watched her come in the wagon, a scrubbed child in a borrowed coat. He had watched Mrs. West send her to find the ax. And the old man’s heart had turned over at the sight, though he did not say so, then or ever.
Instead, he showed it.
It began with small kindnesses. A rag wrapped around the well handle in January, so her palms did not freeze to the iron.
A place cleared for her by the barn stove when the loft was too cold to bear.
He never spoke much. But when she came in from the yard with her face set against the wind, he would nod once.
It was as if she had done work worth nodding at. It was the only nod she got.
Then, in her second winter, he found her at the glasshouse door with a scrap of newspaper in her hands.
It had come around a parcel from the store.
She was staring at the print the way a person stares at a wall with a door drawn on it.
The three months of winter schooling had given her the shapes of the letters and no more.
She knew that the marks had meaning. Other people could look at them and hear words. She could not.
Amos stood a while, watching her. Then he took the scrap gently out of her hands and turned it right way up.
“That’s an A,” he said, and set his thumbnail under it. “You know that one.”
She did. She said so.
“Then you know more than nothing. Come here behind the glass where the wind’s off. Ten minutes. Then you go back before she misses you.”
Ten minutes it was, that first day. Ten minutes behind the glasshouse, where the milky panes hid them from the kitchen window. A scrap of newspaper, and an old man’s thumbnail moving under the words.
It went on for years.
Half an hour, when they could steal it, in the dead time after the noon meal when Mrs. West lay down.
Behind the glasshouse in summer. In the barn, by the stove in winter, with the door cracked so Amos could hear if anyone came across the yard.
He brought her whatever print he could lay hands on.
Seed catalogs. A torn almanac. Once, for a whole glorious month, a Bible with the back half gone that he had found in a ditch by the road.
She was quick. She had always been quick. But she was quicker at this than at any chore. It was the only gift anyone had ever given her for her own sake.
Amos never said why he did it. Once, when she was twelve and had read a whole almanac page aloud without stumbling, she asked him.
He thought about it, scratching his whiskers.
“A body ought to be able to read,” he said. He looked at the page instead of at her. “That’s all. A body ought to know what the world’s saying about them. Nobody ever showed you. Somebody ought to.”
That was as near as he came to tenderness in words. It was enough. Samantha carried it up to the loft that night and turned it over in the dark. It warmed her better than the blanket.
He taught her to write, too, when she could read well enough.
That was harder. Paper was scarce and pencils scarcer.
A girl caught with either would have had questions to answer.
So he taught her in the dust of the barn floor with a stick.
He taught her on the frost of the glasshouse panes with a fingertip.
Finally, when she was fifteen, he taught her on the backs of feed bills he saved from the stove. Her hand came out fine and even. Amos said so, holding a bill up to the light. She kept it, folded small, under the straw tick in the loft.
Neither of them knew what they were making.
He thought he was giving a lonely child something to hold.
She thought she was learning her letters.
Neither of them thought, in those stolen half hours behind the milky glass, that he was cutting her a key.
But that is what it was. Somewhere in a matrimonial paper not yet printed, in a hand not yet written, was a door with a lock on it.
Old Amos was making the one that would fit.
By twenty, Samantha Bree could do anything.
That was the county’s own verdict, given grudgingly and out of the side of the mouth.
The West girl could cook. Everyone said so who had ever eaten at the West table, which was not many, for the Wests did not entertain.
But her pies went to the church supper, and the plates came back scraped.
She could put up a hundred jars of a summer and lose none to spoiling.
She could dress a chicken in the time it took another woman to catch one.
There was a hand with the sick in her, too.
It had begun with the stock, because nobody else would sit up with a foundered horse, and it had grown from there.
She learned what fever felt like under her palm.
She learned which weeds along the fence line drew a poultice and which ones eased a cough.
When Mrs. West took the ague one winter, it was Samantha who nursed her through it.
Three weeks of broth and cold cloths, with no more thanks than the horse would have given.
Capable past any woman in the county, that was Samantha Bree at twenty. The county knew it. It said so, in the same breath it said the other thing.
For nothing had changed there. Off the train was off the train, at twenty as at eight.
She could read now, write a fine hand, cook, heal.
Not one soul thought the more of her for it.
She was still the lowest person in every room she stood in.
At church, she stood at the back. At supper, she sat at the corner of the table.
When Mrs. West had callers, Samantha poured the coffee and did not sit down.
Some part of her, when she was younger, had believed that if she were only good enough, useful enough, quiet enough, it would end. That the county would one day look up and see a woman there instead of a thing off a train.
At twenty she had stopped believing that. It was a relief in a way. A hope let go weighs less than a hope held.
She had her name. She had the vow she had made in the loft, worn smooth now with the years but still there. There was Amos, the barn stove, the words on the page.
That was all she would ever have, she thought. She had made her peace with it, or told herself she had.
Then, in the wet spring of her twentieth year, the team spooked at the flooded ford. Her whole life on the West farm changed in a single afternoon.