Chapter 3
The March rain had fallen for nine days, and the creek that crossed the county road was no longer a creek.
Samantha heard about it first from Amos, who had walked down to look.
The ford was under three feet of brown water, he said, moving fast, with whole fence rails turning over in it.
A man would be a fool to try it with a loaded wagon.
He said this at the kitchen door with his hat pressed to his chest, to Mr. West, who was pulling on his coat.
“I’ve crossed that ford three hundred times,” Mr. West said.
“Not with it running like that, you ain’t.”
“The mill won’t wait on the weather. Neither will I.”
Mrs. West was already on the wagon seat with a shawl over her bonnet.
She wanted the flour. She wanted to see the storekeeper about a bill.
And she had never let a hired man tell her what could not be done.
Mr. West climbed up beside her. He took the lines.
He did not look at Amos or at Samantha, who had come out onto the porch with her hands in her apron.
The wagon rolled out of the yard into the gray morning, and the rain closed behind it.
That was the last Samantha saw of the Wests alive.
The news came back at the end of the afternoon, with a neighbor on a lathered horse.
At the ford, the team had spooked. Nobody knew what did it.
A rail turning in the water, maybe, or the noise of it, or only the smell of the flood.
The near horse had reared, and the off horse had gone with it.
The wagon had swung broadside to the current and gone over.
Mr. West had been under it when they found him.
Mrs. West had been carried forty yards downstream and caught in the willows.
By then it was too late for either of them.
Samantha stood on the porch and heard it all with her hands still in her apron.
She waited for feeling to come. She thought she ought to.
Twelve years, she had lived under that roof, longer than she had lived anywhere.
Twelve years of that woman’s voice coming up through the loft boards before light, of that man’s silence at the head of the table.
She searched herself for grief and found none.
She searched for gladness, and found none of that either.
What she found instead, when she looked, was a cold small stillness, like a held breath.
Because the Wests were dead. And that meant the farm, and all that was on it, belonged to somebody else now.
Nathan West came home the next day.
He had been in town when it happened, on his father’s business, and the neighbor on the lathered horse had ridden on to fetch him.
All his life he had lived under that roof, and Samantha had grown up with him in the kitchen doorway, his shoulders filling it.
He was thirty now, broad and hard-handed, with his father’s long jaw made handsome by his mother’s straight nose.
He wore his good coat, and it fit him well.
Whatever he looked at, he looked at as if he were pricing it.
For years, he had looked at Samantha that way.
She had felt it at fifteen, and pretended not to.
She had felt it at eighteen, across the supper table, and kept her eyes on her plate.
It was not the hungry look of the boys at the gate.
Those boys had wanted her as a person wants what they know they cannot have.
Nathan looked at her the way a man looks at a horse in his own barn.
Now he stood in the yard in the last of the rain, the wagon that had killed his parents hauled up from the ford by the neighbors and left by the shed. He looked at the house, the barn, the fields. Then he looked at her, standing on the porch, and she saw him add her to the sum.
“Well,” he said. “It’s all mine now, I suppose.”
He said it to nobody in particular. But his eyes did not leave her when he said it.
The burying was on the Thursday, in the rain.
Half the county came, because that was what the county did.
They stood in the churchyard under dripping hats and said what people say.
A shame. So sudden. He was a hard man but a fair one.
Samantha stood at the back, as she always had, and heard the good wives murmur over her, too.
Poor thing, what will become of her now.
And, lower, from a woman in a feathered hat gone gray with age: Well, she’ll manage. That sort always does.
Nathan stood at the graveside with his hat in his hand and his face composed.
He shook every hand that was offered. He said his father had been a good man and his mother a good woman, which the county was glad to hear said.
When it was over, he came down the church path with the minister on one side of him and the storekeeper on the other.
He stopped by Samantha without seeming to.
“You’ll stay on,” he said. It was not a question. “The place needs keeping. Nothing changes.”
Nothing changes. She heard the county hear it, nod, and think well of him for it. A man who would keep the train-girl on, after his parents were gone. Charitable.
She lay awake in the loft that night with the rain finally stopping on the roof, and knew that everything had changed.
He was in no hurry.
That was the worst of it. If he had come at her the first night, she would have known where she stood.
Instead, he settled into the house like water settling into low ground, slow and sure, filling every corner.
He slept in his parents’ room. He took the head of the table, left the foot empty, and had Samantha serve him there.
About the farm, he asked her nothing. About his plans, he told her nothing. He simply watched.
He watched her carry water across the yard.
