Chapter 14
It is hard to keep a boy at arm’s length when he sleeps in your barn and dogs your heels. Ramsay Stuart found it harder than he had expected.
He had not meant to find it hard at all.
The boy was his mother’s affair. She had wanted hands for the yard, and she had got them.
It was for her to say what became of them.
Ramsay had a ranch to run. There were cattle on ten thousand acres, a dozen men to keep at their work, and no room in his day for a Society child.
But the child was in his day whether he had room or not.
At first light, when Ramsay went to saddle up, the boy was in the barn.
He was mucking the stall next over with a fork too long for him.
At the spring, when Ramsay watered his horse, there he was.
At dusk he was in the yard, stacking wood, with his thin arms going like a machine and his face shut.
Everywhere Ramsay turned on his own place, there was a small hard-eyed shape at the edge of his sight, working, watching, saying nothing.
And he was slight, was the thing. He was ten and looked eight. One morning, Ramsay watched him try to lift a full pail. He failed. He set his jaw and tried again. It went in somewhere Ramsay had not known was open.
He said nothing about it. Talk was not in him. But the next morning he came into the barn and found the boy at the fork again. He stood a while.
“You’re holding that wrong.”
Harry stopped. He did not turn round. His shoulders came up an inch, as they did when anybody spoke to him.
“Hands farther apart. Low one near the tines. Like this.” Ramsay took the fork out of his hands without asking and showed him. “You’re working twice as hard as you need to. Try it.”
The boy took the fork back. He tried it. It went easier. Both of them saw it go easier. Neither of them said so.
Ramsay went and saddled his horse. That was all. That was the beginning of it.
After that he could not seem to stop.
He told himself it was only sense. A boy who worked in the yard ought to know how to work. A boy who could not lift a pail was no use to anyone. A boy who could was some use. There was no harm in showing him. It was not kindness. It was only what any man would do with a green hand.
So he showed him. How to split a log along the grain instead of against it. How to carry two pails on a yoke, which the boy had never seen. How to walk up to a horse so it did not shy. Where to put his hand.
That was where it began to be more than sense, though Ramsay did not see it yet.
There was a pony in the far corral, a stocky little dun, old and steady, that nobody had ridden in years. It had been left to graze and grow fat ever since. Nobody rode it. One evening Ramsay caught himself looking at it, then at the boy at the woodpile, and putting the two together in his head.
He did not know why he did it. He told himself he did not.
“You ever sat a horse?” he asked the next morning.
Harry looked at him with those old, wary eyes. “No, sir.”
“Come on, then.”
He set him on the dun. The boy sat it like a sack of meal, white-knuckled, braced for the ground.
Ramsay walked at its head with the lead rope, round the corral, once, twice, saying nothing.
On the third time around, he looked up. Harry’s hands had loosened on the mane a little.
His face had come open, just for a moment, the way a fist comes open when the fight goes out of it.
Then the boy saw him looking, and shut it again.
But it had been open. Ramsay had seen it.
He set him a horse after that. The dun, every evening, when the wood was stacked. He showed him how to sit. How to hold the reins so the pony’s mouth did not suffer. How to fall, which was the first lesson anybody ought to learn. In the second week, he put a rope in his hands and showed him a loop.
Much was expected. Ramsay did not soften it. When the boy went wrong, Ramsay said so, flat, and made him do it again. When he did it right, Ramsay said nothing, or grunted, which from him was a good deal.
And the boy bloomed under it. That was what Ramsay had not looked for.
Not at once. Not so anyone would notice, unless they were watching close.
But he came to the corral of an evening a little quicker than he went to the woodpile.
He sat the dun a little straighter. Once, the loop settled clean over the snubbing post on the first throw.
He made a sound that was nearly a laugh, and looked at Ramsay.
Ramsay nodded once. The boy went red to the ears and threw again.
A man’s steady expectation is its own kind of faith.
Ramsay did not know that in words. But he knew that the boy stood differently when he was expected to do a job well.
More often than not, he did it well. He was quick, quick past what Ramsay had thought a Society boy could be.
A rope that had taken Ramsay a summer, he learned in a fortnight.
And something in Ramsay stirred, uneasily, and would not lie down.
He had been raised to know what he saw when he looked at such a boy.
Bad stock. Gutter blood. A rattlesnake in a coat.
He had never had cause to doubt it, because he had never had cause to look.
Now every evening he looked at a boy sitting a dun pony with his thin back straight and his tongue between his teeth.
He could not for the life of him see it.
Looking for it did no good. He looked hard.
What he saw was a boy who was quick, stubborn, not to be beaten by a rope.
A boy who did not lie. Ramsay had caught him at a broken cinch once, and the boy had said, “I did that,” before he was asked.
A boy who fed the dun a heel of his own bread when he thought nobody was by.
What his father had taught him to see was not there. It troubled him, at night, in the front parlor under the likeness. He could not have explained it to anyone, and did not try.
Samantha watched them from the porch.
She had not meant to. She had meant to keep her eyes on her mending. But the corral was in plain sight from the porch step. Every evening now, there was a man in it and a boy on a pony.
Ramsay walked the dun around with the lead rope, saying nothing. He took the boy’s hands and set them right on the reins, gentle, as he had set them on the fork. Harry’s face came open, shut, came open again, a little longer each time.
It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
And her heart turned clean over in her chest. It did not turn back.
She sat on the porch step with the mending in her lap, and her needle stopped. She watched the man she was going to marry teach a marked boy to sit a horse, and knew she was lost.
Then she looked up, and Ramsay was looking at her.
He was standing at the corral rail with one hand on the top bar. The boy was on the dun behind him, walking it around alone now. And Ramsay had turned, at some point she had not seen, and was watching her watch them across the whole width of the yard.
She should have looked away. Every rule she had ever learned said so. A bride on approval did not sit on the porch with her whole heart in her face and let a man see it.
But she did not look away.
Neither did he.
Across the yard they looked at each other, in the gold light, with the swallows going over and a boy on a pony between them. Neither of them moved. She saw his face change. Into it came the look she had seen once before, by the wagon wheel. He did not put it away this time. He let her see it.
Then Harry spoke from the corral. Ramsay turned back, and the moment was gone. But it had been there. They both knew it had been there.
Over the boy’s head, that was how it happened.
In the shared work of feeding him, mending for him, worrying at him. In the look across the yard, and the ones that came after it, that neither of them spoke of.
Ramsay would come in from the corral and say the boy had a seat on him. Samantha would say the boy had eaten two plates. And they would stand a moment in the kitchen doorway with the lamp between them, saying nothing more. It would be as if they had said everything.
The three of them were becoming a thing that had no name.
Not a family. Nobody on the place would have called it that, and Samantha herself would not have dared, even in the dark. A family did not have a boy in a tack room, a bride on approval, a mother who kept the keys.
But it was a family in all but law, growing up in a house that would have forbidden it if the house had known. Man, woman, marked boy. Over the boy’s head, without noticing, they had made it.
Samantha let herself forget.
Not for good. She could not do that. But for hours at a time, in the long gold evenings of that summer, she let herself forget what she was.
On the porch step, she watched a man and a boy in a corral.
Inside, she set two plates on the table, and one under a cloth.
In the doorway, with the lamp between her and Ramsay Stuart, she did not think of trains, or Iowa, or letters.
For those hours she was happier than the girl off the train had ever dreamed she might be allowed to be.
She had not known there was so much happiness in the world. She held it in both hands, in the warm dusk, with the roses smelling sweet on the porch posts.
And she did not let herself think in those hours that a thing held in both hands is a thing that can be taken.