Chapter 11
Eleven
Beau came back from town with a paper of needles and a card of buttons.
She was in the kitchen, flouring up to her elbows. He stepped into the kitchen and placed them on the corner of the table. "Them's for you.”
She looked from the buttons to his face, his eyes holding hers. After two days of grouchiness, it was the first time he’d looked at her properly. She cocked a brow, not about to go easy on him.
"I shouldn't have hollered at you."
"No," she said. "You shouldn't have."
He shifted, eyes moving about the room, before settling on her once again. "It weren't about you."
"I didn’t think it was." She wanted to say more, to press him to get to the bottom of things. There ain’t two dollars. She wanted to ask how his meeting with Hollis went. But the dog off the chain reaction sealed her lips closed.
"Right." He looked at the floor, and then at the window, and then past her shoulder. "There's things I ought to…"
He stopped.
Della waited. She waited a good deal longer than was comfortable, and she made her face as easy and as open as she knew how, and she thought: say it. Whatever it is. Say it, and I will not flinch, I promise you I will not flinch.
"There's a wind coming," Beau said. "I best get to the north gate."
And he went out.
She sighed and shook her head. She kneaded the pastry, punctuating the knuckle-presses as she spoke, “Infuriating, impossible, stubborn man.”
She took the buttons up to her room after supper, and sat on the bed. A small gift for her, yet she couldn’t help but worry about the cost when she knew that they must be struggling. Perhaps he’d solved their problems and had the money spare for the buttons.
They were bone, colored pink by some clever person. He had gone into a mercantile and stood in front of a tray of buttons and picked out the ones that he thought she might like. She’d been gifted jewelry and expensive gloves, books and scarves,
Yet the buttons meant more to her than any of those things. Because he’d chosen them to say…what? Sorry?
She set them in the drawer next to Biddy’s book, climbed into bed and extinguished the lamp.
The sudden darkness took a moment. She lay there, planning how she could help the man who struggled with words.
Four days later she asked Colt to hitch the wagon. When he made to climb into the wagon next to her, she waved him back.
"On my own, Colt."
"Ma'am." Colt looked as though she'd asked him to hold a rattlesnake.
“I’m going to Grand Springs alone.”
“Beau said I wasn’t to let you out of my sight.”
Della shot him a look. “You can tell Beau that I’m his wife, not his property.”
“But he’s out in the pastures, fixin’ fences.”
She pulled herself up, gathered the reins, holding the pony steady as the wagon rocked a little. “If he wants to set a watchdog on me, he’ll ought to be watching me himself.”
Colt leapt back as she began turning. “The cottonwood?—"
“Left at the cottonwood," she called over her shoulder. The fork in the road where the dead cottonwood stood. “I know. I’ll remember.”
"The boss'll skin me." Colt tried again.
"The boss," said Della, "left before five this morning to go and look at a fence, and he won't be back ‘til after dark. I shall be home before he is."
As she drove the road, she realized that she was alone for the first time since New York. The land rolled away on both sides, green going to gold at the edges, broken up by draws and the odd stand of cottonwood along the river line. Cattle in the distance. Rabbits in the wheel ruts.
She had the list in her lap and her old straw hat on and the reins in her hands, and she felt absurdly free.
She sang two verses of something improper she had learned from a cousin at fourteen.
Nobody heard.
Vance's mercantile was a long room with a counter down one side and a myriad of stuff stacked to the ceiling on the other — flour, shot, coal oil, boots, lamp chimneys, liniment, a barrel of pickles, a rack of hoe handles.
At the back where the light came in, the dry goods.
The air reeked, a melded concoction of coffee, kerosene, leather and new cloth.
Della loved it on sight.
She took her time there, smelling, touching, exploring. Feeling happier than she had been in a while.
Calico for the kitchen — blue, with a small white figure in it, enough for two windows and the door. Bleached cotton for the bedroom. Thread. Tape. A packet of hooks. A tin of blacking for the range, which she needed, and a paper of cinnamon, which she did not.
Mrs. Vance was a thin, brisk woman of about fifty, and she measured and cut and wrapped and was perfectly pleasant throughout.
"That's the calico, the cotton, the thread, the tape, hooks, blacking, cinnamon." She licked her pencil. "Four dollars and sixty cents."
"Thank you. Would you put it to the Silver Sage account, please?"
The pencil stopped.
There were two other women at the far end of the counter, near the boots. Della was aware of them chiefly as a sound, and the sound had stopped as well.
"Silver Sage," said Mrs. Vance.
"Yes. I'm Mrs. Hawkins."
The woman simply put her pencil down on the counter and folded her hands. "I know who you are.”
It wasn’t said unkindly, as such. Not even in an accusing tone. But alarm rippled through Della, nonetheless.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Hawkins. We can't put anything more to that account."
