CHAPTER SIX
Supper at Mrs. Pruitt's boarding house, Margaret came to learn over her first fortnight in Junction City, was less a meal than an institution—a nightly gathering that drew together whatever collection of boarders, regulars, and outright strangers happened to be passing through, all seated at the same long table and expected, by unspoken but rigidly enforced house custom, to be sociable about it.
"I'll not have silent suppers in my house," Mrs. Pruitt announced on Margaret's third evening, apropos of nothing in particular, while ladling stew into a bowl with the brisk efficiency of long practice.
"A silent table's a lonely table, and I've had enough of lonely in my own life without inflicting it on paying boarders besides.
You'll talk, all of you, or you'll take your supper standing up in the yard. "
No one, in Margaret's observation, ever chose the yard.
The table that evening held, besides Margaret and Mrs. Pruitt herself, a young woman introduced as Hannah Whitcombe, boarding at the house while she settled her late husband's small estate; two rail workers passing through on the eastbound line, cheerfully talkative and clearly delighted by Mrs. Pruitt's cooking after weeks of camp fare; and, arriving somewhat later and with the harried air of a man whose day had run longer than planned, a physician introduced as Dr. Amos Fielding.
"Doc Fielding," Mrs. Pruitt said, setting a bowl in front of him with the certain briskness she reserved for people she was fond of and wished to fuss over without admitting to it, "you look like a man who's forgotten his own supper three days running."
"Guilty as charged, Connie, and grateful to be caught at it.
" Dr. Fielding was perhaps fifty, silver-templed and quick-eyed, with the particular weariness of a man who carried more of the town's troubles on his shoulders than any one person reasonably ought to.
He nodded to Margaret with easy courtesy.
"Miss Colston, I take it. I understand congratulations are in order, or nearly so.
Caleb tells me the wedding's to be arranged soon. "
"You've seen him recently, then?" Margaret asked, and heard the note of careful interest in her own voice before she could quite disguise it.
"I see Caleb Draycott most weeks these days, though it's his father I go out to tend, not Caleb himself.
" Something flickered across the doctor's face—professional discretion warring, briefly, with plain human tiredness.
"Silas is a stubborn old man with a heart that's given him more warning than he cares to heed.
I'll say no more than that, out of respect for a patient's privacy, but I don't think I'm speaking out of turn to say the family's had a difficult season of it. "
"More difficult than most know," Hannah Whitcombe said quietly, from across the table, and there was something in the young widow's face—a kind of fellow-feeling, Margaret thought, one hardship recognizing another—that made Margaret warm to her instantly.
"Forgive me. I don't mean to speak out of turn either.
Only I lost my own husband this spring, and I've come to notice how a whole town can know a family's struggling and still say nothing plain about it, out of some notion that silence is kindness. "
"Sometimes it is kindness," Mrs. Pruitt said, not unkindly herself, "and sometimes it's cowardice dressed up as manners. I've never been able to tell which is which with any certainty, and I've lived in this town longer than most."
"How did you come to be in Junction City, Mrs. Whitcombe, if you don't mind my asking?" Margaret said, eager to steer the conversation toward gentler ground, and Hannah's face eased into something more open.
"My husband took a position with the rail company two years back—surveying work, mostly, laying out the line before the crews came through.
We settled here when the town was hardly more than the depot and a handful of tents, same as everyone else in those days.
" She smiled, a little sadly. "He always said Junction City would be something someday, once the lines all connected proper.
I suppose I've stayed partly to see if he was right. "
"He was right enough," one of the rail workers put in, through a mouthful of stew, completely unbothered by the solemnity of the moment in the cheerful way of a man who'd spent too many weeks in a work camp to have much patience left for delicate feelings.
"Line's near finished through to the western junction.
Another year, maybe two, and this'll be as suitable a town as any between here and Cheyenne. "
"You hear that, Connie?" the second rail worker said. "You'll want to expand the house. Twice the boarders means twice the business."
"I'll expand the house when I've the money for it and not a day before, and you can tell your foreman I said so when he comes through wanting a room for his whole crew again like he did in August." Mrs. Pruitt's tone was tart, but there was real fondness underneath it, the easy familiarity of long acquaintance with men who passed through her table often enough to have become, in their rough way, something like family.
"Now eat your supper before it goes cold, both of you, and mind your elbows off my good tablecloth. "
"What's the talk out on the line these days?" Dr. Fielding asked, in the manner of a man gathering news from wherever he could find it, since his own days left him little leisure to seek it out otherwise. "I hear less than I'd like, tending patients rather than riding the rails myself."
"Talk's mostly of the winter, this time of year," the first rail worker said, sobering somewhat.
"Crew boss up at the western camp swears he's never seen the marmots dig in so deep, so early.
Course, crew bosses always swear something or other about the weather.
Keeps the men moving faster when there's talk of a hard winter coming, so I don't put too much stock in it myself. "
"Old Ezra Boone's been saying the same for a fortnight, near enough word for word," Mrs. Pruitt said, setting a fresh loaf of bread on the table with rather more force than the task strictly required.
