Epilogue
Sarah had been arguing about the flowers since eight in the morning.
Not with anybody in particular. With the flowers themselves, the vase she'd picked and then unpicked, and the jar she'd tried instead and then rejected on grounds Evelyn couldn't quite follow.
Something about how the jar had a chip on the rim, and it would look "poor" to guests.
Evelyn had told her that no one was going to be inspecting the jam jar, and Sarah had said, I'll be inspectin' it, Evelyn Granger, and I will know.
That was the whole of Sarah's approach to a party.
She'd worked herself up into a fine flustered state by nine, and by ten she was full-tilt, moving through the kitchen with a dish rag over her shoulder and a wooden spoon in one hand, and her hair coming loose from the two combs she'd used to try to pin it up.
"Sit down."
"I ain't sittin' down."
"Sarah Cooper, it's your birthday, and you have been on your feet since—"
"I ain't sittin' down till the biscuits are out and the ham is set."
"Then set it."
"I set it, but it ain't done."
"Then the ham ain't the thing sittin' would fix."
Sarah waved her spoon at Evelyn with the specific finger-shake a Cooper did when they'd been outmaneuvered and refused to admit it.
***
They came in wagons and on foot, all afternoon.
Mrs. Charlotte Montgomery got there first, on the back of a neighbor's buckboard, in her Sunday dress with a big jar of chokecherry jam in her lap, and when she came up the porch step she looked at Evelyn and her whole face lit up like it did when she was pleased.
"There's my girl. Come here."
Evelyn hugged her. Mrs. Montgomery smelled like lavender water, and the specific old-woman smell of a person who lived alone with a wood stove, and Evelyn didn't have a word for that smell, but she'd grown fond of it inside about a week.
"Sarah in the kitchen?"
"Where else."
"Fussin' at the ham?"
"Fussin' at everything."
"I'll go put a stop to it."
Mrs. Montgomery couldn't stop Sarah from anything, and both of them knew it, but she went in anyway.
Then the Hartleys came from the north road, and the Dietrichs from up past the fork. Then the Gundersons—the baker and his wife—came up the porch, and the man slapped Sam on the good shoulder and slapped him again. Sam kept his face steady through both slaps like a man taking medicine.
"Cooper. Heard about your leg. Heard about Wilkes, too. Heard about a lot of things."
"Reckon you did."
"You sittin' the party out?"
"I'm sittin' most of it out, on the doctor's word."
"Doctor's word, my hind end. You're sittin' because you finally got some sense."
"Could be that too."
Then came Old Haskell with his half-blind dog, Bishop.
Bishop went straight to the kitchen and put himself under the stove and did not move for the rest of the afternoon.
Then the Krauses from the store, then Doc Merrick himself, then the Pruett family with a whole pan of cornbread, and Evelyn stopped trying to keep names in her head somewhere around the fifteenth handshake and just smiled at everybody.
Then the mare in the yard picked up her head, and Foster rode in.
He'd shaved.
That was the first thing.
Sheriff Elijah Foster had shaved, and he'd put on a clean shirt, and his boots were polished, and he had his hat in his hand before he was even down off his horse, which was not the man who'd walked into Sam's kitchen a week ago in a five-day beard with his coat buttoned crooked.
Sarah was on the porch when he rode up. She'd come out for a minute to get some air.
Evelyn happened to be looking at her sister-in-law-to-be's face when Foster swung down off his horse, and Evelyn watched Sarah's cheeks go from the pink of stove-flush to a whole different pink in about three seconds.
Sarah put her hand up to her hair and remembered she hadn't fixed it. She tried to fix it, but it didn’t work.
"Sheriff. You made it."
"Ma'am."
"You come alone, or you got deputies about?"
"Alone, ma'am. Ain't no deputy business today. This here's a purely social call."
"Well. Well, then. Come in, come in, there's ham, or there's fixin' to be ham, or there was ham a spell back before I turned my head, and—"
"Miss Cooper."
"Yeah?"
"Happy birthday."
He held out a small parcel. Brown paper. Twine.
