Chapter Eight
Mason threw the oat bucket wrong.
Not wrong in any way that’d matter to a normal person, sure.
The oats still landed in the trough. The horse still ate them.
But the throw came from the side instead of straight on, which meant half the grain scattered across the stable floor, where it’d get stomped into the dirt and wasted, and Logan had explained this particular point maybe six hundred times since Mason turned old enough to hold a bucket.
“From the front, Mason. How many times we gotta go over this?”
“It’s oats, Logan. The horse don’t care which direction they come from.”
“The horse don’t care, but I care, because that’s good grain sittin’ in the dirt now, and grain costs money, and money don’t grow on the cottonwood down by the creek, no matter how hard you wish on it.”
Thomas, over in the next stall, snorted into the mane of the bay mare he’d been brushing. Or supposedly brushing. From what Logan could tell, Thomas had spent more time leaning against the mare’s flank, staring at the ceiling, than actually running the brush over anything.
“Thomas, you gonna groom that horse or you gonna take a nap on her?”
“I’m groomin’. A man can’t take a breath between strokes?”
“A breath, sure. You’ve taken about forty.”
“Well, maybe if somebody wasn’t barkin’ orders every ten seconds, a fella could settle into a rhythm.”
Logan grabbed the pitchfork and drove it into the hay bale harder than strictly necessary.
Fine.
Let them do it sloppily. Let the oats rot in the dirt, and the mare go half-brushed, and the whole job slide into the kind of half-done shambles that’d make Pa shake his head if he could still get out to the stable regular.
Except Logan couldn’t let it slide.
That went against every working principle he’d built this ranch on, and so he pulled the pitchfork free and went back to spreading hay in the box stall with the exact coverage pattern he’d worked out three years ago when he took over stable duties from Pa.
But the hay landed crooked because his hands kept doing one thing while his mind circled back to something else entirely.
To last night, specifically. To Grace coming down those stairs with the baby on her hip and lamp-glow on her face, sitting at the kitchen table while he cut her a slice of bread, and that look she’d tossed him right before she sat down.
Quick as a bird turning its head. Gone before he could read it.
What had that been?
Because women didn’t just look at a man like that without it meaning something.
Or maybe they did. What did he know about women?
His entire experience with the prettier gender boiled down to Ma, who’d been a saint, and old Mrs. Hackett at the general store, who overcharged for salt pork and smelled like camphor. So, not exactly a broad sample.
He jabbed the pitchfork into the bale again and pulled out a wedge of hay that crumbled apart before it reached the stall floor.
“Hey, Logan.” Mason appeared at the stall gate, leaning over it with both elbows hooked on the top rail. “You alright? You just put hay in the water trough.”
Logan looked down. Sure enough, a clump of timothy grass floated in the trough, already waterlogging.
He fished it out and flung it into the stall.
“You’re all over the place today.” Mason tilted his head in that puppyish way of his, which, at nineteen, he really ought to have grown out of by now. “What’s eatin’ you?”
“Nothin’s eatin’ me.”
“Somethin’ is. You ain’t corrected my bucket technique in a full five minutes. That’s gotta be a record.”
From the next stall, Thomas laughed.
But the question had opened a door, and once a door like that cracked, the whole thing tended to swing wide whether you pushed it or not. So, instead of shutting it, which he should’ve done, which any sensible man would’ve done, he planted the pitchfork in the dirt and turned toward Mason.
“You two’ve been talkin’ with Grace. More than I have.”
Mason’s eyebrows climbed. “Well, yeah. On account of you avoidin’ her like she’s got the pox.”
“I ain’t avoidin’ her. I’m workin’.”
“You’re always workin’.” Thomas shook his head. “That’s the whole problem.”
Then he drifted over from the next stall with the brush still in one hand because, apparently, the prospect of Logan asking about Grace ranked above grooming duties, which proved Logan’s point about his work ethic, but he let it go.
“What d’you wanna know?”
Everything.
Where she grew up, exactly, not just the general vicinity.
What kind of songs she hummed to the baby when she put her down at night, because the melody drifted through the floorboards into his room below.
Whether she liked coffee or tea in the mornings.
What made her laugh, really laugh, the kind that came from the belly and made a person’s whole face change.
“She say anything about... I dunno. How she’s settlin’ in?”
Mason and Thomas exchanged a glance.
“She likes it here.” Mason picked a piece of hay off the gate rail. “Told me the air makes her dizzy sometimes, but she don’t mind it. Said she’s never seen so many stars. Oh, and she thinks Thomas is lazy.”
“She did not say that,” Thomas said.
“She implied it. Heavily.”
“That ain’t the same as—”
“What about the baby?” Logan stroked his chin. “Does she talk about the baby much?”
“All the time.” Mason softened his voice. “Yesterday, she spent an hour sewin’ a bonnet out of an old flour sack because she said the baby needed somethin’ to keep the sun off her face while they sit outside.”
A flour sack bonnet. For a baby who still fit inside a dresser drawer.
Logan picked up the pitchfork, set it against the wall, and picked it up again. Put it back. His hands needed something to do, but nothing in this stable needed doing badly enough to justify staying.
“Go on, then.” Thomas waved him off. “Git.”
“I ain’t finished here.”
“Yeah, you are. You been standin’ in that stall pilin’ hay on top of hay for ten minutes. The horse can barely see over it.”
