Chapter Six
Dear Jonah,
I’m writing this from a kitchen table big enough to butcher a whole elk on, which I mention because, apparently, that is a thing people do out here.
Don’t ask.
Grace chewed the end of the pencil. Without Jonah here, she wouldn’t get scolded for it. The wood tasted like cedar and graphite, but stale, in that particular way a pencil that had lived in a drawer for who knew how long grew out of date.
Stripes of morning light filled the whole kitchen. The baby dozed in the dresser drawer near the stove, making those soft grunting sounds she made between naps, the ones that sat somewhere between a piglet rooting and an old man grumbling about the weather.
The house is solid. Built to last, like everything else on this property. The man who runs it has a particular way about him that I will get to shortly.
First, I gotta tell you about the mountains.
Jonah… You cannot imagine them. I tried three times to describe them in my head before sitting down to write this, and every version came up short. They go up and up, and the snow stays on top even now, and the whole sky turns pink behind them at sundown.
You’ll see for yourself when you come.
She tapped the pencil against the paper. How much to tell him? How much could she fit onto a sheet of writing paper and still leave room for the parts that mattered?
I have been here just over a week, and already I can tell you this much: the work suits me.
The house needed tending in the worst way. Four men living alone will do that to a place. I’ve scrubbed the kitchen floor twice since arriving, and it’s only now starting to let go of whatever they spilled on it over the past two years.
The pantry had things in it I could not identify, Jonah.
I threw out a jar of something that may have once been pickles but had turned a color God never intended food to be.
A smile pulled at her mouth. Jonah would get a kick out of that.
Also… There’s a baby.
She stopped writing.
In the drawer, the little one shifted, curling a fist up against her own cheek, and the fine pale hair on the top of her head caught the light like corn silk.
Ten days old, give or take, by Grace’s best reckoning.
Maybe a touch more. She’d gained weight since that first morning, filling out in the cheeks and the creases of her wrists, and her color had gone from angry red to warm peach that deepened to pink whenever she worked herself up for a cry.
Nobody in town had claimed her.
Mason and Thomas had ridden out twice, asking at every homestead and farm within a day’s ride, and come back empty-handed both times.
No missing child. No frantic mother searching the roads.
Just a baby in a basket with no note and no name, dropped at the fenceline like a parcel that couldn’t find its address.
Mason had wanted to name her, said she ought to have a name if she was staying a while, but Logan had forbidden it immediately. Said that, since she’d be staying here only temporarily, they could only call her the baby.
Someone just left the poor thing here. They’re looking for her people. Somebody will come forward eventually, I expect.
The pencil hovered over that last line.
Sure. Any day now. Some mother, some father, some relative would ride up to the gate and claim her and carry her off, and the dresser-drawer would sit empty by the stove, and the kitchen would go quiet in a way that made Grace’s stomach clench just thinking about it.
Because here stood the plain truth of the thing, the part she couldn’t write in a letter, she loved that baby already.
Loved her with a fierceness that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the way the baby grabbed a fistful of Grace’s collar when she nursed from the bottle and held on as if her whole tiny life depended on the grip.
Which, in a manner of speaking, it did.
She’s a good baby, Jonah. Sweet-tempered when she’s fed and dry. She’s got a grip on her that’d put a dock worker to shame. I think you’d like her.
That was the understatement of the century.
As for Logan Foster, he is... a man of routine.
He rises before dawn, goes to bed after dark, and fills every hour between with work.
Fences, livestock, the barn, the stable, and repairs on things that don’t look broken to my eye but apparently offend his standards.
I see him at breakfast, at supper, and, occasionally, when I collect his laundry from the hamper outside his door.
He is polite.
He eats what I put in front of him without complaint, which is more than I can say for his brother Thomas, who made a face at my cornbread last Tuesday that I will remember on my deathbed.
She grinned at the paper.
His youngest brother, Mason, is the one who wrote me.
He’s got a good heart and a face that makes him look about fifteen.
