Chapter 17
Agolden stretch followed. Samantha would remember it afterward the way a person remembers a room they were happy in, every corner of it lit.
It was high summer now. The heat came down on the oak country like a lid.
The creek ran low and clear over the limestone.
Through the middle of the day, the cattle stood in the shade of the live oaks and did not move.
Mornings were the only cool hours. Samantha was up in them, with the stove going.
Harry was at the wood. Ramsay came in from the barn with the light behind him.
Then the sun climbed. The whole valley went white and still until evening.
The evenings were theirs.
Nobody had said so. It had only come to be.
When the heat broke, and the swallows came out, Ramsay went to the corral.
Harry went with him. Samantha took her mending to the porch step.
It was as regular as the bell for supper.
The three of them, easy together in the gold light, the roses smelling sweet, the dun walking round and round.
Harry was unfolding. That was the only word she had for it.
Every day a little more of the boy came out from behind the door he had kept shut so long.
He talked now. Not much, and not to Eleanor, but he talked.
He asked Ramsay how a cow knew her own calf out of two hundred. He asked Samantha why bread rose.
One evening, watching a hawk turn over the valley, he said he had never seen the sky in New York. Only pieces of it, between the buildings. He had not known it was so big. Then he went red, as if he had said too much, and looked at his boots.
He was quick. He was funny when he forgot to be careful.
One evening, he said a word about the foreman’s mustache that made Ramsay put his head down on the corral rail and shake.
Samantha laughed on the porch until she had to wipe her eyes.
Harry looked from one of them to the other with his mouth open.
He seemed not to have known he could do that to grown people.
Then he grinned. It was the first time she had seen him grin. It changed his whole face.
Her secret he kept. He never let it show. But sometimes, across the yard, he would look at her. She would look at him. There it was between them. Two of us. We know.
The wedding was set at last, for three weeks’ time.
Ramsay set it. He said so at supper, plainly, as he said all else, with his eyes on his plate and his jaw set. He had spoken to the preacher. The banns would be read from Sunday. Three weeks. Then the church in town. Miss Bree would be Mrs. Stuart, and there was an end of it.
Eleanor set down her fork.
Samantha watched her look for the reason.
The gray eyes went over her son, over herself, and back, hunting for the one objection that would hold.
It did not come. There was nothing left to say.
The county thought the world of the bride.
The house ran like a clock. Her son was of age.
The ranch was his. He had waited the twelvemonth’s worth of courtship in the space of a summer, and had plainly no intention of waiting more.
“Three weeks,” Eleanor said at last. Her voice was even. “Very well. I shall speak to the wives about a gown.”
That was all. She went back to her supper. But Samantha felt the look rest on her a moment longer, over the rim of the cup. The old woman had not stopped hunting. She had only run out of places to look.
Ramsay spoke his heart on a warm evening in the second week, and he did it as awkwardly as ever a man did.
They were on the porch. Harry had gone to the tack room.
Eleanor had gone up. The valley lay blue below them, with the first stars coming out over the hills, and the whippoorwill starting down by the water.
Ramsay had been sitting on the top step some time, saying nothing.
He turned his hat in his hands, as he had turned it on the platform the first day.
Then he set the hat down.
“I ought to say a thing,” he said. “Before the church. I have been trying to work out how, and I can’t, so I’ll just say it.”
She waited. Her heart had begun to go, slow and hard.
“When I sent for a wife, I sent for a sensible woman. That’s what I wrote.
Somebody for the house, to give the place an heir, to carry the name.
I didn’t look for anything past that. I didn’t think there was anything past that.
My father married my mother because her people had land next to his.
It was a good match. They did well enough.
I thought that was how it was done.” He looked out at the valley.
“I didn’t expect to want a wife. I want you to know that. I expected to have one.”
“I know,” she said. Her voice was small.
“Well.” He was quiet a moment. Then he turned his head and looked at her, full on, in the last of the light.
There was nothing held back in his face.
