Chapter 7
The train that carried Cara Fletch west was six days bringing her to the ranch.
She watched the country change the whole long way.
The green farms of the East gave over to prairie.
Mile upon mile of it, flat and golden under a wide sky.
The prairie gave over at last to a vast and rising land of grass and far blue mountains.
It was grander and emptier than anything she had ever seen.
With every mile, her old life fell further behind her.
With every mile, she let herself hope a little for the new one waiting at the end.
She had learned in a hard school not to hope too much. She could not help but hope a little.
Two-and-thirty years old she was, and a widow these two years past.
The grief she carried did not show on her face.
It was a warm, steady face, with kind dark eyes.
The world had not yet managed to harden the softness out of her.
Her hands were work-worn, the nails kept short, the knuckles a little reddened.
Her dress was plain and clean, mended neatly at one cuff where she thought it would not show.
Pretty enough, she had been called in her time, though never beautiful.
That had never once troubled her. Beauty was not a thing she had ever had the leisure to set store by.
What troubled her in the small hours of the night was the silence where a family ought to have been.
She had married young and for love. A kind man named Todd Fletch, who drove a delivery wagon through the streets of a town in Ohio.
He had been no great catch, her Todd. He had no land, no money, no prospects to speak of.
But he had an easy laugh, and a good heart, and he had loved her plainly.
For five good years, they had been happy together and poor together.
They had counted the one a fair trade for the other.
Then a hard winter came down on them. The fever came with it, sweeping through the cold streets.
It took both her husband and the infant son she had borne him, inside a single cruel month.
She had buried them side by side in the frozen ground.
Then she had gone on living, because there was nothing else a body could do.
The advertisement she had answered in the spring.
She still had it with her, folded soft and small inside her glove.
She had read it so many hundreds of times that the creases had worn nearly through.
The words were plain, almost cold. A steady woman wanted, of good sense and sound health.
Security offered, and a fine house, and a place in a respectable home.
Of love, it said not a single word. Cara had read that absence and weighed it.
Then she let herself fill it in with hope, the way a lonely heart always will.
A man so careful with his promises, she had reasoned, would surely be careful in the keeping of them.
Perhaps the warmth in him was only shy, she told herself.
Perhaps it was buried, and wanted only patience to bring it up.
Perhaps a good marriage might grow from a plain beginning, the way a garden grows from bare brown ground.
She had wanted, above all else, to belong to someone again.
To have a roof that was hers, and a name that was hers.
To have a person across the table who was glad she was there.
So she had packed her small trunk and spent her small savings on the fare.
She had come west to be the wife of a man she had never once laid eyes on.
At a lonely platform beneath the mountains, the train at last set her down.
The station was no more than a wooden shed and a leaning sign with a name burned into it.
A cold wind came down off the peaks and tugged at her bonnet.
For a long moment she stood quite alone on the boards, her trunk beside her, her heart beating high in her throat.
She looked about her for the man who was to be her husband.
For a moment she feared no one had come at all.
A tall figure waited by a wagon at the far end of the platform.
He did not come forward to meet her. He only stood and watched her approach, still as a fence post, his face giving nothing back.
Up close, he was tall indeed, hard-built through the shoulders, iron-gray at the temples.
His flat, cool eyes moved over her, slow and careful.
It was the way a man's eyes move over a horse led out for inspection.
Not unkind, that look. Not warm either. Only measuring.
She felt herself weighed in it and priced.
She could not have said whether the sum came out to his liking.
"Mrs. Fletch," he said. It was not quite a question.
"Yes," she managed, over the beating of her heart. "And you must be Mr. Dyer."
"Otis will do." He bent and lifted her trunk as though it weighed nothing at all. "Wagon's here. It's an hour out to the house. You'll want your coat about you. It comes cold off the mountains, even in summer."
That was the whole of his welcome.
There was no smile in it, and no warmth, and no glad word for a woman come a thousand miles.
She had pictured this moment a hundred times on the long ride west. She had pictured many things.
