Chapter 9
The last of the spring came warm over the oak country, and the great stone house warmed with it.
Samantha felt it before she could have named it.
It was in the way the days went. Ramsay had used to ride out with the hands at first light and not come in until supper.
Now he found reasons to be near the house.
A fence by the garden that wanted mending, though it had stood twenty years.
A wagon wheel to be greased in the shade of the barn, where the kitchen window looked out.
Idling was not in him. But he idled now, a little, in the middle of the day, and always within sight of the door.
She noticed. She was not a fool, whatever else she was.
And she noticed, too, what was happening in herself, and it frightened her more than Eleanor’s questions.
She had come to Texas to be safe. That was the whole of the plan.
It was a good plan, made in a loft. Marry a decent man.
Keep his house. Be Mrs. Stuart, respectable, with the door shut on Iowa.
Nowhere in the plan had there been room for standing at the kitchen window with a dish in her hands.
Watching a man grease a wagon wheel. Forgetting the dish.
Yet there she stood.
Her heart had been guarded twelve years.
She had built the wall herself, board by board, as she had built her whole life.
It had held against Mrs. West, the county, Nathan.
It was holding now, she told herself. It was only that the quiet, decent man in the yard did not seem to be pushing at it.
He only stood on the other side, mending fences, and let it come down of its own weight.
Against every hard lesson she had ever learned, it was coming down.
She saw the loneliness in him first. That was what began it.
It was in the way he sat at the head of that long table with the empty chairs on either side.
In the way he read of an evening in the front parlor under his father’s likeness, alone, with the lamp turned low.
He looked up when she passed the door as if he had been listening for her step.
In the way that in six weeks he had not had a single friend to the house.
Neighbors, yes. Men about cattle. Nobody who came only to sit.
He rattled in that house. A man alone in a great house, ruling a name and a spread his hard father had left him. A mother who kept the keys. A dozen hands who called him boss. Everybody on the place needed something from him. Nobody on the place simply kept him company.
Hungry for it, he was. She saw that as plain as she saw the roses. Hungry for a companion, with no earthly notion how to ask for one. So he mended fences by the door instead, and hoped.
She knew what that was. She had stood behind a glasshouse for twelve years, hungry the same way, and had not known how to ask either.
So she did not make him ask.
She took her mending out to the porch of an afternoon, where he could see her from the yard.
When he came up the steps for water, she had it ready.
She said what she had never had leave to say at the West table.
That the sky here was bigger than any sky she had known.
That the young hand with the bandaged palm was sweet on the hired girl, and had she better warn the girl or the hand.
That the poems he had left her were the first book she had ever been given, and she had read it through three times.
The evenings were long now, and the light lay gold across the porch boards until nearly eight.
Swallows went over the yard. The roses on the posts had come into their second bloom, and the smell of them was everywhere.
In twelve years she had never had such an hour to herself.
She found she did not know what to do with it except sit in it.
He listened. He answered, slowly, in his few words. Once, he laughed outright, on the porch step, at the matter of the young hand. She saw his whole face change with it. Nothing, she thought, had ever been so worth the trouble.
What he saw was a warmth in her that steadied the cold house. She knew that. She could feel him lean toward it, as a man leans toward a stove in January without knowing he has moved.
And she saw something else, that she was slower to believe.
He looked at her sometimes, when he thought she did not see.
Not the way the county looked. Not the pricing look, nor the hungry one.
He looked at her as a man looks at what he had not thought to want and finds he wants past sense.
It was in his face for a moment. Then he put it away, and went back to the wagon wheel with his jaw set.
A sensible wife was what he had sent for. She had read that in every line of his letters. A woman for the household, an heir, the name carried on. It was a fair bargain, and she had come to keep it. But the man who greased the wheel by the barn was not looking at a bargain. He was looking at her.
She was falling. She knew it. Once, in the blue room, she said the words to herself, and then did not say them again, because saying them made them true.
Never in her life had she held what she could not bear to lose. Now she held it, and it was the most dangerous choice she could have made.
Then the wives came to the parlor, and the train came with them.
It was Eleanor’s afternoon. Once a fortnight the good wives of the county called at the Stuart place. Eleanor gave them coffee in the front parlor with the blinds half drawn against the sun. Samantha poured. It was understood by everyone, without a word said, that a bride on approval poured.
There were six of them that day, in their good visiting dresses, with their fans going. The talk was of the train. It had been of the train for a fortnight, and it would be of nothing else until the train came.
“They say forty children,” the storekeeper’s wife said. “Forty. From the New York streets.”
“Not all from the streets, surely.”
“Where else do such children come from? Nobody puts a child of decent people on a train to strangers.” The storekeeper’s wife took her coffee from Samantha without looking up.
“Thank you, Miss Bree. No, they are gutter children. Street rats. The Society scrubs them, puts them on a train, and we are asked to take them into our homes on faith.”
“My cousin in Missouri took a boy,” said the red-faced woman who had asked for the cake receipt. “He turned out well enough.”
“Then your cousin was fortunate.” That was Eleanor, cool from her chair by the window. “Blood will show, sooner or later. It cannot help but show. A child from that class carries its parents in it whether it will or no. One may feed it and school it. One cannot change what it is.”
“Just so,” said the storekeeper’s wife.
Samantha poured.
“I should not take a girl,” said another woman, thin and anxious, with a mouth like a drawn purse. “A girl of that sort in the house, with sons growing. One hears things.”
“A boy for the yard, then. Old enough to be of use, young enough to be governed.”
“And watched. Always watched.” Eleanor set her cup down. “That is the whole secret of such stock. You do not trust it. You use it, you watch it, and you do not let yourself forget where it came from. My husband always said you could get work out of anything, if you never turned your back on it.”
Somebody laughed. It was the storekeeper’s wife. Somebody else said that was very true. There was more of the same. Samantha stood by the coffee tray with the pot in her hand and heard all of it.
Street rats. Gutter blood. Stock that could not be trusted, that had to be watched, that could never be let to forget.
She heard her own eight-year-old self discussed across the parlor like a calf with the scours. And six good women in visiting dresses agreed that this was only sense.
And she smiled.
She had learned that smile at eight, and it had never failed her. She went round with the pot.
She said, “More coffee, ma’am?” She said, “The cake is very fresh.” Her hand did not shake, because she did not let it. Nobody in that parlor saw more than the Stuart bride, quiet and handsome, who poured so nicely.
Nobody but Eleanor. And Eleanor’s gray eyes rested on her a moment, over the rim of the cup, and went away again.
The wives left at four. Samantha carried the tray to the kitchen, set it down, and stood with both hands flat on the table.
It was warm and quiet in there. Bread was rising under a cloth. Through the window she could see the yard, the barn, and beyond them the long green valley running to the blue hills. All of it was lit gold with the late sun. It was the safe new life. It was all she had climbed onto a train for.
And it rested on ground thinner than she could bear.
She had always known that. But she had not known in the loft that she would come to want the ground itself. The house. The man in the yard. The porch step where he had laughed.
Six women had sat in the parlor this afternoon and said what she was.
In three weeks a train would come. Forty children would stand on a platform.
The whole county would walk the row and say it again.
Out loud. With Ramsay standing among them, listening as he always listened, believing what his father had believed.
She was falling for a man who would not have crossed the yard to look at her if he had known.
Samantha stood in the warm kitchen with her hands flat on the table and made herself breathe. The bread rose under its cloth. Outside, a horse called from the corral. Ramsay’s voice answered it, low and easy, the way he spoke to all of them.
She wanted to go out to him. She wanted it more than she had wanted anything since the ticket.
Instead, she stayed where she was and finished the bread.