Logan looked at the stall. He’d overfilled it by at least double. The hay mounded up against the back wall in a ridge tall enough to hide a calf behind.
“Mason and I’ll finish up. Go home. Talk to your wife.”
The word wife still snagged on him every time someone used it.
“You sure you can handle the rest without turnin’ the whole stable into a barn fire?”
“Logan.” Thomas pointed toward the door. “Go.”
He went. The walk back from the stable to the house took about four minutes at a normal pace, but he covered it in two because the downhill slope worked in his favor and also because his legs had apparently decided to move faster than his pride would’ve preferred.
Halfway down the path, he caught the sound of something that stopped him in the middle of a stride.
Grace. Singing. Not the lullaby she used at night, the soft one that drifted through the floorboards. This one bounced, pitched high and silly, with words he couldn’t quite make out until he rounded the corner of the woodshed, and the porch came into view.
“—and the little frog said ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, and he jumped right in the muuuuud!”
She knelt in the flower beds with her sleeves rolled to the elbows and Ma’s leather gardening gloves on—the ones with the yellow stitching. The roses had gotten their second weeding since yesterday, and the dark soil around them looked turned and loose.
But the baby lay in the dirt about two feet from Grace, on her back on what looked like a folded piece of sacking, wearing the flour sack bonnet Mason had mentioned.
She lay still in the way newborns did. Not asleep, just unsure how to move around in the world yet.
Her fingers drifted open and closed against nothing.
Her head had rolled to one side, and her lips moved faintly, rooting at the air and at the edge of her bonnet, where it touched her cheek.
On the porch, Pa sat in his chair.
His whittling knife rested in one hand, and a half-carved something or other rested in the other, but he’d stopped working. Just watched the two of them in the garden with an expression Logan hadn’t seen on the old man’s face in a long time.
Then Pa’s gaze shifted and found Logan standing by the woodshed like some fool who’d forgotten how his own legs worked.
Pa tipped his chin toward Grace.
Logan crossed the yard.
Grace looked up as his shadow fell across the flower bed. A smudge of dirt ran along her jaw, and the sun caught the copper in her freckles, and the collar of her dress had gone crooked from the baby grabbing at it all day.
“You done with chores already?”
“Finished up in the stable.”
“Your brothers still breathin’?”
“Mostly.”
She smiled, and it spread slowly across her face, starting at one corner of her mouth and taking its time reaching the other.
That rearranging in his chest happened again.
It was more obvious now, more deliberate, like whatever piece of furniture had been moving around in that locked room had finally found its spot and settled.
“Well,” she nodded at the ground beside her. “You gonna stand there blockin’ my light or you gonna make yourself useful?”
He dropped to his knees next to her and picked up the hand trowel she’d set beside the watering can.
The work came easy now after yesterday’s practice, turning the soil around the rose bases, breaking up the clumps, and pulling the small weeds that had already started creeping back in, because weeds up here grew like they had a personal vendetta against you.
Between them, the baby babbled at the soil and slapped both palms flat against it, sending up little puffs of dust that made her sneeze.
“She loves bein’ outside.” Grace leaned over and wiped the baby’s chin with her thumb. “Inside, she fusses. Out here, she’s happy as a clam at high tide.”
“She’s lucked into a good Ma, I reckon.”
The words just came out. Plain and easy, like breathing. He hadn’t meant to say Ma. He’d meant to say something neutral, something practical, something that kept things in the territory of business arrangement and no complications.
Grace went still for just a second. Then she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and cleared her throat.
“Here.” She reached over and scooped the baby up out of the dirt pile, bonnet and all, and plopped the baby into Logan’s lap. “Hold her facin’ out. Like she’s sittin’ in a chair.”
“I know how to—”
“You know how to hold her against your chest. That’s naptime hold. This here’s playtime hold. Different job, different grip.”
She repositioned his arms, so the baby sat upright in his lap with her back against his stomach, and then she pressed his hand flat against the baby’s belly. She had his other hand supporting the baby’s head.
“There. She can see the world from up here. And keep your hand firm on her middle so she’s got somethin’ to lean on. She can’t sit up proper on her own yet, but she wants to look around.”
The baby couldn’t see very far yet, but she stared at the colors and shapes around her—the rose bush, the porch, and a bird crossing the yard.
“Now.” Grace held out her index finger above the baby’s loosely curled hand. “Put your finger in her palm.”
He hesitated, then extended one finger and touched it gently to the baby’s open hand. The baby’s fingers closed around it immediately, all four of them, and the thumb, clamping down with a grip that seemed impossible for something so small.
Logan went still.
“She’s not going to break,” Grace said. “And she’s not letting go either. Try pulling your hand back.”
He did, gently, and the baby held on.
“That’s not her choosing to do that. She can’t help it. You touch her palm, she grips. That’s all she knows right now.” She paused. “But she knows it very well.”
Logan looked down at his finger locked in the baby’s fist.
“She’ll let it go eventually, don’t worry,” Grace said.
The baby tipped her head back against his chest and looked straight up at him. Upside down from this angle, all round cheeks and those big eyes catching the afternoon light.
On the porch, Pa picked up his whittling knife and went back to carving.
“You know what?” Grace leaned back on her heels and surveyed the flower bed. “I think that last rose bush on the end might actually bloom this year. The buds are startin’ to swell.”
Logan looked at the bush. The baby still held his thumb.
“Yeah,” he smiled. “I reckon it might.”