10. Epilogue 2
Raiford
Five years later
The ranch is running like a machine. Six hundred head of cattle across eight sections with a rotation schedule that Elise designed and I stopped questioning after the first year because her rotations produce better forage yield than anything my father or grandfather ever ran.
Elise will tell you the land deserves the credit. I know better. Five years ago this ranch was good. With her, it’s better.
Ours. She made it ours.
It’s 6 AM. I’m at the north gate. Not because I need to check the section.
Because this is where we start. Every morning.
Every day. Two thermoses, two notebooks, the gate between the main operation and the valley she built.
We meet here and we walk the plan and we start the day together the way my parents started every day together, standing on the land, facing the work.
She’s not here yet. She’s late. Elise is never late.
Elise has been at this gate before me every single morning for five years with one exception (the morning Charlotte was born, when she was at the hospital in Bozeman, and she called Beckett from the delivery room at 5:50 to ask about the water levels in the north creek, and the nurse took the phone from her and told me to stop enabling the crazy rancher lady).
Charlotte Wylde. Three years old. Dark hair like mine, blue eyes like her mother’s.
Built like a fence post: small and sturdy and absolutely immovable once she’s decided where she’s standing.
She rides Birdie (Birdie is twenty now, retired from ranch work, but she’ll carry a three-year-old across the yard with the patient dignity of a horse who has been through enough to know what matters).
Our son is eleven months. James Robert Wylde, named for my father (James) and Elise’s father (Robert). He’s in the carrier on my chest right now, asleep, his face against my shirt, his fists curled, the weight of him on my body the most important weight I’ve ever carried.
Elise pulls up at 6:04. Four minutes late.
She gets out of the truck and she’s carrying Charlotte on one hip and a thermos in the other hand.
Her hair is in the braid and she’s wearing the same old flannel she wore the first Saturday we fixed the cabin roof together, and it’s faded and soft and she won’t replace it and I don’t ask her to because some things are better worn.
“Sorry,” she says. “Charlotte wanted to bring her boots.”
Charlotte is wearing boots. Tiny boots. The ones Elise’s mother sent from Virginia, real leather, child-sized, with pointed toes. Charlotte insisted on wearing them because Charlotte insists on everything she wants and Elise says she gets it from me and she’s not wrong.
“Gate!” Charlotte says. She wants down. She wants to stand at the gate like her parents stand at the gate every morning. Elise puts her down and Charlotte walks to the gate, grabs the bottom rail, and peers through it at the valley.
“Cows,” Charlotte says.
“Cows,” I confirm.
“My cows.”
“Our cows.”
“MY cows.”
She’s a Wylde. The arguing comes standard.
Elise stands next to me. Her shoulder against my arm. James between us on my chest, sleeping through the morning the way babies sleep through everything that matters. Charlotte at the gate, inspecting her inheritance.
“The Henderson section needs the east fence checked,” Elise says. “Beckett saw some sagging near the draw yesterday.”
“I’ll take it this morning.”
“Take Charlotte. She likes the draw.”
“She likes the mud at the draw.”
“Same thing when you’re three.”
We stand at the gate. The morning is clear and the valley is green. The cattle are spread across the sections, visible as dark shapes on the grass, moving slow, the way well-managed cattle move on good land.
The photographs in the hallway at home have new additions.
Our wedding, on the ridge, wildflowers everywhere, my mother crying, Dane as best man, Jules narrating (always narrating, Jules will narrate from beyond the grave).
Charlotte’s birth. James’s birth. A photograph of Elise on Birdie, crossing the creek.
And one more. A photograph I put up last year.
Elise at the north gate, morning light, thermos in one hand, notebook in the other.
Just like the day she started. Like the first morning.
Before the spring and the fences and the handling facility and the ring and the kids and the sixteen thousand acres that belong to both of us.
In the photograph she’s standing exactly where she’s standing now. Same gate. Same valley. Same woman. Except in the photograph she’s alone and now she’s not.
My mother comes for Sunday dinner every week.
She brings pie. My mother holds James after dinner and sits in the rocking chair my father built (everything in this house was built by a Wylde hand, and now Elise’s hands are part of that, she rebuilt the porch steps last spring, and Charlotte “helped” by carrying a single nail from the truck to the porch, a distance of forty feet that took her twenty minutes).
“He looks like your father,” my mother says. Holding James. Looking at his face.
“He has Elise’s eyes.”
“He has your father’s jaw.” She looks up at me. “Your father’s jaw and your mother-in-law’s stubbornness and your wife’s hands. He’s going to be a rancher.”
“He’s going to be whatever he wants.”
“He’s going to be a rancher,” she says again. With the certainty of a woman who has spent her life watching Wylde men do exactly one thing and do it well.
She might be right. She usually is.
Night. The kids are asleep. Charlotte in her room (the room that used to be my room when I was a boy, same walls, new paint, Elise chose the color). James in the crib next to our bed.
Elise is on the porch. I find her there studying the valley and the stars. She’s in my flannel and her hair is down and she’s looking at the land the way she looked at it the first time. With hunger and love and the quiet understanding of a woman who knows what it means.
I sit next to her. I don’t say anything. We sit shoulder to shoulder, facing the same direction, looking at the same land.
“Hey, cowboy.” She smiles at me. “So Charlotte called them ‘my cows’ again today,” she says.
“She’s not wrong.”
“She’s three.”
“She’s a Wylde. The entitlement starts early.”
She laughs. The laugh I heard for the first time on a trail ride and have heard every day since. The laugh that fills the house.
“Do you remember the first day?” she says. “The trail ride?”
“You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen and I was trying to treat you like a guest but I somehow knew you were something else.”
“What?”
“Home. You were home. Standing in my driveway in work boots asking about my fencing and I thought: there she is.”
“I’m not a guest.” She looks at the valley. “I’m home.”
I put my arm around her. I hold the woman who let me underestimate her and then quietly, patiently, thoroughly proved me wrong in every way that matters.
There are small boots by the door now. A three-year-old’s voice in the mornings. A baby’s cry. Elise singing in the kitchen while the coffee brews.
My father died in the barn at sixty-two and left me the land and the name and the weight. I carried it alone for five years. I carried it because that’s what Wylde men do.
I don’t carry it alone anymore. The woman next to me picks up the weight every morning at the gate and doesn’t put it down until the stars come out and sometimes not even then.
The valley is dark. The stars are up. Our house is full. Our home.