Chapter 23
The county came round within the week. It came round as a county always does, all together, as if it had never been anywhere else.
Samantha had not expected it. She had stood on the carpet and told the truth to a dozen faces. She had watched them change. That, she had thought, was the end of any warmth the county might feel for her. She braced herself for the sidelong look at the store that first day after.
It did not come.
What came instead was the red-faced woman, on the second morning, in her wagon, with a basket. She got down in the yard without waiting to be asked. Up the porch steps she came, took both of Samantha’s hands in her big rough ones, and held them.
“I sat in that parlor,” she said, “and I never said a word for you. Not one. I’m ashamed of it.
I’ve been ashamed of it two nights running and I couldn’t stand a third.
” She let go. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and looked at the basket as if she had forgotten it.
“That’s a pie. It’s not as good as yours.
My cousin in Missouri took a boy off a train, you know.
I said so once. I should have said it louder. ”
On the third day, the storekeeper’s wife came, stiff and correct. She said that she hoped Miss Bree would not think the less of her for what she had believed. Samantha said she did not. It was true. She had believed worse of herself, and for longer.
Nothing was seen of the thin woman with the drawn-purse mouth.
But her husband came, on business about a bull.
He stood in the yard turning his hat. The sheriff had told it at the store as it happened, he said.
There was not a man in the county who thought other than that Miss Bree had done right.
And the old fellow with the barn-bar, he said.
If he was living, he’d like to shake his hand.
Samantha went in after that one and stood a while in the kitchen with her back to the door.
It was told at every table in the valley.
She learned that from the hired girl, who came back from her mother’s on Sunday full of it.
How the train-girl at the Stuart place had stood up in front of the whole county, the sheriff, a man from Iowa.
How she had told the truth of it plain, and looked the man in the eye.
The man had gone for her. Ramsay Stuart had put him down on his mother’s carpet with one blow.
The sheriff had said self-defense. And how Ramsay had knelt to the boy.
The county loved nothing better than a fallen villain and a brave woman.
Samantha had not known that. She had only ever known the county’s other face, the sidelong one, in a church pew.
Now she saw the front of it. It was warmer than she had ever guessed.
She did not know quite what to do with it.
So she did what she had always done. She fed people.
She poured coffee. The cake, she said, was fresh.
But she said it with her head up now, and she did not smile the eight-year-old smile. She smiled her own.
At the end of the week she was still the girl off the train. That, she would always be. It was only that the county had decided it liked her anyway, and she found, to her surprise, that she could let it.
Their love stood open now, and it was the stronger for it.
That was the strangest part of all. Samantha turned it over many times in the blue room at night, with the window open on the valley.
She had thought the secret was the wall between them.
She had thought that if it ever came down, there would be nothing left standing.
It had come down, in the worst way it could have come.
Behind it there was not nothing. There was more.
He knew her. That was the whole of it. He knew the loft, the tag, the corner of the table, the barn. Every buried secret she had, he knew, because she had dug it up herself and set it on the carpet. He had put out his hand across all of it and said my wife.
There was nothing left in the dark to fear. She could not get used to it. She kept reaching for the stone, out of twelve years’ habit, and finding it gone.
He looked at her differently. She had not thought he could look at her more than he had.
He did. Across the supper table, with the lamp between them, he looked at her as if he were still seeing her entire.
He did not mean to stop. She looked back, and did not hold her face still, because she no longer had to.
It was a lesson she was still learning. It came slowly, like the reading had, a little at a time.
On the porch step in the blue dusk, with the whippoorwill calling, he kissed her. It was not careful now, though it was still slow. Afterward, he rested his forehead against hers as he had before, and said her name.
“Samantha Bree,” he said. “I’ll say it in the church, and I’ll say it loud.”
“You had better,” she said.
She heard him laugh in the dark.
The wedding was set again, three weeks off, as if nothing had happened. The banns had been read once already. The preacher read them a second Sunday, and a third, to a church that was fuller than it had been all year. Nobody in it looked sidelong.
Ramsay had gone to the preacher himself, the day after the parlor.
He had told him plainly what the whole county knew, and asked whether it made any difference to the church.
The preacher had said the church had married a good many people off a good many roads.
He did not see why a railroad should be any different.
The wives were making a gown. Samantha did not know how to bear it.
Harry became a Stuart.
Not in a day. Such things take papers. Papers take a lawyer. A lawyer takes a ride to the county seat and back. Ramsay went, the second week. He came back with two folded documents that had seals on them and a great many words. He set them on the kitchen table in front of the boy.
“That’s a good many words,” he said. “Most of them are lawyer’s words. I’ll tell you what they come to, because the lawyer told me, and I made him say it plain.”
He put his finger on the first paper.
“This one is a declaration. I signed it before the county clerk, and it’s filed in his book.
It says that Ramsay Stuart takes Harry, who has no other name, to be his lawful heir.