A shy man, perhaps, who would not meet her eye.
A gruff one who would warm by the second day.
A kind one even, against all hope, who would take her hand and say he was glad she had come.
She had not pictured this. This cool and careful weighing, as a man weighs a heifer at the rail.
She put her own hopeful face away quietly, the way a woman folds a dress she will never wear.
He handed her up onto the wagon seat, correct and impersonal, his eyes already on the team.
Then he climbed up beside her and shook the reins.
They rolled away from the little station into the great empty country.
The ride out passed in near silence.
Cara asked him gentle questions as they went, of the land, the weather, the work of the ranch.
She did it partly to be friendly, partly to fill the vast quiet between them.
He answered each question plainly and briefly, in as few words as the asking allowed.
He offered nothing of his own. He did not ask her a single question in return.
He did not ask after her journey, nor her people, nor the life she had left behind.
The country rolled by them, grand and empty and gold.
She had never felt so far from everything she knew.
Never so alone with another soul sitting close beside her.
The house, when it rose at last against the mountains, was finer than she had dared to imagine.
Squared timber and good gray stone. Glass in every window, catching the last of the light.
A wide porch facing the great peaks. A lesser woman, come west only for comfort, might have been gladdened to the heart by the sight of it.
Cara looked at the fine, cold front of it, dark against the darkening sky.
Without quite knowing why, she felt a small chill settle into her chest. It was a beautiful house.
It did not look like a home. It looked like a thing a man had built to be looked at and not to be lived in.
Supper was waiting when they came in, laid by a hand Cara did not yet know.
They ate it at opposite ends of a long table, in a dining room built for a large family that had never come.
The food was good, plentiful, and well-cooked.
The silence between them was vast. Cara looked down the length of the polished table at the stranger she had agreed to marry.
He looked at his plate. The candles burned between them, and no word passed for a long while.
It was over that first cold supper that Otis Dyer laid out his terms.
"You'll have understood the arrangement from my letter," he said, his voice even and unhurried. "I'll say it plain all the same, so there's no mistake between us. You'll keep my house, and see it run well. In time, you'll give me an heir, God willing. And you'll want for nothing a body can buy."
Cara set down her fork. The small sound of it was loud in the quiet room. "And beyond that?" she asked.
"Beyond that, nothing." He met her eyes across the table without a flicker.
"I'm not a warm man, Mrs. Fletch. I'll not pretend to be one.
And I'll not have you fooling yourself otherwise.
You'll have my respect. You'll have my protection, and a fair hand in all things, and that is no small thing in this world.
But tenderness is not in me to give. Best you know it now, plainly, and not go on hoping for what isn't there. "
The words landed in her quietly, one by one, like stones dropped into a still dark pond.
She had come west for a marriage and found a contract.
She had come for a family, and found a fine cold house, with a fine cold man at the head of it.
For a moment, the disappointment rose so sharply in her that she feared it might show on her face.
She gathered herself, the way she had learned to gather herself over a grave.
She thought of the husband and the child in the ground in Ohio.
She thought of the long road that lay behind her now, all those miles.
And she thought of the plain, hard fact that she had nowhere else on this earth to go.
"I understand you," she said at last, steady enough. "I'll keep your house well, Mr. Dyer. You'll have no complaint of me."
"Good," Otis said. And he went back to his supper. The matter was settled in his mind, as plainly as a tally of cattle entered in a book.
That night, Cara lay alone in a fine bare room in a house with no warmth anywhere in it.
She listened to the wind work along the eaves, a lonely sound in a lonely place.
The grief she had thought long buried rose up fresh in the dark, as grief will.
It came when a body was too tired and too far from home to hold it down.
She wept for a little while, quietly, with the blanket pressed to her mouth.
She did not want the cold man down the hall to hear her and think her weak.
She wept for her Todd, and for the baby, gone these two years.
And she wept for the new family she could already feel slipping away, cold and out of reach, before it had even begun.