Epilogue
The Collins Ranch House
The long table in the front room had been laid since ten in the morning, and Zoe had changed the arrangement of it three times since.
She stood at the head of it now at half past eleven with her hand at the small of her back where the ache had settled from seven months of her second child and looked at the table.
The good cloth Mary had kept for Christmas suppers, the pewter bowl of the last white asters off the south fence, the large plates set for the grown folk and the small ones set at the corner for the children.
She moved the aster bowl an inch in the center, stood back, decided she didn’t like it and moved it back.
Little Nora came to her skirt and grabbed a fistful of the wool, two years old in the summer and named with all the tenderness of the Earth for the sister Wade had buried six years gone.
Zoe set her free hand on the small dark head, the same as Wade’s sister’s.
She minded, in that moment the ache at her back very much less.
“You have set that bowl in four different places at the whole of the morning, Mama.” Sadie came to the table with the last of the cider cups on a tray, grown tall over the summer, grown into a young woman who ran a table with more sureness than Zoe brought to it herself.
“It was right in the first place. It is right in this place. It will be right in the next place you set it, on account of a bowl of white aster not being a thing a body can set wrong on a table.”
“You have your grandmother’s tongue in you, sweet girl.” Zoe set her hand on the tall braided head and drew it to her side. “The Lord help your husband, whoever the poor soul turns out to be.”
“I have little use for a husband at present.” Sadie set the cider cups on the corner of the table. “I have a ranch to help run and a baby cousin coming at Christmas and a mama who sets asters wrong. My hands are full.”
The words came as easy off her now as easy as they had come hard at eight, at the bound shoulder and the locked door, and Zoe felt it land at her the same warm place it had landed the whole of three years.
They both looked to the window as a wagon came up the long yard at the gravel.
Brody handed his wife down off the wagon, and the two children after her, and Zoe came down off the porch step at the speed seven months of pregnancy would let her.
She had not seen her brother in three years.
She had written him; the wedding, the news of the first child in the summer, the short plain letters a woman sends a brother she loves across a distance she cannot otherwise cross.
He came to her now a little older in the face and a little broader across the chest than the brother she had left in Albany.
He took her in a careful embrace and held her a long moment without a word.
Zoe felt the whole of the three years and the whole of the miles fold up against her brother’s coat.
“Zoe.” His voice had gone rough in her hair. “You have made a thing of yourself out here. I had not pictured it, in the letters. I had not pictured the half of it.”
“Come into the warmth, Brody. There is a dinner at the table going cold around my four arrangements of the aster bowl.”
Bonnie came to the porch step behind her husband.
She had become handsome at twenty-four, handsomer than the Bonnie of Albany who had set Zoe’s two trunks on the porch.
She came up the porch slowly, measuring the house—the deep porch, the glass in the tall windows Wade had fitted in the summer, the long sweep of the good grass south to the cottonwoods and the white cattle scattered thick across it.
Zoe watched her eyes go across all of it and do the arithmetic Bonnie had always done, and come up at a sum she had not expected the total of.
“Zoe.” Bonnie set a cool cheek to Zoe’s on the porch step. “You look very well. The child suits you. And the house is—” Her eyes went once more to the long grass and the white cattle “—the house is a great deal more house than the letters gave it to be.”
“The letters gave you the truth of it, Bonnie. I have not the gift of making a thing sound grander on a page than it stands on a pasture.” Zoe took her sister-in-law’s coat at the porch. “Come in.”
***
They sat down at the long table at noon.
Brody set a question down in front of the roast Zoe had half-looked for since the letters.
“You wrote to me about a thing in the spring of the first year, Zoe; a hard thing, at a man at a chapel wall and a ball at your shoulder. I have carried the half of it with me since then, on account of not being there at the hour of it, and little able to do a thing about it but read it on a page in Albany. The man. Dawson. What has come at him?”
The room went quiet at the question.
Zoe set the carving fork down. “He is in the territorial prison at Deer Lodge, for a term the court at Helena set at him. He will little see the outside of a wall a great many years yet.” She held her brother’s eyes a count.
“Wade rode to him in the second spring. He did not wish to, and Ben pressed him not to, but he rode. He carried the man his grandfather’s letter; the true one, the one from the box under the rose.
Wade left it for him at the cell. The word from Deer Lodge in the summer, off the chaplain there, is that Dawson has read it at least a hundred times since, in the quiet cell, with a clear head at last, and has come to the end of it at the thing Wade’s grandfather asked of him in the letter seventeen years gone. ”
“Which was?” Brody asked.
“To sit at the rose a while before he goes.” Zoe took the carving fork back up.
“He does not have the rose at Deer Lodge. But the chaplain writes that he has found peace in the letter at last, in a cell instead of at a chapel wall, and not with the gold, on account of there being no gold and never having been but the little Wade’s grandfather gave the Lord.
He is a ruined man, Brody. But he is not a raging one at the end of it.
He has set the fever down. It came late to him, and it came behind a prison wall, but it came.