Sarah took it. She had to put her spoon down first because she'd forgotten she was still carrying it, and she looked at the parcel like it might bite her.
"Sheriff, you didn't—"
"I did."
"You didn't have to—"
"I didn't have to. I did anyhow. There’s a difference, ma'am."
She unwrapped it there on the porch with everybody drifting by, which meant she didn't quite have privacy about it, and she didn't quite not, and inside the paper was a book. Leather-bound. Small. Poems.
Sarah looked up at him.
"You know I ain't—"
"I know it. You told me once your mama used to read to you, and you never picked up the reading of poems after she went. So."
He shrugged.
"Figured you might start again."
Sarah's mouth opened and closed.
Evelyn slipped past them both with a plate she didn't need, because she was fixing to burst into either laughter or tears.
***
She caught Sarah in the pantry maybe twenty minutes later, hiding.
Sarah was rearranging jars of preserves. The preserves did not need rearranging. Sarah had been at it, Evelyn suspected, for a good five minutes.
"You got somethin' to say to me, honey?"
"Nope."
"You got nothin'?"
"Not a blessed thing."
"So we ain't gonna discuss the sheriff."
"The sheriff is a fine man and a professional, and there ain't nothin' to discuss."
"Uh huh."
"Evelyn Granger, don't you start."
"I ain't started. I'm settin' the plates. See? Plates."
"You are grinnin' like a possum."
"I ain't."
"You are."
"Sarah."
"What."
"He shaved."
"He always—"
"He does not always. He had a beard on him last Tuesday I could've lost a chicken in."
"Evelyn—"
"And he polished his boots."
"He might've—"
"And he brought you poems, Sarah."
Sarah put down the jar of preserves she was pretending to arrange. She turned around and leaned back against the shelf and folded her arms.
"I ain't studyin' it."
"You ain't studyin' it."
"No, ma'am, I ain't."
"You're standin' in the pantry rearrangin' jam."
"I'm restin'."
"You're hidin'."
"Fine. I'm hidin'. Ain't nothin' criminal about hidin' in your own pantry on your own birthday."
"Sarah."
"What?"
"He looked at you like you was the ham."
Sarah made a small, strangled noise and put both hands over her face, and Evelyn started laughing and couldn't stop.
Sarah started laughing too. It was muffled through her hands, and the two of them stood there in the pantry between the preserved peaches and the chokecherry and laughed until Evelyn's ribs made her stop, because her ribs still weren't right.
"Get out of my pantry."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Get."
"Goin'."
"And don't you say a word to that man."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"Evelyn."
"I said I wouldn't."
"I love you, honey."
"I love you, too."
***
The afternoon rolled into evening.
Somebody had brought a fiddle. Somebody else had a harmonica.
There was music on the porch, and dancing in the yard, and Sarah had put out her ham, and it was, in fact, exceptional, and Mrs. Montgomery's jam had gone on biscuits, and there was cider warmed in a pot.
Old Haskell had told the same story about a bear three times to three different groups of people, and every time it was a different-sized bear.
Sam sat in a chair by the porch rail with his bad leg propped up on a crate somebody had turned over for him.
Good arm resting on his thigh. He'd been watching Evelyn move through the crowd all afternoon with a particular quiet look on his face, and every time she'd caught him at it he'd looked away too slowly to pretend he hadn't been looking.
Then he tapped his cup against the porch rail.
It wasn’t loud, but the sound carried. A couple of people closest to him quieted, and then the ones next to them, and then the fiddle stopped, and then the whole yard went to that soft-hush a Montana yard went to when it understood something was about to happen.
Sam pushed himself up out of the chair.
Evelyn was standing near the porch steps with Mrs. Montgomery's arm through hers, and she went still, because she knew Sam Cooper's stand-up-and-say-a-thing face, and she had not been expecting it.
"Folks. If I could beg a minute."
Sarah was on the porch too.
Sam looked around.
"I ain't a talkin' man. Y'all know it. If I could have got out of makin' this here speech, I'd have done it, but Evelyn Granger deserves the whole speech, and she deserves it in front of everybody what matters to her, so."