Their father, Rafe, sat me down the second evening and told me that his wife used to plant roses along the front porch railing and that if I had any inclination toward gardening, he’d appreciate it if I didn’t touch those beds because they were hers.
Then he patted my shoulder and went to bed.
I think he likes me, Jonah. In that gruff, roundabout way, certain men have of showing it where they can’t just come out and say a kind word without wrapping it in something practical first.
Write me back soon. Tell me you’re eating. Tell me you’re staying out of trouble.
All my love, Gracie
She folded the letter along crisp lines and slid it into the envelope she’d found in the hutch drawer, the one Logan kept stocked with writing supplies. All arranged by size, of course.
As Grace made her way through the front room, the baby stirred in the dresser drawer and let out a whimper that promised to grow into something bigger if ignored. Grace scooped her up one-handed, settling the baby against her shoulder, and pressed her lips to the warm crown of the baby’s head.
“Shh, shh, little bird. Just a fuss, that’s all. We’re all right.”
The baby burrowed into her neck and sighed.
Outside, Mason sat on the porch step, lacing his boots, hat already on and tipped back in that jaunty way of his that made him look more like a boy playing dress-up than a working ranch hand.
Thomas leaned against the porch post with a toothpick rolling between his lips, and Rafe hitched the wagon team in the yard.
“Mason.” Grace held out the letter. “Would you drop this at the post for me when you head to town?”
He tucked it into his shirt pocket and patted it flat. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And I need your wash. Yours and Thomas’s both. I’m doing laundry today, and I’d like to get through the lot of it before the sun moves off the clothesline.”
Mason jerked a thumb toward the house. “Pile’s by our door upstairs. Logan’s, too, if you want it.”
“Yeah, I’ll take it.”
“You, uh…” Mason stood up and brushed dust off the seat of his trousers. “You spent any time with him this week? Outside of meals and such?”
Heat crept along the back of Grace’s neck.
“He’s busy.”
“He’s always busy. Ain’t the same as bein’ unavailable.”
“I’m not about to go bother the man while he’s working, Mason. He’s got enough on his plate without me trailing around after him like a lost calf.”
Mason pulled his hat down and tugged the brim with both hands, adjusting it the way a man adjusted a hat when his mouth wanted to say something his brain told him to sit on. Over by the post, Thomas had stopped chewing his toothpick and glanced sideways at the two of them.
“Gracie.” Mason dropped his voice. “He ain’t gonna come to you. Ain’t how he’s built. Man could be on fire, and he’d just stand there organizin’ the flames by height before askin’ for a bucket of water. If you want to know him, you gotta go where he is.”
“And where’s that?”
“This mornin’? The north pasture. Fence work.” He started down the steps. “Bring him some water. He forgets to drink when he gets into a job.”
Thomas pushed off the post. “We headin’ out or we gonna stand around playin’ matchmaker all day?”
Grace chuckled. “You, hush.”
“Just askin’. Pa’s already got the wagon hitched, and he’s givin’ me that look.”
Sure enough, Rafe sat on the wagon bench with the reins in one hand and the kind of stare that could’ve hurried a glacier. Mason trotted down the steps and swung up beside Thomas on the tailgate, and, within a minute, the wagon rattled down the dirt track toward the main road.
Grace bounced the baby on her shoulder and surveyed the yard.
“All right, little bird. Laundry first.”
Getting water for the wash took four trips to the pump with the heavy copper kettle, and, by the second trip, her arms burned from the wrists to the shoulders.
Back in New York, she’d hauled water up three flights of stairs in a building where the pipes froze every winter, so the pump and the short walk to the stove should’ve counted as an improvement.
And it did, strictly speaking. But the altitude up here stole air right out of a body’s lungs, adding a breathless edge to every chore that made even simple tasks run longer.
She heated the water on the stove and scraped soap shavings into the washtub while the baby watched from the dresser drawer, gnawing on a knotted rag with the single-minded focus of someone who’d discovered the only important thing in the world.
