Chapter 4 #3
Thomas looked at her. She meant it. He had thought she would — it was one reason he had chosen her, out of three letters and a hundred things he had no words for.
Something in the plain way she put words on paper had told him she was not a woman who would try to erase what came before her.
She would walk into Sarah’s house and see Sarah’s curtains and know whose they were, and she would leave them hanging.
He looked back at the road.
The ranch came into sight beyond the next rise.
The house sat back from the road — smaller than some women might have expected after reading the word ranch in an advertisement.
Barn behind it. Corrals farther out. Kitchen garden beside the house, much of it already gone over, because Thomas had not been able to keep up with it and the cattle both, and the cattle paid and the garden did not, and it showed.
Sarah’s garden had never looked like that.
Through Hannah’s eyes, he wished he had pulled the dead vines before he left this morning.
Hannah took it in without speaking. The house, the barn, the garden, the mountains behind all of it, and Thomas waited.
He had described the place honestly in his letters and he was not going to apologize for a house he had built with his own hands.
But there was a difference between reading that a house was small and travelling a thousand miles to find it sitting in front of you.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and nothing more, and he could not read the nothing, and then the front door opened.
Lucy came out at a run.
Thomas pulled the horses up. She was down the steps before he had set the brake — ten years old and faster than she had any right to be, and then she saw Hannah, and stopped.
Thomas climbed down. Hannah remained in the wagon.
For all Lucy’s questions over the past weeks — what does she look like, will she like me, does she know about the creek, can she ride — she had apparently not prepared herself for the woman becoming real.
She stood in the yard with her hair coming loose and her boots muddy and looked up at the wagon, and Thomas watched her work out that the person sitting up there was real.
A woman, an actual woman, with a face and a voice and hands and opinions, who was going to live in their house.
Thomas went around and held out his hand. Hannah took it and stepped down, and when her boot reached the ground she was standing close enough that he caught the smell of soap beneath the dust of the journey, clean and plain, and he stepped back and let go.
Lucy had not moved.
“Lucy,” he said. “This is Miss Bell.”
Her eyes came to him — Miss Bell, for three more days, because she was not his wife yet and he would not call her by a name she had not given him.
“Hannah Bell,” she said to Lucy.
Lucy stared at her.
Hannah stood in the yard and let Lucy look, without hurrying it, without reaching for the easy word that would smooth the moment over. Too many people spoke to Lucy because they could not bear to wait for her. Hannah waited.
“I thought you’d be married,” Lucy said.
“We were meant to be,” Hannah said. “Mr. Jessup had to go away.”
“Then you’re not staying?”
The question came fast — too fast — and something caught in Thomas’s chest, because he heard in those four words everything Lucy had been carrying since Sarah died.
Every woman who had come by with a casserole and gone home.
Every neighbour who had stayed a week and left.
The schoolteacher who had been kind to her through the winter and moved to Denver in the spring.
Lucy had learned that women left. She had learned it from the ground up, and she was standing in the yard asking this one whether she would too.
Hannah’s face did not change. But it settled, and when she spoke her voice was level and plain and held nothing back.
“I came all this way to marry your father,” she said. “I have no present intention of turning around and going back.”
Lucy looked at Thomas. “She’s going to stay?”
“If she’ll still have us Thursday,” Thomas said. The word was out before he heard it. Us. Hannah’s head turned, and her eyes came to him, and stayed.
Lucy came forward and took Hannah’s hand.
Just like that. No preamble, no permission. She took the hand the way she took everything — entirely, without checking first whether it was hers to take, and said, “Do you want to see my room?”
Hannah glanced at Thomas. He nodded.
“I should like to,” she said, and Lucy led her up the steps and through the door, and they were gone.
Thomas stood in the yard.
The door was open. Through it he could hear Lucy’s voice going: which room was which, where the stove was, why the step creaked, and underneath it, quieter, Hannah’s, saying less, asking something he could not make out.
He stood and listened to the two voices moving through his house, Lucy’s quick, Hannah’s low and even, and after a while he went to see to the horses.
If she’ll still have us.
He had written for a woman who would be good to Lucy. Hannah had walked off a train and into his daughter’s hand in the space of an afternoon. That ought to have been enough.
The voices went on in the house, and Thomas stood in the barn with the halter in his hands and did not go back inside until he was certain he could walk through that door and look at Hannah Bell and not think about Thursday.
He was not certain for a while.