Chapter 4
It was Amos who brought her the door, and he brought it folded small inside his coat.
He found her in the glasshouse on a gray afternoon, a week after the burying, with her hands in the seed flats. Nathan had ridden to town. That was the only reason she was out there. She had kept to the house as the old man told her. Then the house began to feel like a box with the lid coming down.
Amos came in sideways through the low door, glanced once back across the yard, and drew a paper out of his coat.
“Come up from Kansas City,” he said. “Fellow at the feed store had it wrapping nails. I asked him for it. He didn’t ask why.”
It was a newspaper, or near enough to one.
It had been folded and refolded until the creases were soft as cloth.
Across the top, in fat black letters, it said The Matrimonial Times.
Below that ran columns of small close print, and Samantha, who could read now, saw what the columns were before Amos said a word.
Gentlemen seeking wives.
“There’s a lot of them,” the old man said. “Miners, mostly. Fellows with nothing but a claim and a hope. I wouldn’t send a dog to most of them.” His gnarled finger moved down the column, slow, and stopped. “That one.”
She bent to read it. The print was small, and the light was poor through the milky panes, but she made it out.
A rancher of Texas, of some standing, aged thirty-five, sought a steady and respectable wife for the management of his household.
He was of sober habits. He asked for a woman of good character, capable, sensible, not afraid of a quiet life.
Correspondence invited. A name followed, with a town she had never heard of, in a county she had never heard of. The state might have been the moon.
Ramsay Stuart.
She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, and the words did not change.
“Texas,” she said.
“Long way,” Amos agreed. “That’s the point of it.”
She looked up at him. He was watching her with those tired, kind eyes, and there was a look in his face she had not seen there before.
It was not hope, exactly. Amos had lived too long for that.
It was more like a man who has found a gate in a fence he thought ran on forever. He is not yet sure it opens.
“Steady and respectable,” Samantha said. Her voice was quiet. “He wants a respectable woman.”
“He wants a woman who can keep a house and hold her head up. I never met one could do the first better than you.” Amos folded the paper along its soft creases and put it into her hands.
“As for the second. Nobody down there knows what this county calls you, girl.
Nobody down there ever will, ‘less you tell them.”
She held the paper. It weighed nothing.
“Write to him,” the old man said. “Tonight, while he’s in town. Write it in that hand I taught you. And don’t you say one word about trains.”
She wrote that night by a candle end, in the loft. The paper was spread on the plank floor, with the last of the feed bills under her hand.
The candle was stolen. So was the ink, which she had made from soot and a little vinegar, as Amos had shown her once for a joke. The pen was a goose quill she had cut herself. It was a poor set of tools for the most important work she had ever done, and her hand shook when she dipped the quill.
Then she thought of the fingers pressing along her arm on the platform. The corner of the table. The way Nathan had smiled in the hall. Her hand stopped shaking.
Dear Sir, she wrote.
She told him she had seen his notice, and that she wished to answer it.
Her age was twenty, she wrote, unmarried, in good health.
She could cook, keep a house, put up stores, nurse the sick.
There was no work on a farm she had not turned her hand to.
Her habits were sober. A quiet life was what she wished for, a settled one, and she was not afraid of hard work or a plain home.
Nothing went down about her being beautiful. It was not a fact to write to a stranger. Nor did she write that she was clever, though she was. She let the letter show it instead, in the evenness of the hand and the plainness of the words. She hoped he was the kind of man who would notice.
And she did not write one word about trains. Or the Wests. Or a paper tag pinned with a bent brass pin. She said she was raised on an Iowa farm, which was true. Her people were gone, which was true. She was alone in the world and wished not to be. That was the truest line on the page.
At the bottom, she signed it Samantha Bree, and looked at the name in the candlelight before she folded the sheet.
Amos posted it in town on Saturday, in among the feed-store mail, and nobody asked why the old hired man was posting letters.
Then there was nothing to do but wait, keep near the house, and feel Nathan’s eyes.
The reply came in twelve days, which Amos said was quick.
He brought it to her behind the glasshouse as he had brought the almanacs, holding it low against his coat.
The envelope was good paper, thick and cream-colored, addressed in a square, careful hand.
Miss Samantha Bree, care of the West farm.
She had told the rancher to write her there, because there was nowhere else.
She had prayed every night since that Nathan would not be at the store on the day it came.
Nathan had not been. Amos had.
She opened it with her back to the milky glass and her heart going so hard she could feel it in her fingers.
It was plain. That was what she noticed first, and it steadied her. Ramsay Stuart did not write like a man selling a horse. He wrote like a man stating his business.
He thanked her for her letter, and he found it sensible.
He owned a cattle ranch in the Hill Country of Texas, a good spread in oak land, left him by his father two winters back.
His mother kept house there with him, and would go on doing so.
