Chapter 21
She sat at the kitchen table with both her hands flat on the wood, and listened.
Beau told her all of it. What he knew, and what he’d only been told. The game at Listwood, the signed paper, the buyer with the wagon coming at end of day. His shame at keeping it from her, and his foolishness in the parlor last night.
When he had done, he turned his palms up on the table.
"That's the whole of it," he said.
She set her palms more flat against the wood.
"I'm very sorry about your brother. I'm sorrier that you carried it for days without telling me. You weren't wrong to be afraid for me. You were wrong about which part to fear."
He looked at her then, and she let him. It was not the looking of yesterday morning. It was the looking of a man who had spent the night being shamed by his own daughter.
The kitchen door pushed open three inches.
Lydia stood in the gap. She did not come in.
"Florence."
"Yes, child."
"Your turn."
Florence drew a long breath.
Last night on the bed she had thought she would not know how to begin. She began anyway.
"My father is a thief, Beau. He and my three brothers.
Career thieves. The food I ate at our table for years was bought with money that had belonged to somebody else.
I loved them. I love them now. I couldn't condone it.
I couldn't turn them in. I wrote to your advertisement to escape it. That's the first thing."
"All right."
"There is a second."
She told him the rest.
She told him about Mrs. Kendall on the train. The canvas bag at her feet on a junction platform. The paper money and the gold. Two days of not putting the bag down. A hole in his wood. The lie hot in her chest in the kitchen yesterday morning.
When she had done, he had not moved.
"In my wood?”
"Yes."
"You buried it?”
“Well yes. I needed to hide it.”
"And you didn't tell me?”
“That’s not how hiding works."
"You didn't tell me because?—“
“Because that’s not how hiding works.”
“But if I was to push you for a different answer?”
"Because I didn't know you. Because I’ve had to judge the moral weight of too much already, and I feel that weight and I didn’t want to have to hand a share of it to you too soon.”
He sat. He turned his palms over on the wood, then back.
"How much."
“I don’t know, but if I had to guess, the figure on your paper is in there many times over."
"Would I have been the right man for you, if none of this had been?”
"Yes. I knew on the platform. I knew at the cottage window. I've known since. I've known since the second paragraph of your first letter."
"Florence. I cannot ask you, in the same breath, to marry me and to put a bag of money I have no right to ask after into my hand. I won’t do it..”
"I know, Beau."
"What do we do?"
She folded her hands in her lap. "The bag was given to me.
Not to you. Mrs. Kendall didn't know you existed.
She gave it because she'd decided I was a woman who would do something with it her conscience could live with.
The Kendalls tried to find the right thing and couldn't. I can't give it back to a person I can't name.
I can't turn it in to a sheriff who'd steal it. "
She stopped. Her father had said nearly as much after numerous robberies.
The money has no owner now, Florence, so it may as well do good.
She had thought him wrong then. She thought him wrong still.
But she was not him, and this was not his money, and what separated her from him was only what she chose to do next.
"The thing has no past I can pay. It has only a future. The only honest thing I know is to decide what that future will be."
“Florence?"
"Yes."
"I won't have it save the ranch on its own. I won't have it said, in this house, that you bought me. I won't have you wonder it either."
"Then we won't. The ranch will be saved. From this day it will also be the place that does what the money was given for… work for men who can't find it, a pot on the stove for women who can't pay, and a roof for whoever asks. We won't take a gift and buy a comfort. We'll build a use."
He looked at her.
"Florence."
“Yes?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes. All of it. Yes."
She stood. He stood. He did not reach for her.
She did not reach for him. They stood across the table with their hands at their sides, two people who had each, in the last quarter of an hour, set down a weight they had been carrying alone.
Her breath had gone thin and slow. His palms were still flat against the wood where he'd first laid them.
She picked up her shawl. "Lyddie. Bring a shovel. Beau. Come with me.”
“Lyddie, tell them two men we’re going for a walk in the woods. They’ll have to wait. If they complain, my rabbit gun’s on top of my cabinet. Come with us when you’ve told them.”
They walked into the wood together. She showed them the stone and the smaller stone. Beau dug. He lifted the canvas bag from the hole and undid the buckles. He looked once at her. She nodded. He looked inside.
"It is twice."
"I told you."
They counted in the grass. Lydia kept the running figure on a slate Quint brought. When they were done they had counted the figure on Mr. Colt's paper, and a second nearly equal sum beside it. Beau set the second sum back into the canvas.
They went to the house. They went into the parlor. Two men rose from the settee.
"Mr. Ferris."
"Sit down, Mr. Colt."
"We will not?—"
“You will. I’m paying my brother's debt. In cash. On this table. Now. Mr. Saville, count it with him. You'll sign that I have done so, and that this house and its land are in the name they've been in for fifteen years. Then you'll ride out, and you'll not ride back."
He set the first bundle on the table.
Mr. Colt looked at it. Then he looked at Beau. "Where does a man like you come by cash money like that? I could have the sheriff here inside of an hour. Claim the whole of it stolen."
"You could," Beau said. He set the second bundle beside the first, then the third. “But I think you’re forgetting something. You’re not in your hometown now, with your friendly sheriff. You’re in my town.
And you’re going to go to the sheriff and complain that I’m trying to pay you off fair and square?
You’re going to make accusations without proof?
What’ll happen is the sheriff will lock you up, and the story’ll be that you tried to extort money from a grieving brother and his twelve year old daughter.
I’ve never been locked up. It’d be you that looked like the villains. ”
Both men were silent.
“So I recommend you recognize when you’ve found a good thing, and accept it. Sure, this was step one in acquiring a man’s ranch, and that failed, but you’re going to ride away with a bag full of money. Say a prayer of thanks, and leave before Lyddie gets by rabbit gun.”
They took his advice.