Chapter 10
She pieced him together the way she had once pieced together her letters, a little at a time, out of whatever came to hand.
Nobody told her about the elder Stuart. Nobody needed to.
He was everywhere on the place, though he had been two winters in his grave.
He was in the likeness over the parlor mantel, hard-jawed and unsmiling in a black coat.
The fences that ran straight as rulers were his.
He had walked every rod of them and would not have a post out of true.
The hands still said the old man when they meant the one who had built it all. And he was in his son, in the set of the jaw, in the gray eyes that gave nothing away. Samantha sometimes looked from the likeness to Ramsay and back. She could not have said where one left off.
The place itself told her more. There was a chair in the front parlor that nobody sat in, a big leather chair with the arms worn pale.
Ramsay walked around it every evening as if the old man were still in it.
There was a riding crop on a nail in the barn that nobody used and nobody moved.
The whole house had the feel of a room where somebody has just gone out.
He might yet come back, and had better find it all as he left it.
She learned the shape of it from Eleanor over the mending in the evenings.
Eleanor did not gossip. But she spoke of her husband as other women spoke of the weather, as a fact so large it did not need explaining.
He had come into the Hill Country with a wagon, forty head of scrub cattle, and nothing else.
Against drought he had held the land, against Comanche, against men who wanted it worse than he did.
Never had he borrowed a dollar nor forgiven a debt.
By the time he died, there was no name in three counties that stood higher.
Every inch of it he had built with his own two hands and his own iron will.
“He was not an easy man,” Eleanor said once, with the needle going in and out. “He did not intend to be. Easy men do not build anything that lasts.”
Samantha said nothing. She thought of a boy growing up under that jaw.
She learned the rest from Ramsay himself, though he did not know he was telling it.
He never spoke of his father directly. But his father was in every word he said.
Blood tells. You cannot trust bad stock.
A man is what his people were, and no amount of feeding changes it.
He said them the way he said the sun rose in the east, without heat, without thinking.
They had been said across the supper table every night of his boyhood, by a man nobody argued with.
Not once had he turned them over. He believed what he believed because his father had believed it. His father had been right about all the rest, so why not this.
Once, on the porch, she came near to asking him.
“Did your father ever hire a man off a train?” she said. It came out lighter than it felt. “One of the Society children, grown up. Or take one on the place?”
Ramsay looked at her, a little surprised.
“No. Never. He wouldn’t have such stock about. Said you might as well take in a rattlesnake and hope it changed its mind.” He shrugged. “He’d seen it go wrong, I expect. He’d seen most things.”
“I expect he had,” Samantha said, and looked out at the valley.
That was as near as she came.
And yet, under the inherited hardness there was another man, and she found him a piece at a time too.
She found him first in the horse barn, at dusk, when she had gone out with scraps for the barn cat and heard a voice.
It was Ramsay. He was in the end stall with the old bay mare that had been his father’s saddle horse, and the mare was lame.
Samantha had seen her favor the near fore for a week.
Now Ramsay stood at her head in the half dark, one hand on her neck, talking to her low.
The foreman worked at the hoof with a knife.
“Easy, old girl. Easy. He’s nearly done. I know it. I know. There now.”
The mare stood for it, because he asked her to. Samantha stood in the barn door with the scraps in her hand and did not go in.
There was nothing in his voice she had ever heard at the supper table. It was gentle past belief. He was speaking to an old lame horse as she had once longed for somebody to speak to her. He did not know he was doing it. He would not have thanked her for seeing.
She went away without the cat getting its scraps.
In the blue room that night, she sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap.
She heard it over again. Easy, old girl.
There now. Nobody had ever said there now to her in her life.
She had not known until that moment how badly she had wanted someone to.
The green hand showed her the same man again, the young one with the bandaged palm.
He had let a gate stand open and lost a dozen steers into the brush.
It was a bad mistake. It cost a day’s work for six men to get them back.
Samantha braced for what she would have heard on the West farm, and heard Ramsay’s flat, quiet voice in the yard instead.
“You’ll ride with me tomorrow. You’ll shut every gate on the place, and I’ll watch you do it. Then you’ll do it again the day after. A man learns a thing by doing it, not by being shouted at. My father shouted. I never learned a blessed thing from it but how to keep out of his way.”
The boy went red and said yes, sir. Ramsay nodded and went in. He did not know she had heard.
There were other marks, small, that she added to the account.
He paid the hands on the day, never a day late, and paid them himself, from his own hand.
The same page of the poems he read twice if he liked it.
He took his coffee black and never said so, but drank whatever she gave him.
When the hired girl broke a cup that had been his grandmother’s, he looked at the pieces for a moment.
Then he said it was only a cup, and went out.
Fair. That was the word she came to, turning it over in the blue room at night.
Under the hardness he was fair. Gentle with a lame horse.
Patient with a green hand. Slow to anger and slower to hold it.
He carried his father’s expectations on his shoulders like a yoke, all of them, every certainty the old man had ever drilled into him.
But he did not know the yoke could come off. That was the thing. Nobody had ever told him he was allowed to set it down. So he walked under it, straight-backed, and called it sense.
She was falling for him. Not for the man his father had made.
For the one underneath, who talked to horses in the dark and would not shout at a boy.
She had thought, in the loft, that she was coming south to marry a stranger for a roof.
She had not thought there might be a man under the roof worth the marrying.
There was.
It was folly. She said the word to herself plainly, so there should be no mistake.
A woman built on a hidden past, falling for a man raised to despise exactly what she was.
There was no sense in it anywhere. If she had come across such a woman in a book, she would have shut the book.
She would have said the woman was a fool, and deserved whatever came.
She said it to herself lying awake, and it changed nothing. In the morning, she would come down, and he would be in the kitchen doorway with the light behind him. He would say good morning, and look at her when he said it. The whole careful argument would go out of her head like smoke.
She had never before been unable to make herself act with sense. It frightened her. For the first time since she was eight years old, she was not entirely in charge of what became of her.
And she found, to her own astonishment, that she did not altogether mind.
Far to the north, in a county she had run from in the dark, a minister sat down at his desk. A letter from Texas lay open before him.
He was an elderly man, careful and slow.
The letter had lain a month on his desk before he found the time for it.
He had buried the Wests in the rain three months before.
He remembered the girl at the back of the churchyard very well.
Everybody remembered the girl. There was not a soul in that county who could not have told the lady from Texas exactly what she wished to know. And a good deal she had not asked.
All of it, he wrote down.
His hand was small, cramped, careful. It covered both sides of three sheets, because he was a thorough man and the lady had asked for particulars.
What the county knew, he wrote. Then, being thorough, he walked over to the courthouse and asked the clerk what else there was.
The clerk had a great deal to say. There had been talk since the spring, and some of it was very ugly talk.
The minister wrote that down too, with a note that he could not vouch for it.
Then he sealed the letter and posted it south.
It went into a mail sack, and the sack went onto a train.
Neither Samantha nor Ramsay knew of it. She was on the porch that evening with her mending.
He was on the step below her, with the swallows going over the yard.
Slowly, in his few words, he was telling her about the spring roundup.
She listened with her needle stopped. Neither of them was thinking of Iowa.
But the letter was on its way. It was carrying all she had buried south at the pace of a train. Toward the stone house in the oak country. Toward the cold gray hands that had sent for it.
And on the porch, in the gold evening, she laughed at a word of his about a steer. He looked up at her. Neither of them heard the whistle of any train at all.