He was not a man of many words, he wrote, and he did not expect she would find him lively company.
But he could offer a sound roof and a decent life to a woman who wanted one. He would treat her fairly.
He asked her three questions. Whether she was a churchgoing woman. Whether she minded heat, for the Texas summers were hard. And whether she was quite certain, for he did not care to be trifled with.
That was all. He signed it R. Stuart, and under that, as if he had thought better of the shortness, Ramsay.
Samantha read it three times, as she had read the notice. Then she folded it and held it against her chest, under her crossed hands. She stood a moment behind the glasshouse with her eyes shut.
It was so plain. It was so decent. There was nothing in it that reached for her, nothing that priced her, nothing that smiled in a hallway. A reserved man of some standing, saying what he had and asking what she wanted. Nobody had ever asked her what she wanted.
And nowhere in it, not in one line, was there any notion of what she was.
To Ramsay Stuart of Texas, she was a sensible woman of twenty who wrote a good hand. That was all. That was everything. Standing there with the letter against her chest, she saw what she had never had in all her twenty years. She had stopped believing she ever would.
A chance to be nobody’s charity. Nobody’s marked girl. Nobody’s thing off a train.
Only Samantha Bree, who could keep a house.
She wrote back that night, and answered his three questions honestly. Yes. No. Yes.
The letters passed between them through the rest of March and into April.
There were only three of them each way. That was all the time allowed, and both of them seemed to know it.
His grew no longer, but they grew a little less stiff.
He wrote about the ranch, plainly, as a man describes his work to someone who might share it.
Live oaks and limestone. Cattle on the hills.
Spring water that ran cold even in August. His mother, he wrote, was particular.
She would want to see for herself what kind of woman he had chosen.
Samantha read that line twice and put it away to think about later.
She wrote about cooking, stores, the care of stock, and she made him laugh once, or thought she did.
He wrote back that he had read her remark on the subject of hogs to his foreman.
The foreman had said any woman who knew that much about hogs was worth the price of a ticket.
Samantha turned that over in the loft for a whole night, smiling into the dark.
Then, in the last week of April, the ticket came.
It was folded inside his last letter, with a page of instructions in the same square, careful hand.
A train south to St. Louis. Another to Texas.
The name of a Hill Country town. The day he would meet her at the depot with a wagon, and what he would be wearing so she would know him.
He had thought of all a stranger might need, as he seemed to think of all else. Slowly, thoroughly, without fuss.
The last line said: I will be there. R. Stuart.
Samantha sat in the loft with the ticket in her lap and did not move for a long time.
It was real. She turned the ticket over and read the printing on it.
Still real. In three weeks, she would climb onto a southbound train with a stranger’s name to hide behind.
At the other end of the rails, a whole life waited.
A life where nobody had ever heard of the West farm.
A life where a reserved man in good plain clothes would step forward on a platform and call her Miss Bree.
She slid the ticket and the letters deep inside her straw tick, where the feed bills already were. She smoothed the ticking flat over them. Then she lay down on top of it all, on top of her whole future. She stared at the roof slope an arm’s length above her face.
Three weeks.
It was Amos who told her she would not have three weeks.
He said it at the well, in the gray of the next morning, without looking at her, with his shaking hands on the rope.
“He knows something’s up.”
Samantha’s hands stilled on the pail.
“Don’t know what. But he feels it. Feels you slipping.” The old man drew up the bucket, slow, hand over hand. “He asked me last night who’s been writing to the place. I said nobody. He asked was I sure. I said I was.” He set the bucket on the curb. “He watched me a long while after that.”
She looked across the yard at the house. Nathan’s window was dark. He was still abed. But she felt it anyway, as she always felt it now, the weight of being watched even when nobody was looking.
He had tightened. She had felt that too, these last days, and told herself it was nothing. He was in the kitchen more. He came out to the yard when she went to the well. Twice he had gone to the loft ladder while she was in the house. He had stood at the foot of it, looked up, and come away.
“You go soon,” Amos said. “Sooner than that ticket says, if you can change it. And you go quiet. You hear me? You don’t pack a bundle where he can see. You don’t say goodbye to that mare. Just walk out like you’re going to the hen house, and keep going.”
“He’ll follow.”
“He’ll try.” The old man looked at her at last. His face was gray in the gray light, and very tired. “That’s why you go quiet. He’ll never let a thing worth what you’re worth just walk off this place, girl. Not if he sees it going. So he mustn’t see.”
She nodded. Her mouth was dry.
“Three weeks,” she said.
“Three days, if I had my way.” Amos picked up the pail and put it in her hands. “But it’s your ticket. Go on in now. Get the stove lit before he’s down.”
She went. Behind her, she heard him let the bucket back down the well, slow, hand over hand. Then he stood there a while in the gray, listening for the house.