Chapter 8
They were married within the week, and there was nothing of celebration in it.
The town minister came out to the ranch on a Tuesday morning.
He spoke the words over them in the front parlor.
Garrett, the old foreman, stood witness, turning his hat slowly in his weathered hands.
The whole of it was done before the noon meal.
No guests came up the long road to wish them joy.
No music played. No flowers stood upon the table, for it was not the season.
Cara wore her best dress, the gray one. She held a small posy of nothing, because her hands wanted something to hold.
By the same afternoon, Otis had filed the marriage certificate among his deeds.
He kept it in the locked drawer with his papers of worth.
Then he pulled on his coat and rode out to see to a broken stretch of fence.
She had not looked for a wedding with bells and a white dress.
She was a widow, past her first youth. She had buried her romantic notions in Ohio with her Todd.
But she had hoped perhaps for some small mark of gladness.
A toast. A kind word before the witness.
A hand held a moment longer than it needed to be.
There was none of it. There was a signature, a filed paper, and a man gone back to his fences before the ink was dry.
So Cara Dyer began her married life as a wife in name and a housekeeper in every plain fact.
The Bar D house was grand and comfortless, run like an outfit rather than a home.
Cara moved through its cold rooms in those first days, learning their ways.
She found a kitchen well stocked, a pantry full to the shelves, and good linen folded in the presses.
She found fine things, bought with money and never once warmed by use.
All of it was kept by a hired girl from town named Edie.
She was a quiet, willing girl who came three days a week to scrub and wash.
There was no want of anything in that house that a body could buy.
There was only the want of warmth. That was the one thing wanting, and no money on earth could supply it.
Her days took on a shape of a kind. She rose early and lit the fires.
She cooked, and cleaned, and mended. She put up preserves against the winter.
She learned the house room by room. She learned which boards creaked, which windows stuck, and where the cold came in.
She set flowers on the table when there were flowers to be had.
She aired the unused rooms, though no one used them.
It was good work and honest. It kept her hands busy through the long days.
It did not keep her heart busy. That was the trouble.
A body could sweep a floor and grieve at the very same time. She did, often, both at once.
At first, she set herself to thaw him.
She tried it gently, in small ways, the way one coaxes a wary animal to the hand.
A better supper laid with a pie to follow.
A soft question about his day when he came in stamping from the cold.
A warmth in her voice that asked for only a little warmth back.
She was not a woman to give up easily, and she did not give up easily on him.
Each kindness she offered, Otis received with the same wary courtesy.
He took it up, looked at it, and set it carefully aside.
It was the way a man hands back a gift he has decided he cannot accept.
"You needn't trouble over the pie," he told her once, not unkindly. "Plain fare suits me well enough. I'd not have you wear yourself out on my account."
"It's no trouble at all," Cara said. "I like to bake. It makes the place feel more like a home."
A shadow crossed his face at the word, quick as a cloud over water, and was gone before she could read it.
"The house is well enough as it is," he said. And that was the end of it.
She watched him eat the pie all the same that night.
He ate it slowly, and he ate every crumb.
He did not praise it. He did not say a word.
But he ate it as a hungry man eats. A man who has known what it is to go without.
When his plate was clean, he sat a moment looking at it.
Then he rose, thanked her stiffly, and went to his books.
Cara cleared the plate and thought on it.
He had said the pie was no matter. He had eaten it like it was.
There was a man, she thought, who had taught himself not to want the sweet things.
He could not always make the lesson hold.
She did not weep over these small defeats.
There were a good many of them, had she been the weeping kind.
The warm word that met no answer. The chair drawn nearer that he did not draw nearer in turn.
The hundred small reachings of a hand that closed on nothing.
Each one was a small defeat. Each might have soured a lesser woman, and turned her hard in her turn.
Cara did not let it. She had wept enough her first night under his roof, and found it changed nothing.
Tears were a poor tool for the work in front of her.
So instead she watched, and she learned, and she went carefully.
