Chapter 12
The train came in on a bright, hard morning. The sun was already white on the depot roof, and half the county stood in the dust to watch.
Samantha stood among them.
She had not meant to stand so near. Ramsay had left the wagon at the rail and gone to speak to a man about a bull.
Eleanor had gone straight to the committee table where the preacher’s wife sat with her ledger.
Samantha had meant to stay by the wagon.
But the crowd had moved, as crowds do, and carried her with it.
Now she stood at the front of it with the platform boards not ten feet away.
The whistle blew, long and hoarse. It was the same whistle. It had not changed in twelve years.
Then the engine came round the bend below the town, black and enormous, throwing steam. The platform shook under it. The county leaned forward as one. Samantha did not lean. She stood very still with her hands folded, and felt the whole of her go cold in the white sunshine.
The cars came alongside. Faces showed at the windows. Small faces, scrubbed pink, with hair wetted flat.
She could not look at them. She looked anyway.
They came down in a line, as she had come down, with a Society man in front and a Society lady behind. There were not forty. There were nineteen. Somebody in the crowd said so, disappointed, as if the county had been shorted on a shipment.
The children were ranged along the boards, oldest to youngest, in coats that did not fit them, with paper tags pinned to the coats.
A little girl of five was crying without any noise.
A boy of twelve stood with his chin up and his fists shut.
Between them the others stood as children stand who have been told to stand, not to fidget, to smile.
Most of them were smiling. Samantha had smiled too.
The Society man said the things. Good Christian homes. Schooling. Treated as one of the family. The words came out exactly as they had come out on the Iowa boards. Samantha, standing in the Texas dust, heard them in the same voice. She knew she was going to have to stand there and not fall down.
She did not fall down. She had never been permitted to.
The county walked the row.
It went as it always went. The winsome ones went first. A woman in a green bonnet knelt to the crying girl of five and wiped her face with a handkerchief.
The child stopped crying and put her arms up.
That was done. A big rancher from up the valley took the boy with the fists, because he liked the look of the fists.
Two yellow-haired twins went together to a Swede farmer who could not tell them apart and did not try.
One by one the smallest and the sweetest were led away to the committee table.
The row grew shorter. The crowd thinned.
Samantha watched everyone go. She could not stop watching. It was the worst day of her life come round again. She was living it from the wrong side, and every scrubbed hopeful face was her own.
There. That one, with the too-big coat. That was her.
And that one, who was trying so hard to smile that it hurt to look at.
She gripped her own hands together until the knuckles whitened. She stood, watched, and did not make a sound.
Then the row was down to one.
He stood at the far end of the boards, where the row had thinned to nothing.
He was ten, perhaps. Thin as a lath, in a coat that had been made for a bigger boy and hung off him.
His hair was cut close and stuck up at the crown.
He was not smiling. He had plainly been told to, and had plainly decided not to.
Now he stood with his tag pinned crooked, his thin arms hanging.
He looked at the county the way a cornered dog looks at a stick.
His eyes were the thing. Samantha saw them across ten feet of dust and could not look away.
They were hard, old, watchful past what a child’s eyes had a right to be.
They had been betrayed. You could see it.
Somebody had betrayed him, then somebody else.
By now he had stopped waiting for kindness and started waiting only for the next blow.
His whole thin body was braced for it, standing there alone on the boards.
Two families walked up to him, looked, and walked on. He glared at their backs.
“That one’s trouble,” a man said, near Samantha. “You can see it in him.”
“Society man says he’s been trouble the whole way down. Won’t smile. Won’t answer to anybody.”
“Well. There you are.”
The Society lady was talking to him, low, bending down. He did not look at her. He looked at the county. The county looked back. Nobody moved.
Samantha at eight. That was what he was. Samantha to the bone.
She had not been hard-eyed. She had been quiet, had kept her head down.
That was the difference between them. But she knew what he was doing, standing there braced.
He was making his face say that he did not care, so that when they did not want him it would not show.
She had done that for years, until her face forgot every other look.