Logan’s laundry told on the man the way a diary might have.
He’d folded every shirt before placing it in the hamper with the collar facing up.
Stacked every pair of trousers in order.
Even paired off his socks and tucked them together at the tops.
Mason’s laundry, by contrast, arrived in a ball.
Thomas’s came inside-out with a penny and two buttons loose in the pocket.
After wringing the whole lot, she rigged the sling Rafe had shown her, a length of soft cotton that wrapped around her torso and tied across the back, cradling the baby snug against her chest. The baby settled in with a grunt and grabbed a fistful of Grace’s collar.
Standard arrangement. The baby went where Grace went, and Grace’s collar bore the wrinkles to prove it.
Outside, she strung the first of the shirts along the clothesline and worked her way through the pile, pinning each piece with the wooden clips from the basket by the door.
She pinned Logan’s trousers by the waistband.
Then Mason’s. Then Thomas’s undershirts, which needed replacing badly enough that she made a mental note to mention it at supper before thinking better of it, because suggesting a grown man buy new undershirts after ten days of acquaintance seemed like the kind of thing that’d send Thomas into a dramatic spiral for which she lacked the energy.
With the last of the wash hung, she stepped back and let herself breathe.
Laundry on a line had always given her a particular satisfaction.
Even in New York, stringing the wash between the fire escape and the neighbor’s window, watching the sheets catch wind and billow out like sails.
Something about clean cloth in the open air.
Proof that a person had taken hold of something dirty and put it right.
The baby cooed against her chest.
“You agree? Good. Glad we see eye to eye on the important things.”
She turned to gather the wash basket, and that’s when she spotted it.
Along the south side of the porch, running the full length of the railing, a strip of earth about two feet wide hugged the foundation.
Rocks edged it on both sides, river stones, forming a border that curved out at the corners in a pattern too deliberate for nature.
In between those stones, a jungle of weeds had swallowed everything.
But underneath all that green tangle, if a person looked closely—if a person crouched down and parted the crabgrass and the thistle—the soil held a different color. Darker. Richer. Worked soil. Soil that someone who knew gardens had turned, fed, and tended.
His wife used to plant roses along the front porch railing.
Rafe’s words from that second evening circled back, and with them the gravel in his voice, the way he’d gripped the arm of his chair when he’d said it.
He’d told her not to touch the beds. But touching and tending amounted to different things, and, right now, those beds needed nurturing the way a child needed feeding.
The weeds had buried the roses Miriam Foster had planted here, and Grace had a thing or two to say about that.
She set the wash basket on the step and knelt.
The first weed came up with a satisfying rip, roots and all, trailing clumps of dark earth that crumbled between her fingers. She shook the dirt off, tossed the weed into the basket, which she’d now have to wash, but she’d take that trade, and reached for the next one. Then the next.
Pretty soon, she’d stopped thinking about anything except the rhythm of the work, grip and pull and shake, grip and pull and shake, and the smell of turned soil rising up around her like bread baking.
The baby slept through all of it.
The weeds gave up their secrets as she cleared them.
Beneath the crabgrass, a woody stem pushed up from the base of the railing post. Grace brushed the dirt from around its base and traced the stem upward to where new growth had started, pale green shoots reaching for sunlight through the canopy of weeds that had smothered everything around them.
A rose bush. Still alive.
Further down the bed, another survivor. And another. Three bushes total, half-strangled but stubborn, pushing up through two years of neglect with the kind of blind determination that only living things possess.
Grace sat back on her heels.
Sweat ran down the channel of her spine and soaked into her waistband. Dirt packed under every fingernail and worked into the creases of her knuckles, the good kind of dirt—garden dirt—soil that still held the promise of growing something.
She’d cleared half the bed already.
She leaned forward and tugged at a stubborn clump of thistle. The roots ran deep on this one, spreading through the soil in a web that held fast when she pulled. She shifted her grip, braced her knee, and yanked.
Someone cleared their throat behind her.