Della felt the embarrassment crawling up her neck. “Why not?”
Mrs. Vance leaned closer, but didn’t lower her voice. "It's cash at Silver Sage. Has been since March this year."
The store had gone extremely quiet.
Della stood at the counter, with four dollars and sixty cents' worth of goods in a neat brown parcel in front of her, under the withering stare of a stranger.
For as long as she could remember, Warner & Company held good standing with their creditors.
It was nothing to choose cloth, or a fancy barrette for her hair, and leave it to be settled on account.
She did not have four dollars. According to her husband, they didn’t have two dollars right now - and she should have remembered that before standing at the counter, in front of the whole town to witness her shame.
Her brother held her money. Her husband didn’t have any. So much so that he wasn’t in good enough standing for credit.
She had, it turned out, travelled two thousand miles to arrive at the identical position.
"I see," said Della.
She did not cry, and she did not leave. She would not let those who stood and watched her, judge her and her husband.
She reached up and took her earrings out.
They were her mother's. Two sapphires in a simple gold setting. Nothing that would have caught attention back in New York, but they were all she had on her at that moment.
She set them on the counter beside the parcel.
"Mrs. Hawkins?—"
"They are good stones and the setting is gold," Della said, staring at the earrings and not at Mrs. Vance.
"They came from Ball, Black and Company on Broadway.
I should think they are worth thirty dollars in New York.
I have no idea whatsoever what they are worth in Montana Territory, which puts me at a disadvantage, so I will ask you to be fair with me. "
When Della had no reply, she risked a glance up. Mrs. Vance was looking at the earrings. She picked up one of them and turned it to the window, and her mouth moved.
"I can give you fifteen," she said. "I'd be lying if I said I could sell them here for more than twenty."
"Then fifteen is fair. Thank you. If you can take what I owe for those, plus anything else on the account," Della said, spine stiff.
Mrs. Vance hesitated, then pulled out a cash tin. She fussed and counted, and gave Della a few coins back in her hand. “That’s the Silver Sage account set straight now.”
Della’s fingers closed on the coins. She picked up the brown parcel and nodded curtly, “Thanking you kindly.”
"He's a good man," Mrs. Vance said abruptly.
Della looked up.
"Beau Hawkins. He's a good man. So was John Hawkins.
I'll not have anybody say otherwise in this store.
" Mrs. Vance's chin came up. "It's not us, Mrs. Hawkins. It's my husband's supplier in St. Paul. I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you on account of you being a rancher’s wife.
But we've had two bad years off the ranchers, the same as they've had off the weather.
If I did it for one, I'd do it for everyone, and then there'd be no store. "
"You needn't explain yourself to me."
"No," Mrs. Vance agreed. "I don't think I need to." She hesitated. "You'll want to get that blacking on the range before the damp gets under it."
"I will."
"And the calico'll shrink. Wash it before you cut it."
"Thank you," said Della. "I didn't know that."
She got as far as the door before she heard it.
She would not have heard it at all if she hadn't stopped to shift the parcel to her other arm. One of the women by the boots, not troubling very much about her voice, and another one shushing her too late.
"—and he never told her a word of it, is what I heard. Brought her clear out from New York and never said. Denny Walsh reckons they'll not see Christmas out there."
Della stood in the doorway of Vance's mercantile with the sun on her face and a parcel under her arm.
No, he hadn’t told her a word of it.
Then she went out and set it in the wagon bed. Untied the horse and climbed up and turned for home.
If not for the horse knowing his way home. She might not have made it, because out on the road, with the grass going over in the wind, she wasn’t paying attention. Her mind was on the mercantile, and the choices she’d made to get to where she was.
It wasn’t even the earrings, though she felt a sting at having to give up something that had been her mother’s. Nor was it the bone buttons.
It was that Beau Hawkins was a man. He wanted to solve these things by himself, believing that she wasn’t strong enough to stand by his side. Shoulder to shoulder, and help him.
Over the last eighteen months of Warner & Company, when her father was dying upstairs, and Peter would not let her past the office door, everybody had gone on being extremely polite while the business went down.
When she took matters in her own hands, and saw for herself her brother’s blatant incompetence, he laughed at her predictions that their father’s business was floundering.
Della turned in at the gate posts under the crossbar with SILVER SAGE burned across it. Colt came out of the barn at a run to take the horse, jabbering about how he was mighty happy to see her in one piece.
She handed him the reins and thanked him and went up the steps and into the house.
She put the parcel on the kitchen table. Then she went down the hall, past the parlor, to the shut door at the end.
She might not know how to rope steer, or the process to get the metal shoes onto a horse in the same detail that her husband did. But business she knew.
She placed her hand on the handle and took a deep breath.