He looked at Evelyn.
"Come on up here, honey."
She came up. Mrs. Montgomery gave her a little push she didn't need because Mrs. Montgomery was going to enjoy the moment thoroughly, and she wanted her hand in it.
Evelyn got to Sam. She stood in front of him at the top of the porch step, the creaky one. Neither one of them looked at the step. Both of them were thinking about it.
Sam's good arm came up.
He was holding the ring.
She'd taken it off that morning because Sarah's dough had gotten in around the band and she'd said she'd put it back on after the party.
She hadn't thought about it since. And now here it was, out in Sam's hand, in front of the whole yard, and every last soul present who hadn't already known was putting the pieces together fast.
She heard a gasp somewhere behind her. Mrs. Krause probably.
"Evelyn Granger."
"Yeah."
"I asked you a thing on this here porch a week ago. Just the two of us. And you said yes to me and it meant every last thing to me it meant, and I ain't takin' none of it back, and I never will."
"Sam—"
"But I got to thinkin'. You come to this country with a bag and a letter, and the whole time you was here, folks have come to know you.
Every one of these folks in this yard. Mrs. Montgomery yonder, Sarah here, the doc, the Hartleys, Gunderson.
Every last one of 'em. You made yourself a place among these folks whether you meant to or not, and that place is yours, and I reckon they got a right to hear me ask, on account of they're the ones what's gonna stand with us, when the standin' matters. "
Evelyn's throat had gone tight.
"So."
He held the ring up between them.
"I'm askin' you again. In front of everybody what loves you. Marry me, Evelyn Granger."
She looked at him.
She looked at his gray face, still healing, and the shave-nick still on his jaw that had never quite scabbed over right, and his good arm shaking a little because it had taken to shaking sometimes since the fight, and the ring between his fingers.
She looked past him, one second, at Sarah on the porch. At Mrs. Montgomery down in the yard, crying quietly. At Foster, standing at the edge of the crowd, holding his hat.
"Sam Cooper."
"Yeah."
"You are the biggest showoff on God's green earth."
He grinned.
"That a yes?"
"You know it's a yes. You knew it was a yes when you got out of that chair. Put the damn ring on me."
The yard exploded.
Cheering. Whistling. Old Haskell whooped so loud his dog came out from under the stove barking. The Gundersons were clapping. Doc Merrick was shaking his head and smiling. Mrs. Montgomery had gone from quiet crying to loud crying and had grabbed onto the porch rail because her knees had gone weak.
Sarah came off the porch in three steps and threw both arms around them both.
"About time, brother. About time."
"You knew a week ago."
"That was different. That was you tellin' me a secret. This here's proper."
Sam slid the ring onto Evelyn's finger. Same finger. Same worn scrollwork on top. It caught the last of the afternoon gold, that Montana gold that came down slantwise off the ridge, and it sat there on her hand as if it had always been meant to sit there.
The fiddle picked back up. Somebody started dancing. Somebody else opened another jug of cider.
Evelyn kept looking at her hand.
Sam sat back down in the chair because his leg couldn't hold him for a moment longer, and he pulled her down onto his good side.
She settled against him, being careful of his shoulder and careful of all of him, and she leaned her head on his good shoulder and watched the yard full of people she loved.
Foster had gotten Sarah's hand. He hadn't asked for it.
Sarah had given it. They were standing by the porch rail and Foster was showing Sarah something in the book of poems he'd given her, and Sarah was leaning in to see, and their shoulders were touching, and neither one of them looked like they had any intention of moving.
"Sam."
"Yeah."
"Look at your sister."
Sam looked. He looked a good long second.
"Well, I'll be."
"Mhm."
"When did that—"
"About twenty minutes ago. In the pantry. She was hidin'."
"She was hidin'?"
"Uh huh."
"From Foster?"
"From herself. Foster was just doin' the standin' around part."
Sam huffed. It was almost a laugh. He winced because laughing pulled his shoulder, but he did it anyway.
"I'll be damned."
"You will."
"I love you, Evelyn Granger."
"I know it, honey. I love you back."
THE END?
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