Chapter 8
Eleanor Stuart had not kept the standing of the Stuart name for forty years by trusting beautiful strangers. She did not intend to begin now.
She wrote the letters on a still, hot afternoon, before Miss Bree had been a fortnight in the house.
She sat at the desk in the front parlor with the door shut.
Nobody saw her do it. Samantha was in the kitchen.
Ramsay was out on the range with the hands.
The house had the deep hush of a Texas noon, when even the flies are too hot to move.
There were two letters. She wrote them in her firm upright hand, and she chose her words with care.
Both went north and east, to Iowa. One was addressed to the clerk of the county court, in the county Samantha had named. The other went to the postmaster of the nearest town, to be handed on to whatever minister had buried the Wests. It was a name Eleanor had got by the simplest means in the world.
She had asked.
“What was the name of the family who raised you, Miss Bree?” she had said one evening, over the mending. She asked it as lightly as she might have asked the time.
“West, ma’am.”
“West. And the nearest town?”
Samantha had told her. She had had no reason not to. A woman with no past that she would speak of could not refuse to name the one piece of it she admitted to. Eleanor had nodded and gone on with her stitch. The name was filed away with all the rest.
Now she wrote it at the head of a sheet of good cream paper.
She asked, in the most correct terms, for any particulars that might be had of the late Mr. and Mrs. West. She wished, she wrote, to make some inquiry after a young woman lately of their household.
A matter of family concern. Any particulars of the young woman’s history and character would be gratefully received.
She sealed the two letters with her husband’s seal and rang for the hired girl. They went to town with the afternoon’s post.
Then she sat a while at the desk with her hands folded, looking at the shut door.
The parlor was cool and dim behind its drawn blinds. Her husband’s likeness looked down from over the mantel, hard-jawed, unsmiling, the man who had built all this out of nothing. He had never trusted a stranger in his life. He had told her so, often, and been proved right more often than not.
She did not think of it as cruelty. It was not.
A young woman had come from nowhere with nothing, and was to carry the Stuart name.
That was all. A woman who had nothing to hide would have nothing to fear from a few letters.
And if she had something to hide, then it was better known now, before the church, than found out after.
That was only sense. Eleanor had built her whole life on sense, and had never yet found it fail her.
Samantha knew nothing of the letters, and the house went on around her.
She had the run of it now, or as near as made no difference.
Eleanor still kept the keys, but it was Samantha who knew what was in the pantry and how much flour was left.
She was up before the light. Before the hired girl came, she had the stove going, the bread rising, the coffee on for the hands.
Nobody had told her to do it. Nobody had needed to.
And little by little, the reserved master of the house began to thaw toward her. It happened in the long warm days of those first weeks and the sixth.
It began with a roast.
She had put it in too early on a Sunday, because Eleanor wished dinner at one.
Ramsay had said at breakfast that he might be late in from the far pasture.
So she had held it, and held it. When he came in at last with dust to the knees, the outside of the beef was the color of a saddle.
She carved it anyway. There was nothing else to do.
Ramsay took a bite. He chewed a while.
“Well,” he said. “That’s a well-traveled piece of beef.”
Eleanor’s mouth pressed thin. Samantha felt her face go hot to the hairline. She opened her mouth to say she was sorry. Then she saw that he was looking at her across the table with the corner of his mouth turned up. It was the first time she had seen it turn up all the way.
“Been all the way to Kansas and back, by the taste,” he said. “I’ve had worse off a chuck wagon. Considerably worse. Pass the gravy, Mother, and we’ll see if it can’t be brought back to life.”
She laughed. She had not meant to. It came out of her before she could stop it. Ramsay’s smile widened. Eleanor looked from one of them to the other and said nothing.
After that, it was easier.
Not easy. He was not an easy man. But he began, in small ways, to make room for her in his day.
He said good morning now when he came into the kitchen, and looked at her when he said it.
He asked, at supper, what she thought of the heat, or the hired girl, or the price the store was asking for coffee.
When she said what she thought, he listened.
