Chapter 12
He had not let himself look at her on the platform.
He had not let himself look in the wagon.
He had been afraid, in a way he could not have explained to anybody, that if he looked at her properly the look would tell her things he had decided not to tell her.
So he had been looking at the road and at the bay and at the hat in his hand, and now he was standing in the doorway of the foreman's old cottage.
She had set down her travel case and walked to the window with the canvas bag still hooked over her arm, and the western light was full on her, and he looked.
She was, unquestionably, the most beautiful woman who had walked into a room he owned since the day his wife had died.
The thought went where things he had no business with went.
He set it on a shelf for later, because it was not the time.
There was a man named Colt in Listwood who had a paper with his brother's signature on it.
There was a deed in a drawer in town that no longer told a true story about who held what.
There was a girl in a blue dress in the wagon outside watching him through the open door.
There was no time for the most beautiful woman in a room.
And yet he had looked.
"It's a fine view," Florence said.
"It is."
"The trees."
"Cottonwoods."
"They lean."
"The wind comes off the west most evenings."
“That makes them lean?”
“Eventually. Eventually we all succumb to the inevitable.”
She turned from the window, and set the canvas bag on the small table by the window, very carefully, with both hands.
He looked at the bag. He didn't mean to.
He had looked at it three times on the wagon, and twice on the walk up the path, and once when she had hooked it over her arm coming through the door, and now his eye went to it once more, because it was an unusual sort of bag for a woman to be unwilling to put down.
He could not tell its weight from the way she had set it.
It had not swung on her arm the way an empty bag swung.
He set the question aside… whatever the bag was, it was hers, and a man didn't start a marriage by asking a woman what was in her purse.
"The kitchen's through there," he said.
"Yes."
"Stove is good. Wood's in the lean-to. The well is the one on the south side The one nearer doesn't draw well, despite the look of it."
"All right."
"Mrs. Letts put sheets on the bed. There's a basin. There's water in the jug."
"Thank you."
"Lyddie will come for you about six. We'll eat in the house."
"All right."
"I'm sorry it's small."
"It's beautiful."
"It's small."
"It's still beautiful, Mr. Ferris."
He didn't know what to do with that. He stood with his hat in his hand, and looked for a place to put it, then decided that putting his hat down was a liberty. This was her place now.
"You'll want a wash," he said.
"I will."
"I'll leave you. But I think you should call me Beau.”
“Beau, then. And I’m Florence.”
He looked at her. She had turned from the window completely. The light had come down off the top of her hair and into her face. He had not heard his name spoken by a woman like that in eight years. He did not, quite, know how to receive it.
"Florence."
"Yes."
A silence sat between them. It was not a hostile silence. It was not, in fact, hostile at all. It was a silence in which two people were each waiting for the other to give them something they didn't know how to ask for, and neither of them could.
He shouldn’t be feeling this way…
"Six," he said, finally. "The path's marked. Lyddie will come."
"Thank you, Beau."
"Florence."
He put his hat on. He went out. He did not look at the bag. He closed the door behind him with a care he was a little ashamed of, and walked down the path to the wagon. Lyddie was sitting on the wagon seat with her hands in her lap and her face turned to him.
"Pa," she said.
"Don't."
She climbed down off the seat and put her hand into his and walked with him up the path back to the ranch house, with the dust kicking up at their boots and the cottonwoods bending in the slow western wind.
He let her hold his hand. He had not let her hold his hand on a path in some months. He let her hold it now.
“Pa?"
"Mm."
"She is beautiful, isn't she."
"She is, yes.”
Because there was no honest other answer, and because Lyddie was twelve, and because he didn't wish to teach his daughter that a man learned, by stages, to deny what was plainly true.
"Yes, she is.”
“You know…”
“What do I know?”
"She had her hand on that bag the whole time."
"I saw."
"What's in it, do you think?"
"It's her bag. It's not for us to ask."
She let it go. The dust came up, and the bay nickered from the rail.
He thought, with a wretched honesty, that he had walked into that cottage and looked once at a woman with western light on her face and, for a count of three slow seconds, forgotten that he had no house to give her and no brother to greet her and one week to find the only money in his life that could keep any of it standing.
He thought, just as honestly, that he could not afford to forget again.
He squeezed Lyddie's hand. He didn't say more. They went up the porch and into the house.