Her hand had found the hitching rail beside her without her knowing. She held it. She held it so hard the wood bit her palm. If she did not hold on, she was going to cross those ten feet of dust. She would kneel down in front of him, in front of the whole county. And she could not.
Could not. She was Miss Bree, the Stuart bride on approval. Eleanor was ten yards off.
Eleanor was walking toward the platform.
Samantha saw it and could not breathe. The old woman went up the steps in her black silk without hurry.
She crossed the boards to where the boy stood alone at the end.
She stopped in front of him. He looked up at her, braced.
She looked down at him with those cool gray eyes that missed nothing. Neither of them said a word.
Then Eleanor reached down and took hold of his arm through the too-big coat.
Her fingers pressed along it, from shoulder to wrist. She took the other arm. Next she turned him a little, by the shoulder. She looked at his back. Her eyes went to his hands. He let her do it. He stood like a post and let her, jaw set, eyes fixed on nothing.
Samantha’s own arm ached, all the way down, where fingers had pressed it twelve years ago on a platform in Iowa. She had not felt it in years. She felt it now.
“Strong enough,” Eleanor said. Her voice carried in the still hot air. “He will do for the yard.”
She turned, walked to the committee table, and signed for him.
It took a minute. The preacher’s wife wrote a line in her ledger.
The Society man shook Eleanor’s hand and said a word about visits.
Eleanor answered, but Samantha did not hear it.
Then it was done. A strong back for the Stuart yard, signed for, at no charge but board and schooling.
The boy stood on the empty platform where he had been left, and nobody had asked his name.
Samantha knew it anyway. She had heard the Society lady say it, low, when she bent to him. Harry. Just that. No more than that, on his tag.
He came home to the Stuart place in the back of the spring wagon, among the straw.
Ramsay drove. Eleanor sat beside him, upright, and did not look round.
Samantha sat on the far side of Eleanor and did not look around either, because she could not trust her face if she did.
Behind them, in the wagon bed, the boy rode with his knees drawn up, his bundle on them, his back against the sideboard.
He watched the road unroll behind. He said nothing. Nobody spoke to him.
Once, on the long climb into the oak country, she heard him shift in the straw. That was all.
The house came up out of the valley in the last of the afternoon. Ramsay drew up at the steps. He handed his mother down, then Samantha, steady, and let her go. Then he went round to the tailboard and stood there.
“Down,” he said. He said it as he would have said it to a horse. Not unkind. Not anything.
The boy climbed down.
Eleanor stood at the foot of the porch steps and looked at him.
“You will sleep in the tack room off the barn. There is a pallet. You will be up when the hands are up, and you will eat in the kitchen after they have eaten. Wood, water, hens, and whatever else you are set to. You will go to the school in town when it opens in the fall, because the Society requires it. Straight back after. You will not go in the house except you are sent for.” She looked at him a moment longer. “Is that understood?”
The boy said nothing.
“Answer me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice was flat, thin, older than he was.
“Good. Ramsay, show him the tack room. Miss Bree, there will be supper wanted.”
That was all. She turned, went up the steps, and in.
Samantha stood in the yard, with the roses smelling sweet on the porch posts and the swallows going over. She watched Ramsay walk the boy across to the barn without a word. Taken for use and not for love. Given a pallet and a list of chores. A place at the corner of no one’s heart at all.
Exactly as she had come to the West farm.
That night she lay awake in the blue room with the window open. She did not sleep. She did not try to.
The house was quiet. The valley was quiet. Far off, a coyote called from the hills and another answered. She lay on her back in the great bed with her hands folded on the coverlet.
And below her, in the tack room off the barn, on a pallet, a marked boy of ten was breathing in the dark.
She could not hear him. The barn was too far off for that. But she heard him anyway. It was the way she had once heard her own breath in the loft. Braced. Awake. Waiting for the next blow, and telling himself he did not care.
He was hers. He was her own kind, her own kin, the only soul in Texas who knew what she knew. And she was forbidden to claim him. She could not so much as go down to the barn and tell him her name.
Samantha lay in the dark and listened to a boy she could not hear.
The platform had followed her. It had come all the way to Texas. Now it slept in the barn.