Chapter 10
Beau Ferris had said almost nothing on the ride into town.
Lydia had sat beside him on the wagon bench with her hands folded in her lap and her braid lying down her back, and the wheels had rattled the way they always rattled, and the bay had pulled the way she always pulled, and Beau had let the road do its work for him and not spoken, because nothing he could have said would not have been a lie.
Lydia had not spoken either. She had cried herself out in the kitchen after the two men had ridden away, and had washed her face at the basin, and had come out asking for her hat as if her hat were the only thing she had to think about, and he had taken his cue from her.
Now they stood on the planks of the platform. The train was a black dot in the east, getting larger. A widow in black with a basket. Two ranch hands he half knew, leaning on a post. The stationmaster lifted a hand at Beau and went back inside.
Beau took his hat off and turned it once in his fingers and put it back on.
“Pa?" Lydia said.
"Mm."
"I have to ask you something now, and you're not going to like it."
"Ask."
"When she gets off the train. What are you going to tell her?"
He did not answer immediately. He had been answering it in his head since the wagon turned out of the gate, and the answer he kept coming back to was not the one Lydia wanted.
"Today?" he said.
"Today, Pa."
"Not today, Lyddie."
She turned her face up to him. She was twelve, and she had her mother's set jaw, and the same way of pushing it forward when she had set her mind on a thing she would not let drop.
"You're not going to tell her about Uncle Hudson?"
"No."
"You're not going to tell her about the ranch?"
"No."
"That's a lie."
"Not telling a thing isn't a lie, Lyddie."
“So if I stole money from the collection plate and didn’t tell you, it wouldn’t be a lie?”
He looked down at her. He had a small, sharp impulse to be angry, the way he was sometimes angry with her when she was right and inconveniently right, and he set it aside, because he had no spare anger left in him today. Besides, she was right. And smart. He sometimes felt outmatched.
All the same, he had to make her understand.
"Listen to me a minute," he said.
"I'm listening."
"That woman has been on a train for nine days.
She left a house and a family she didn't tell us much about because she didn't want to, and from what she did say I'm guessing she didn't leave it easy.
She's stepping off in a minute onto a platform in a town she's never seen, to marry a man she's never met. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Now think what it is to step off that train and have the first thing the man tells you, before he tells you his daughter's name, before he tells you where the wagon is, before he tells you welcome to Prosperity…
think what it is to have him say my brother was killed four days ago, and the ranch I asked you out here to live on belongs to a man in Listwood I haven't even met yet.
Think what it is to hear that. Think where you'd put it.
Think what you'd think of the man telling you. "
"I'd think he was honest."
"You wouldn't, Lyddie. You'd think he was a man with the worst news of this year, who couldn't even sit down to dinner with you before he laid it on your plate. You'd think he didn't care enough to give you an hour to get your land legs."
She looked away. He watched her work the argument over. She was not a child who gave up on a thing because somebody had spoken louder than she had, and he was glad of that, but it made conversations like this harder.
"What if she asks?” she said.
"She won't ask. Not the first day."
"What if she does?”
“Why would she ask if my brother’s been killed, or whether I still own my own ranch?”
“Not what I mean. What if she asks something that pushes up against that? Something that means you need to lie, or omit a truth?”
"If she asks, I'll tell her there's a thing we'll speak of after she's had a meal and a wash. That's not a lie either. We'll tell her. We will. Just not on the planks of a station with the conductor calling all aboard behind her."
“When?”
"Soon."
"How soon?”
"Lyddie. I don't know. Soon. When she's sat at our table and met the place. When she's had a chance to know if she wants to be here at all."
The black dot in the east had become a black smudge with a white plume. The platform began to murmur. The widow shuffled forward. Two ranch hands pushed off the post.
"I don't like it."
"I know you don't."
"I won't tell her. But I'll tell you something. If you wait too long, she's going to find it out herself, and then it's going to be worse."
"I know."
She didn’t look at him. She looked east along the rails. The whistle came in, two short notes, and the bell on the engine could be heard. The smudge resolved into the shape of an engine with a tender behind it and the rounded windows of three passenger cars and a freight car at the back.
"Promise me you'll be kind to her."
"Lyddie."
"Promise."
"I will, child."
"Even if you're sad."
"Even if I'm sad."
The train was coming in now in its long, hot way, the engine clattering past them, the brakes a high steady hiss, the carriages shuddering.
Beau took his hat off again and held it against his chest. He stood up straighter.
The boards lay solid under his boots and the heat of the sun pressed the back of his neck.
Whatever happened in the next ten minutes, he could not, would not, allow a single line on his face to show this woman that she had stepped off into a worse house than she had been promised.
The carriages slowed and stopped. The doors opened with a grinding sound.
A conductor stepped down. The widow stepped up.
A young man hopped down with a leather case.
And then, in the doorway of the second carriage from the front, a woman in a dark traveling dress paused on the top step and looked out at the platform, and her eyes went, after a searching half-second, straight to him and to Lydia beside him, and stayed there.
Beside him, Lydia drew an audible breath.
"Pa," she whispered. "That's her."
"I know," he said.