"Man's ranched forty years and predicted a hard winter thirty-nine of them, so I'll credit his judgment when he's right for once and not spend the meantime fretting over it. "
"That's a comfort, Mrs. Pruitt," Margaret said, and meant the dry humor in it, though something in her chest had gone quietly attentive all the same—another voice, however lightly dismissed, joining Mrs. Kessler's on the train and Tobias's careful account of his father-in-law's superstitions, until the accumulation of small warnings had begun to feel, to her sensible bookkeeper's mind, rather less like coincidence and rather more like a pattern she hadn't yet learned to properly read.
The conversation rambled on through the meal—town gossip, mostly, delivered with the casual thoroughness of people for whom everyone's business was, by necessity of small-town life, at least partly everyone else's business too.
Margaret learned that the mercantile owner's daughter was expected to marry a cattle buyer from Cheyenne come spring; that the church, still lacking a true roof, was the subject of an ongoing and increasingly heated dispute about whether the congregation could afford shingles before winter or would simply have to make do with canvas again; that Dr. Fielding had delivered eleven babies in the town's short history and lost, he said quietly, when Mrs. Pruitt pressed him for the number, only one.
It was Hannah Whitcombe, though, that Margaret found herself drawn to most, and after supper the two young women lingered at the table a while after the others had dispersed, Mrs. Pruitt busy with the washing-up and waving off Margaret's offer to help with the brisk insistence of a woman who preferred her kitchen run her own way.
"You'll forgive me for saying so," Hannah said, turning her teacup slowly in her hands, "but I recognized something in your face at supper, when Doc Fielding mentioned the Draycotts' difficult season. The distinct look of a woman doing arithmetic she hasn't got all the figures for yet."
Margaret laughed, surprised into it. "Is it so plain as that?"
"To another woman who's done the same arithmetic herself, it is.
" Hannah's smile was rueful. "My husband kept things from me too, toward the end—not out of unkindness, I don't think, but out of some notion that a man protects his wife by carrying the worst of things alone.
I didn't learn how much trouble the rail contract was actually in until after he'd died and I was left to sort through what he'd left unsaid.
I don't say that to frighten you, Miss Colston.
Only—if you've noticed your Mr. Draycott keeping something back from you, I'd trust that instinct rather than talk yourself out of it for the sake of a peaceful supper table. "
"I have noticed it," Margaret admitted, lowering her voice though there was no one left in the room to overhear. "Something about the herd, and the grazing. He won't give me a straight number, however plainly I ask."
"Then I'd keep asking, simply, until he gives you one.
" Hannah reached over and pressed Margaret's hand, briefly, with the specific understanding of a woman who'd learned her own lesson the hard way and would rather see another spared it than watch it repeat.
"I loved my husband dearly, and I'd give a great deal to have him back regardless.
But I'd give almost as much to have had the figures plain in front of me while there was still time to do something useful with them, instead of only after, when all that was left to do was grieve and sort through the wreckage. "
"May I ask what happened? With the rail contract, I mean—only if you don't mind the telling of it."
Hannah was quiet a moment, and Margaret half expected her to demur, the way most people did when a grief was asked after too directly.
But instead the younger woman seemed almost relieved to have been asked openly, rather than tiptoed around.
"The company had underbid the grading work through the eastern pass, and my husband knew it within the first month, I think, though he never said so to me.
He kept thinking he could make up the difference through his own extra hours, his own care with the surveying, as though a husband's diligence alone could mend a contract that had been unsound from the very signing of it.
By the time the company's own accountants caught the shortfall, he'd worked himself past what his heart could bear, out in weather no sensible man should have been surveying in, trying to finish ahead of a deadline that was never realistic to begin with.
" Her voice had gone very steady, the particular steadiness Margaret recognized as the kind a person adopts precisely because the alternative is not steady at all.
"The company settled his affairs decently enough, in the end.
But I've often thought, since, that if he'd told me clearly what he was up against, I might have found some way to help him carry it, rather than losing him to a burden I never got the chance to share. "
"I'm so very sorry, Hannah."
"Don't be sorry. Be plain with him instead, whatever the answer turns out to be.
That's the only comfort I know how to offer, and I offer it gladly.
" Hannah squeezed her hand once more and rose, gathering her shawl about her shoulders against the evening chill.
"I'll bid you goodnight, Miss Colston. I find these conversations easier by firelight than I do in the plain light of morning, when I've had time to remember all over again how much I still miss him. "
Margaret sat with that a long moment after Hannah had retired for the evening, alone now in the quiet parlor with the fire burned low and the house settling into its night sounds around her.
She thought of Caleb's careful evasions, of the locked ledger in his ranch office, of Mrs. Kessler's warning on the train and Connie Pruitt's own careful words about a man who'd rather carry a burden alone than trouble another soul with it.
She did not yet know precisely what she was up against. But she understood, with growing certainty, that Junction City was a town well practiced in exactly this especial silence—kind men and women alike, choosing not to say the hard thing simply, out of habits of privacy and pride that ran, she suspected, as deep as the frost already settling into the ground outside.
She meant to be different, in her own household, however the wider town chose to manage its griefs and its warnings. She had not come two thousand miles to learn the same lesson Hannah Whitcombe had learned only after it was too late to matter.
Outside, the wind had shifted, and somewhere beyond the edge of the lamplight, the first true cold of the season continued its slow, patient work.