Chapter 12
The train came in on a bright, raw morning, and half the county came in with it.
Cara went too.
She could not have stayed away to save her life.
A pull drew her down to that platform, past all her good sense, past her husband's cold command of the night before.
She had lain awake on it. She had told herself to let it be.
To mind the terms of her marriage, and put the train from her mind as he had bid her.
And in the morning, she had put on her good bonnet and gone all the same.
To look was all she meant to do, or so she told herself.
Even as she told it, she did not quite believe it.
There was an ache in her arms that did not care for sense.
To her surprise, Otis came as well.
He said no word of why. He had been against the whole business, hard against it, only the night before.
Yet in the morning, he hitched the team in silence and handed her up onto the seat.
He drove the long road into town with his jaw set like gray stone.
His eyes were fixed on the road ahead. Cara did not dare to ask him why he came.
She only watched the side of his hard face and wondered.
At the meetinghouse, he did not go forward into the crowd.
He stood at the back instead, well back, his hat pulled low and his shoulders squared.
He had the look of a man braced against a blow he would not name.
A man standing his ground before something he dreaded.
Cara left him to it. She moved up nearer the front, where the families gathered, drawn despite herself toward the children.
A young woman had charge of them.
She was brisk and neat and travel-worn, with a ledger carried under one arm.
She had the tired, steady look of someone long at thankless work.
Miss Francine Wise, she gave her name to the gathered families.
She was the placing agent, she told them.
She had come the whole long way west with the children to find them homes among good Christian people.
One by one, she handed them down from the cars.
One by one, she ranged them along the platform, in a row for all to see.
She smoothed a collar here, murmured a low word of encouragement there.
She had done it many times before. It showed in the weary gentleness of her hands.
Cara warmed to the young woman at once, watching her work.
There was kindness in her, under the briskness.
She crouched to speak to the little ones at their own height.
She tucked a loose curl behind a small ear.
She told each child, low, to stand straight and not to fret.
She gave each one a squeeze of the hand before she let it go.
It was a grim trade she plied, Cara thought.
To gather up the cast-off children of the cities.
To carry them across a continent. To stand them up to be chosen, or not chosen, by strangers.
A body would need a strong heart for such work.
A body would need to harden some part of herself or break.
Cara wondered which the young woman had done, and guessed it was a little of both.
The children stood in a row for the families to look over.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, scrubbed and tagged and blinking in the bright mountain light.
They wore their best, which was no great thing.
Donated coats and mended stockings, all of it a size too big or a size too small.
Their faces were washed pink. Their hair was combed flat with water.
They had been made as pleasing as the agent could make them, for pleasing was the whole of their hope.
The small ones clutched at the hands of the bigger ones.
Frightened, not understanding, knowing only that something was about to happen to them and that they had no say in it.
The families pressed close to inspect them.
And the old, terrible commerce began again.
It was the same that had played out thirty years before in a Missouri town.
The weighing of a child by the strength of his arms and the soundness of his teeth.
Cara watched it with an ache rising sharp in her throat.
She had thought she understood what she came to see.
She had not known it would be so hard to watch.
Then her eye found the boy at the end of the line, and her breath caught.
He stood a little apart from the rest, as though he had set himself there, and did not mind it.
Eleven, he looked, perhaps twelve. Thin and wiry, all sharp angles and wary stillness.
Scabbed knuckles and a jaw held too tight for a child his age.
He did not clutch at anyone. There was no one to clutch at, and he wanted none.
He did not smile for the families the way the little ones were coaxed to smile.
He did not plead with his eyes. He only stood and stared out at the crowd with a flat, hard defiance.
It all but dared them to come close, dared them to find him wanting.
The set of him struck Cara to the bone, though she could not say why.
It was not pity, exactly, though there was pity in it.
It was a strange jolt of knowing, as though she had seen the boy before.
She had not. She was certain she had not.
And yet the look of him pulled at something in her, some thread that ran she knew not where.
She stood and stared at the hard-faced boy.
The feeling grew, and she could not account for it at all.
Beside her, of a sudden, she felt her husband go rigid.
She had not heard him come up. But he was there now, close behind her shoulder. The change in him was so great that she felt it through the very air. She turned to look at him, and what she saw there frightened her badly.
Gray to the lips, he had gone.
His flat eyes were fixed on the boy at the end of the line, fixed and unblinking.
The child might have been a ghost risen up out of the cold ground before him.
One hand had closed white-knuckled on the brim of the hat he held.
He was not breathing, or near enough to it.
Every hard line of him had gone still as struck stone.
She had never seen him so, not in all their months. She had not known he could look so.
"Otis?" she said softly, alarmed. "What is it? What's wrong?"
He did not answer her. He did not seem to hear her voice at all. He had gone somewhere she could not follow, somewhere far back and far down. The boy on the platform had taken him there.
For the sight of the boy had hit Otis Dyer like a fist driven clean into his chest.
He had known the train was coming. He had known the children would be lined up just so.
That was the very reason he had forbidden Cara the night before.
And the reason he had come this morning all the same, drawn against his own will.
He had told himself he only meant to stand at the back and see it done.
To prove, once and for all, that it had no hold on him.
He had been wrong. The hold was total. One look down that line of scrubbed and waiting faces.
And the thing he had buried thirty years deep came clawing up out of the ground.
It was himself. It was himself, thirty years gone.
Standing on just such a platform, in just such a ragged line, thin and rawboned and braced for the worst. The same defiant jaw, set against the tears.
The same flat refusal to beg, to please, to make himself soft and biddable for the choosing.
The same wary, friendless stare he had worn himself.
He had worn it the very day the Craws walked up and pried open his mouth to count his teeth.
He had buried that boy on a long drive north and never once gone back for him.
He had spoken of him to no one in thirty years.
He had near forgotten, on the good days, that the boy had ever been.
And here the child stood now, alive, breathing, flesh and bone in the morning light.
Waiting on the kindness of strangers, exactly as Otis had once waited, and waited, and waited in vain.
The years fell away beneath him like a rotten floor.
No longer was he the master of the Bar D.
He was a boy with a tag pinned to his coat, and no one coming, and no one ever going to come.
He could feel the old straw under him. He could smell the cold barn and the leather of the belt.
He could taste the shame of the smiling, the smiling until his face cracked.
The begging without words for someone, anyone, to choose him.
All of it came back at once, in a single cruel flood, called up by the sight of a thin boy in a donated coat.
Thirty years he had spent building walls against this very memory.
Thirty years of land and cattle and cold.
And it had taken only one boy on one platform to bring the whole of it down on his head.
Cara knew none of this.
But she followed her husband's stricken stare to the defiant boy, then back again to his gray and stricken face.
And something in the matched set of their two jaws told her a thing before she rightly knew how she knew it.
It told her plain without a word, the secret he had carried locked in him the whole of their marriage.
She did not have the whole of it. She could not.
But she had the shape of it now, and the shape was enough to take her breath.
The boy on the platform was her husband, made young again, and set out for strangers to pass by.
And her husband, standing gray and stricken at her side, was that same boy grown old.
He looked on at his own ruin and could not lift a hand.
She was looking at one wound. She was only seeing it twice.