I small find it at me to wish no worse for him than that. ”
Brody held his sister’s eyes a long count.
“You have our mother’s forgiving in you, Zoe.” The line of his jaw eased. “You had it as a girl. You have it yet.”
“I have had a great deal of cause to practice it.” Zoe set a slice on his plate. “Eat your dinner, Brody. The pudding is with Sadie, and Sadie is with the children, and the whole of it will be gone before the grown folk get any if we sit at the philosophy of forgiving past the second course.”
***
George came at half past with Alice and their two children, and Ben Greene and Inga Andersen came behind them at the second wagon, Ben gone wholly gray at fifty-seven now and Inga with a jar of her own preserves in her hands she would not trust to the shelf without setting them there herself.
The front room filled with the noise a family makes after a long habit of Sundays; the children at their own corner.
Sadie run off her feet serving them. George, Brody, and Ben at the far end talking of cattle and rail prices and the winter coming.
Inga in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up, Alice on Zoe’s good side with the ease of a friendship with the depth of three years.
Bonnie sat at Zoe’s right hand.
She had come to the table with her old sharpness, the small remarks set low and neat under the noise of the room as she had always set them; a word about the plainness of Zoe’s dress as a rancher’s wife, a word about the country cut of the roast, a word about the child coming at a Christmas that would keep Zoe the whole of a winter in the nursery and not at anything grander.
Zoe took them as she had learned to take them in Albany, hearing the barb and letting it go past her to wherever the barbs of an unhappy woman go.
Then, at the pudding, Bonnie said something different entirely.
“You have done better than the whole of us reckoned at Albany, Zoe.” It came up at Zoe’s right hand, no barb in it and something rawer under it.
“I said to Brody, at the wedding news, that you had gone and married a hard old rancher at the far end of nowhere with the desperation of a woman with no other roof to go to. I said it plain. I have little gift at the holding of my tongue, as you have cause to know.” Her eyes turned to the head of the table where Wade sat, a touch of gray at his temple now, too, his pale blue eyes looking up at the whole of the loud warm room and coming to rest on Zoe on the far side with the aster bowl by her hand.
“I had not reckoned on the hard old rancher looking at you like that. Nobody has looked at me like that, Zoe. Not the whole of my life. Not Brody at the best of it.”
The room went on around the two of them. Zoe set her hand over her sister-in-law’s a beat.
“He was a hard man the first, Bonnie. I came to this house on a trial and found a stranger’s kitchen and a man shut in his own grief.
There were hours at first I little knew whether I had come to a home or a hard bargain.
The looking came to the both of us slow, and it came on the far side of a thing that near took my life.
It came dear.” She held Bonnie’s hand a count on the cloth.
“You are welcome in this house the whole of the years to come, Bonnie, barb and sharpness and the rest of it. You are my brother’s wife.
You are family. I have little wish in the world to be at odds with you the rest of our lives. ”
Something flitted across Bonnie’s handsome face that was not quite warmth and not quite the old sharpness, either; a thing nearer a truce.
“You have your mother’s forgiving in you, Zoe,” Bonnie said, low.
“I have little deserved the half of it. I do not say I will earn it. I will say I will not forget you offered it.” She drew her hand back, and the corner of her mouth pulled at something near a real smile at the last. “Pass the pudding, sister. Before your energetic girl serves the whole of it to the children and leaves the grown folk not a spoonful.”
***
Wade found Zoe on the porch at the end of the day, in the low gold of the late afternoon, the wagons not yet hitched and the children run off to the yard in the last of the light—Nora staggering after the bigger ones, and Bonnie’s two shrieking at Sadie’s heels over a game Sadie had invented.
He came to her good side on the porch rail and set his hand at the small of her back where the ache sat.
“Your brother has softened, Zoe. And his wife has softened in the one dinner, by the look of the two of you over the pudding.”
“Bonnie and I have reached a truce. The softening will want a great many more of them, if it comes at all.” Zoe leaned at his side at the rail. “I don’t mind the waiting. I have my brother back at the table after a long time. I hadn’t reckoned on that while I was writing the letters.”
Wade set his other hand on the small shape of the child her good Sunday dress; the boy, Doc Reeves had ventured, though Zoe had set her own heart at not minding what it was.
“We have come through a great deal,” he said, low and rough by her ear.
“We have come through the whole of it with both hands open.” Zoe set her hand over his.
“Your grandfather had the right of it in the letter. A fortune held is a fortune that holds the man. We did not hold the world in our two hands. We opened them for it. And the Lord has set all of this in them —” She turned her face at the yard, toward the children, then the white cattle thick at the good grass, and the cottonwoods gone gold at the south fence, and the child coming at Christmas “—the whole of it, in our open hands, in valley I came to three years gone with a trunk and a Bible and not a roof on the Earth to call my own.”
The sun went down red behind the Bridgers.
Wade set the first kiss of the evening at the part of her dark hair. The two of them stood at the porch rail in the low gold light and gave thanks for it to the Lord who had set it in their open hands.
THE END?
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