She crossed him the way a woman crosses ice she is not sure will hold.
She was a patient woman by nature, patient the way the poor learn to be.
And she had begun to suspect a thing about her husband.
He was a puzzle that would never yield to force.
But he might, in time, yield to something gentler.
The hands, at least, were kind to her.
They tipped their hats when she crossed the yard.
They thanked her, shy and rough, for the coffee she carried out on the cold, bright mornings.
They asked after her health. They told her small jokes, and grew red and pleased when she laughed.
They were good men, most of them, hard-worked and far from their own mothers and sisters.
A kind word from the mistress of the house meant something to such men.
They had taken to the new mistress of the Bar D far more readily than the master ever did.
Chief among them was Garrett Ford, the foreman.
He was a bandy-legged old cowhand with white whiskers and shrewd, kindly eyes.
They had seen a great deal of the world, those eyes, and forgiven most of it.
For twenty years, he had worked at Otis's side.
He was, as far as Cara could tell, the one living creature her husband trusted at all.
It was Garrett who first gave her any true word of the man she had married.
"Don't take his coldness to heart, ma'am," the old foreman said one morning.
He had found her standing troubled by the corral fence.
"He's been just so the whole twenty years I've known him.
It ain't you, and it ain't anything you've done.
The man trusts cattle, and he trusts his ledgers, and not one living soul besides. "
"Has he no people?" Cara asked. "No family anywhere in the world?"
"None that I ever heard tell of." Garrett scratched at his whiskers and looked off toward the mountains.
"Came up from nothing, did Otis. Made every inch of this place himself, out of dirt and grit and his own two hands.
And a man don't build a thing like the Bar D out of nothing without it costing him somewhere.
Costs him deep, a thing like that. Just where it cost him, he's never once said.
And I've never been fool enough to ask."
"You're fond of him," Cara said. It was half a question.
The old man's hands went still on the leather.
"Twenty years I've rode for that man," he said at last. "He's hard.
I'll not say he ain't. But he's fair, and he's square.
He never asked a hand to do a thing he wouldn't do himself in the wet and the cold.
I've seen worse men loved by all the county.
And I've seen better men I wouldn't cross the road for.
" He took up his awl again. "So yes, ma'am.
I reckon I am. For whatever that's worth to a body. He don't make it easy."
"No," Cara said softly. "No, he does not."
Cara turned that over in her mind a long while, after the old man had touched his hat and gone.
A man does not build a thing like the Bar D out of nothing without it costing him somewhere.
The words seemed to hold the whole shape of her husband, if only she could learn to read them.
She had taken his coldness that first hard night, for the simple absence of feeling.
For a man born without a heart, as some men seemed to be.
Now she was not so certain. A man born without a heart did not flinch, however slightly, at the word home.
For now and again, she caught it, the flinch behind the flat gray stare.
It was a small thing. A flicker, there and then gone, quickly shuttered away.
It came when she spoke of warm things. Of children.
Of homes. Of the small kindnesses that pass between people who love one another.
Each time, she saw something in him draw back and bar a door.
He barred it the way a man bars a door against a cold he remembers too well and means never to feel again.
She began slowly to wonder whether the ice was not the truth of him at all.
Perhaps the coldness was not the absence of feeling, she thought.
Perhaps it was a wall built up over far too much of it.
Behind that flat gray gaze, there might be a great deal a man was hiding.
A great deal he had buried so deep, and so long ago, that he had nearly forgotten it was there.
She did not know. She could not yet know.
But the more she watched him, the surer she grew.
There was something underneath the cold. And the cold was there to guard it.
The thought did not warm her marriage. Not yet. But it kindled in her something better than warmth for the moment.
It kindled her curiosity, first of all. And underneath the curiosity, against all her good sense, it kindled the first faint stirrings of her compassion.
A wounded creature, she had always found, was one she could not help but want to tend.
And she was beginning to believe, though she could not yet have proved it, that she had married one.