“I was wrong. I find I don’t want a wife.
I want you. Only you. There’s no sense in it.
I have tried to find some, and there isn’t any.
It’s only that when you’re in the kitchen the house is a different house.
When you’re not, it’s the one I grew up in.
I don’t know how to say it better than that. ”
He looked out at the dark valley again.
“I’m not a man who says things. But I wanted it said, plainly, before the church, so you’d know what you were getting. Not a bargain. Not the sensible match.” He stopped. “Me.”
She could not speak.
On the porch step she sat, in the blue dusk, with her hands in her lap. She looked at the man beside her, and could not say a single word. Every board she had ever nailed up around her heart lay flat in the dust of the yard. Behind them was a girl off a train who had never been told she was wanted.
Wanted. Not needed. Not useful. Not a rare find, or a credit to the place, or strong enough. Wanted, for herself, by a quiet man who had sat an hour on a step to find the words.
He was watching her. She saw the uncertainty come into his face, because she had not answered.
So she leaned across the little space between them. She put her hand against his hard jaw, and let him kiss her.
It was not a practiced kiss. He was not a practiced man. It was careful, slow. It asked before it took, as his hand had asked when he helped her into the wagon. When it was done, he did not let her go at once. He rested his forehead against hers a moment, in the dark, and she felt him breathe.
“Well,” he said again, very low. “That’s said, then.”
And she let herself hope.
She had not known, until that moment, how long it had been since she had let herself.
Not since a small vow made in the dark of the loft.
She had planned, worked, made herself needed.
None of that was hope. Hope was sitting on a porch step with a man’s forehead against yours and thinking, this.
This might be mine. This might be let to stay.
Happier than she had ever been, that was what she was. And more afraid than she had ever been. The two came together, and she could not have said where one left off.
Because happiness could be taken. She had learned that at eight, on a platform. And now she held this. The man. The boy. Porch and roses. Every night she lay awake in the blue room and prayed.
Not for it to last. She did not dare pray for that. Only for the past to stay buried a little longer. Long enough. Enough for the church, the ring, the name. Enough for her to simply have this, once, before whatever was coming came.
She half resolved to tell him.
It came to her in the good hours, on the porch, with his shoulder against hers.
She would tell him herself. Not be found out.
Tell him, on her own terms, before the church, as he had told her.
Plainly. I came off a train. She would say it.
He would hear it. Then he would know what he was getting, as he had put it, and he could choose.
And if he chose her anyway, knowing, then she would be known and chosen both.
There would be nothing in the world left to fear.
She wanted that. She wanted it so badly it hurt her chest.
And every time she came to it, she looked at him, and lost her nerve.
Not because he was hard. He was not hard, on the porch, in the evenings.
But she remembered the flat quiet voice on other evenings, saying blood tells.
He had begun to look at Harry and not see it.
Begun. He had not finished. And she would think, tomorrow.
When he has looked at the boy one more evening.
When the church is a little nearer and the ground a little surer.
Then another golden day would come, easy, warm, full of the three of them. It would talk her out of it. Because how could she break what was so nearly whole? How could she take a day like this one and put a train in the middle of it?
So she did not. Not that day. Not the next. She let the days go by, one gold day after another, and told herself there was time.
There was not time.
Far to the north the letter had left Iowa. Across Missouri it had gone in a mail sack. It had lain a night in a depot in the red country, been sorted, sent on. It was addressed to Mrs. Eleanor Stuart at the Stuart ranch, in the Hill Country of Texas.
All of it was in it. The train, the tag, the West farm. And the ugly talk from the courthouse that the minister could not vouch for.
It was on the last leg now. A day. Two at most.
And on the porch, in the blue dusk, Samantha leaned her head against Ramsay Stuart’s shoulder and watched the stars come out over the hills. Harry’s lamp showed in the tack room door. The whippoorwill called. She let herself think there was time.
The letter came south at the pace of a train, and did not stop for anyone.