From the doorway, he watched her at the stove until she felt his eyes between her shoulder blades like two thumbs.
When she passed him in the narrow hall, he did not step aside as his father would have.
He let her squeeze by, close, and smiled a little when she did.
“You’ve grown up handsome,” he said one evening from the table, while she cleared. “My mother never mentioned it. I suppose she wouldn’t.”
Samantha said nothing. She took the plates.
“Twelve years,” Nathan went on. “Fed and roofed twelve years, on this place. That’s a debt, girl. My father never called it in. He was soft that way.” He tipped his chair back and studied her. “I’m not soft.”
She kept her hands steady on the crockery. It was all she could control.
“I keep what’s mine,” he said quite pleasantly. “That’s all. You’ll come to see it that way.”
Then he went to bed. He left her standing in the kitchen with the plates in her hands, the lamp guttering, and did not trouble to say goodnight.
She understood her position with a cold clearness that surprised her.
There was nobody to go to. That was the first fact, and she made herself look at it squarely.
She had no people. She had no money, not a dollar of her own, for the Wests had never paid her a cent.
There was no place for her to sleep but the loft over Nathan West’s kitchen.
If she walked out the gate tomorrow with her bundle, she would walk into a county that had called her bad stock for twelve years. It would take her in exactly nowhere.
And if it came to worse than watching, and she knew it would, who would she tell?
She turned that question over in the dark of the loft, and could not find an answer to it.
Not the minister, who had shaken Nathan’s hand at the graveside.
Not the sheriff, who had known Mr. West thirty years and Samantha never.
Not one of the good wives, with their feathered hats and their sidelong words.
She could see their faces as clearly as if they were standing in the loft.
The train-girl, saying such a thing about the young master of the West farm. Well. That sort would say anything.
Nobody would take her word. Not against his. She had known that in her bones since she was eight years old and a woman in a church pew had said gutter-bred.
She was a woman alone in a house with a man who had told her plainly what he meant to do. The whole county stood outside the gate, and would have called it her own doing.
Amos saw it too.
She knew he had, because now he was always somewhere near.
When she went to the well, the old man was mending harness in the barn door, where he could see the yard.
When she went to the hen house at dusk, he was there ahead of her, fussing slow with the latch.
Of an evening, if Nathan sat in the kitchen, Amos found reasons to come in.
Wood for the box. A question about the mare.
A cup of coffee he could have done without.
Nathan noticed. He could hardly fail to. He said nothing about it, but she saw him look at the old man as he looked at the whole place, pricing him. And she saw him find the price low.
“You’re underfoot lately, old man,” he said one night, when Amos had brought in an armload of wood the box did not need.
“Cold’s coming on.”
“It’s March.”
“March cold’s the worst kind,” Amos said. He knelt slowly and fed the stove a stick it did not want. He did not look at Nathan. Nor did he look at Samantha. He only stayed, on his knees by the stove, until Nathan tired of waiting and went up.
When the boots had gone overhead, the old man got up, one hand on the stove rail. It took him a while.
“You keep near the house,” he said, very low. “Daytime. Where folks on the road might see. And you don’t go in that barn after dark, not for anything. Not if the mare’s foaling. Not if the roof’s afire. You hear me?”
She heard him.
“I’ll be about,” Amos said. “Best I can.”
Best he could. She looked at him, bent nearly double. His hands shook now when he lifted a pail. His breath whistled going up the barn ladder. Sixty years old if he was a day, and likely more. He was setting himself between her and Nathan West like a hurdle set in front of a bull.
She loved him for it. It was the first time she had let herself think the word about anyone. It frightened her, because she knew he would not hold.
He could not hold. That was the plain arithmetic of it, and Samantha had always been able to do sums.
Amos was old, and Nathan was thirty. Amos slept in the barn, and Nathan slept overhead. Most of the day Amos could be near her, but not all of it, not every night, not forever.
Nathan was patient. She saw that clearly.
A man who had waited thirty years for a farm could wait a few weeks more for what came with it.
He was sure. There was no hurry in him because he did not need any.
The wall the old man had put up was thin, and Nathan had only to lean on it, a little at a time.
She gave it weeks. Not months. Weeks.
Somewhere in that time, if she wanted to walk off the West farm on her own two feet, she had to find a way. She did not know what way. She lay in the loft with her knees drawn up under the roof slope. She looked at the square of window no bigger than a Bible, and could not think of one.
But she had a name. She had her letters. And she had an old man who was doing his best.
It would have to be enough to start with. It was all she had ever had.