That’s how the law of Texas does it. There’s no other way to make a son of a boy who wasn’t born to you.
It gives you my name. It gives you a share of what’s mine when I’m gone. ”
He moved his finger to the second.
“The lawyer said the declaration by itself only goes so far. If there should ever be other children in this house, the law would cut your share down small. So this one is my will, drawn the same day. It says the ranch and the stock go as I mean them to go, not as a statute reckons them. You’ll not be cut down small. Not while I have a pen.”
He read the first paper aloud then. It took him a while. When he came to the place near the bottom where it said the boy’s name, Harry Stuart, in a clerk’s neat hand, he stopped. He turned the paper around on the table. He set the boy’s finger under the name, and held it there.
Harry looked at it a long time. He did not say a word. He did not need to.
There was a room in the house for him now.
Ramsay had said so the morning after the parlor.
He had gone out to the tack room himself.
The pallet and the folded blanket he carried across the yard, up the stairs.
He put them in the small room across the hall from Samantha’s, the one that had a window on the corrals.
Harry had followed him up. He stood in the door a good while, looking at the room without going in.
“That’s mine?”
“It’s yours.”
“To sleep in. Not to clean.”
“Yours to sleep in. There’s a bed being sent from town.
This’ll do till then.” Ramsay had set the pallet down and straightened up.
“You’ll still do the wood. A man does his share on this place, and you’re on it.
But you’ll do it as my son, not as the yard boy.
You’ll eat at my table, and you’ll sit down to do it. Is that understood?”
Harry had understood.
He was slow to believe it. Samantha watched him be slow, and did not push, because she knew that slowness from the inside.
He kept his bundle knotted under the bed for a fortnight.
She saw him check the knot at night, through the open door, and said nothing.
Then one evening she went by and the bundle was gone.
His few belongings were in the drawer of the little chest, folded.
The bundle cloth was spread over the chest, with his tin cup on it, like an ornament.
Day by unbelieving day, he was learning that he had been kept for good.
That he had been kept for himself, and not for the wood.
That there was nothing under this house waiting to give way.
It was the hardest lesson a marked child ever has to learn.
Samantha, who was learning it beside him at twenty, thought he was doing it faster than she was.
Sir, he still called Ramsay. He would come to the other word in his own time. But once, in the corral, when the dun did right, she heard him say it, low, half to himself, trying it. Pa. Then he went red and looked to see if anyone had heard.
She had. She did not let on.
In town, Eleanor Stuart sat alone.
The rooms she had taken were good rooms. They looked out on the square. She had her trunks, her black silk, her jet brooch, and nobody in the county who did not know her name. She had also nobody in the county who came to call.
That was the thing she had not reckoned on.
Forty years she had ruled that county by knowing what it thought.
Now it thought what she had not foreseen, and it thought it about her.
Not unkindly. Nobody in the town was unkind to Mrs. Stuart.
They lifted their hats. They asked after her health.
But they did not come and sit. They did not ask her to the sewing circle.
When she passed on the boardwalk, she felt the talk stop and start again behind her.
A train-girl might have felt it so, in an Iowa church.
She sat by her window and looked at the square. There was a great deal of time to think.
Pride held her. It held her upright in her chair.
It kept her from the spring wagon and the valley road.
She was glad of it. It was the only thing she had brought from the great stone house that had not been taken from her.
She had been right. She said so to herself every morning, and she believed it every morning a little less.
Because under the pride, the cold arithmetic worked on her. Eleanor Stuart had never been able to look away from a sum.
She had made an ally of a predator. That was the first line, and she made herself read it.
She had sat in a hotel parlor with a man who had gone into a barn after a girl of twenty.
She had found she did not mind him, because he was useful.
Into her house she had brought him, set him before her son and the county.
She had stood by while he showed what he was.
And she had been the one who opened the door.
Her creed had done that. Not the man. The creed. It had told her what the girl was before she ever looked, and so she had never looked. And so she had not seen the difference between a woman who told the truth on a carpet and a man who lied on it. Not until he lunged.
That was the second line, and it was worse than the first.
And the third line was the plainest of all.
She had cost herself her only son. And a grandson, for the boy was to be a Stuart now.
A boy who would carry the name, and the place.
Who would grow up in that house under her husband’s likeness.
Who would never, if things went on as they were going, sit at his grandmother’s knee.
Because his grandmother had said, on a platform, that he was stock.
An empty life on the one side. That was the sum. Good rooms on the square, a black silk dress, nobody who came to sit.
And on the other side, seven miles up the valley road, a family she might yet be let to belong to. If she could bend. If she could only, once in forty years, bend.
She did not know if she could. She sat by the window with her hands folded, upright, and looked at the square. The arithmetic went on working on her whether she would or no.
The banns were read the third time on Sunday. She heard the bell from her window.