It was not much. It was more than anyone had done in twelve years.
She found herself listening for his step on the porch of an evening. Once, she found herself at the window, watching him ride in with the hands, tall and easy in the saddle. She turned away quickly before anyone could see her do it. It was foolishness. She knew it was. She could not seem to stop.
Then one evening, she found a book on the kitchen table.
It had not been there when she went out to the hen house.
When she came back, it was there, square in the middle of the scrubbed boards.
A bit of paper was folded in it to mark a place.
A book of poems, old and worn soft at the corners.
She opened it at the marker. Somebody had underlined a line, long ago, in faded pencil.
She looked up. The kitchen was empty. Through the window she could see Ramsay crossing the yard toward the barn, not looking back.
Once, in a letter, she had told him that she liked to read when she could get a book. She had not thought he would remember. Standing in the kitchen with the poems in her hands, she felt something turn over in her chest. It was slow and warm. She had no name for it.
It was regard. She had never been regarded, and she did not know what to do with it. So she did what she knew how to do. She took the book upstairs and read the underlined line four times by lamplight. Sleep was slow to come after.
But there was another side to him, and it showed the same week.
It showed on the porch, in the evening, when a neighbor had ridden over about a bull. The neighbor was a lean, sour man with a hired hand who had lately run off with a saddle, and he was full of it. Samantha brought out the coffee and stood a moment in the door with the tray.
“Should have known better than to take him on,” the neighbor said. “Fellow’s father was hung in Missouri. Everybody knew it.”
“Then you knew it too,” Ramsay said mildly.
“I did. Thought I’d give the boy a chance.”
“That was your mistake.” Ramsay took his coffee from the tray without looking round. “Blood tells. My father used to say you can’t get good stock out of bad, not in cattle and not in men. It runs true. A man wants to remember that before he hires.”
“Your father was a hard man.”
“He was a right one.” Ramsay drank. “You can’t trust bad stock. That’s not hardness. That’s only sense.”
The neighbor grunted and agreed. It was the sort of thing men agreed on. Samantha set the tray down on the porch rail, and her hands did not shake, because she did not let them.
Blood tells. You can’t trust bad stock. It runs true in men as in cattle.
She had heard the words before, in the exact voice the county used for the weather. She had learned to hold her face still over them so long ago that she could not remember learning it.
It was still now.
He did not know. That was what she made herself understand, standing on the porch in the warm dusk with the coffee steaming.
He was not looking at her when he said it.
He was not thinking of her. What he said was what his father had said.
He said it as a man repeats words he has never had cause to turn over and look at the underside of.
It was plain fact to him, like the price of coffee.
It was not aimed. But it landed all the same, exactly where the county had always aimed it, and she felt it go in.
There were other times, that week and the next.
A word about the new hand, whose people nobody knew, and who wanted watching.
A remark at supper about a family up the valley whose eldest had gone to the bad.
You could have seen it coming, if you’d looked at the father.
Never much. Never unkind, exactly. Only certain, with the flat easy certainty of a man repeating what he had been raised on and never thought to question.
Each time, Samantha held her face still. Each time she understood a little more precisely what the man she was coming to like believed about women like herself.
Not women like herself. Herself. There was no like about it.
She thought about it lying awake in the blue room, with the window open on the valley and the smell of cedar coming in.
He would never know. That was the point of it.
She had come all this way so that he would never know.
She was Miss Bree, who wrote a fine hand and cooked a good roast. In a month or two she would be Mrs. Stuart.
There was no reason on God’s earth why anyone in Texas should ever hear the words ‘off the train’ spoken about her again.
She could keep his house, bear his children, grow old on the porch with the roses, and never once let it slip. It did not matter what he thought about bad stock, because he would never have cause to think it about her. What a man did not know could not come between them. It was only sense.
And she did not let herself hear how thin the words sounded.
Said over and over in a separate room at the end of a long hall, to a ceiling too high to touch.
She had learned to hold her face still. She had not learned to make her heart believe what her face said.
That was harder, and she lay awake a long while trying.