Chapter 14
Beau was at his kitchen table with a mug of coffee gone cold in his hand when Lydia came down and stood in front of him and would not sit.
"Pa."
"Lyddie. Sit."
"No."
He set the mug down. He had slept three hours in three-minute pieces, which was not, in any useful sense, sleeping at all. The kitchen was still gray. The stove muttered through its first wood. The sun had not cleared the ridge.
"Pa, look at me."
“Yeah?"
"Last night you didn't look at her once during the entire supper. I watched. She's a grown woman and she's come three thousand miles, and you spent her first dinner in this house looking at cornbread."
He put his palm flat on the table. He had no answer.
The small hours had gone to making lists in his head, of what was in the bank, and what was owed to Quint and others.
What could be borrowed against the herd, and what could be sold without it being noticed.
He had not, in the small hours, spent any of that time making lists of how to look across a table at a woman.
"I'll do better tonight."
"Will you?"
"I will, Lyddie."
“How?"
"I'll—" He sighed. “Lyddie…"
"How, Pa?”
"I'll talk to her."
"About what?"
"About anything."
"Pa. Listen." She came around to his side of the table and put her hand on his sleeve. "She's going to leave."
"She's not."
"She is. I saw her face going down the path. She thinks she's not wanted here. She's going to leave, Pa, and then we'll have lost the ranch and her, and you'll have nobody to blame but yourself."
“Is it better that way? Is it better if she goes?”
“What?"
"I have nothing to offer her now. The ranch isn't going to be ours by next Saturday. I can't ask her to walk into that. I can't, in good conscience, look across a table at a woman I brought out of Worcester on the promise of a home, and pretend that promise still stands."
"You haven't lost it yet."
"I've got a week."
"That's a week."
"A week isn't a chance, Lyddie. A week is a closing door."
Her eyes went wet. He put his hand over the hand she had laid on his sleeve. She did not pull it back. She was working not to cry, and the working was harder than the crying would have been.
"Then try harder, Pa," she said. "You don't get to give up because you're afraid she'll have to share a hard thing.
You're not the only person in this house who's lost someone.
She was my mother and he was my uncle. You're not the only one who's lost a ranch. I’ve lived here too.
You don't get to decide what she'd carry. You don't even know her."
He looked at his daughter. He took a slow breath. He nodded once, very small. "All right."
She drew her hand back, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm, briskly, her mother's gesture. She crossed to the stove and lifted the kettle and set it on the heat, and the movement made him, for the first time that morning, feel like a man who had a chance.
He had a count of perhaps thirty seconds of that feeling before Quint came in through the back door without knocking.
"Boss."
"Quint."
"I wouldn't speak if it weren't a thing."
“So speak."
Quint took his hat off. He turned it in his hands. He looked at Lydia, then at Beau.
"Last night," he said. "Late. I was in the south yard. Heard the back door of the foreman's cottage. The lady came out. She walked across to the wood. She had her shawl over her, and she had that bag."
"What bag."
"The bag she carried in."
Lydia turned from the stove.
"She walked into the wood. She was in there a long while. She came back without the bag."
The room went quiet around him. He stood up. Suspicion tightened in him into a worse shape. A woman, alone, a heavy bag, the wood at the edge of his property in the dark.
"Pa," Lydia said.
"Hush, Lyddie."
"Pa, no."
"Hush."
"You don't know what was in it."
"I know it isn't usual."
"You don't know what it was. She didn't do anything wrong."
“Lyddie, hush. Quint. Thank you.”
Quint nodded. He put his hat back on. He let himself out.
"Pa. Look at me."
"Lyddie."
"You don't know. So don't decide."
"I haven't decided."
"You have. You've decided already."
He had. He had decided three things in succession… that the woman in his cottage was hiding something in his wood, that the something was not innocent, and that he had been a fool to think a woman like her had stepped off a train without baggage of her own.
He had decided. He had not decided what to do.
A horse came up the lane.
Two horses. He knew the sound before he turned. He went to the front and looked through the parlor curtains, and the two horses tied at his rail again were the same two horses, and the two men coming up his porch in the gray of the morning were the same two men.
“Lydia? Time for school.”
“But Pa…”
“Go.”
Mr. Colt knocked. The knock was polite. The knock was the knock of a man who already knew the door would open.
Beau opened it.
"Mr. Ferris."
"Mr. Colt."
"You'll have had time to think."
"Not today. I’ll meet you at the hotel in town this evening. I will not speak to you here. Get off my porch.”
“A quarter of it’s not your porch, Mr. Ferris.”
“For the rest of this week, it is.”