Chapter Two
The letter had come down from Lander with the Tuesday rider, and Nathan had spent the better part of an hour turning it over in his hands.
The stove had gone cold in the meantime, as had the coffee. Somewhere in the yard, the children hollered at each other. Three weeks ago, Nathan had buried an empty coffin, and now he sat at his brother’s table—his table, he kept forgetting that—holding a letter from a woman he didn’t want.
Miss June Sinclair, of Hannibal, Missouri.
A schoolteacher that had to drag an old woman with her.
That’s what he’d brought his life down to.
No portrait in her letter. Nathan hadn’t asked for one, of course, but a woman with anything to show in the way of looks would’ve sent one anyhow.
The paper ran things between his fingers, and the lines lay too straight, as if she’d ruled them in pencil first and erased the marks.
He held the page up to the window. She had.
She had no smell, either. Some other women had perfumed their letters, showing that they had sat down to write wanting to show their interest. Miss Sinclair, by all accounts, had likely written her letter in her schoolroom, between sums, and sent it to the postman with some random child.
I am capable and willing to undertake the instruction of your three children.
As if she’d applied for a position with the railroad.
Almighty help him, he’d wanted some flicker of a woman in the writing, a turn of phrase or a small foolishness. Anything to show that the one holding the pen had blushed a little as she wrote. That couldn’t have been too much to ask for.
Instead, I get “capable and willing to undertake.”
He got a fifty-year-old aunt, who couldn’t even work a full day, thrown in. He’d asked for a woman and was being offered half of one along with her chaperone.
He threw the letter on the table and went out to the porch.
The yard ran out maybe forty paces to the round pen and the long pole barn beyond it. Further down, the stable stood to the right of the bunkhouse, where Hank would likely have the stovepipe going already.
Nathan and Jacob had laid the place out together on the back of a feed bill in the winter of ’73.
Every post, gate, line of fence, and inch of the main house.
They’d built the thing damn near with their own four hands, but it still stood true because of it.
The board-and-batten on the stable held tight against wind coming down the draw.
The smokehouse had seen hanging and curing meat every season without so much as a creak in the planks.
Not the ranch givin’ me problems, though.
He crossed the yard.
The new chores had him in a corner. Three weeks now, and he still had no idea what to feed Eli that the boy wouldn’t throw on the floor.
Nathan could put a saddle on a green three-year-old colt with less trouble than he had getting Eli into a clean shirt.
No idea what to say to Audrey when she came down in the morning asking him to fix the gnarled mess that sleep made of her hair.
Not to mention Rhett.
That boy still wouldn’t meet his eye proper or answer a civil question, and he disappeared from sunup to suppertime to Lord knew where. Worst of all, half the time, he took the other two with him.
Time to round them up before the light went.
He came up on the pole barn and shoved the door back.
Inside, the temperature had risen by ten degrees, and the smells of hay, horse, and old leather welcomed him back like old friends. As he came down the row, the bay mare put her head over the gate and blew at him. He set his palm against the broad bone of her face.
Horses, he understood.
Simple business, dealing with horses. You fed it, watered it, and, so long as you worked it fair, it gave you back what it had to give. It sure didn’t kick over the milk pail when you asked it to come inside, or wail for an hour because you didn’t button her shirt like her pa had.
You’ve spoiled them too much, Jacob.
Nathan forked hay down from the loft and broke the ice skim on the trough. Then he went down the row checking feet and eyes and running his palm along each horse’s flank. By the time he went back out to the yard, the sun had cleared the ridge, and frost was creeping over the grass.
Wherever those three had gone now, the time had come to come inside.
***
Huh… If I were a half-grown hellion with nothin’ better to do, where would I be?
Where would Jacob have gone?
Not the barn, Pa had always looked there first, and not the bunkhouse, either.
Not after Old Wheeler had caught them in the rafter and tanned them both with a length of latigo.
No, Jacob would’ve gone down to the water.
He and Nathan had always loved skimping on chores on hot afternoons to go swimming, and they’d lie in the reeds hiding from Pa when he’d come looking.
Right now, the children wouldn’t be swimming, not if they wanted to keep their lungs, but if Jacob had ever taken them to the creek, and they were missing him, they’d go there.
I really ought to have paid more attention to these things while I lived here.
He cut across the back forty at a long stride.
Damn fool errand, chasing children across his own land when a hundred things needed doing before dark.
His breath showed white in the slanting light.
How much time had he wasted already? An hour?
More? The sun had moved a hand’s width while he’d been looking for them, and the cold had right about settled into its night temperature.
Eli hadn’t even put on a proper coat.
By the time Nathan came up over the rise above the bend, the shadows of the willows lay across the water, and about a dozen curses had snuck their way out of his mouth.
The cottonwood stood at the elbow of the creek, right where the bank curved east, and rose sixty feet if it stood an inch.
Nathan and Jacob had climbed it any chance they’d got as boys.
Wonder how many of them I’ll find up there?
All three, as it turned out.
Audrey, thank the Almighty, had stayed near the bottom, tucking her knees and perching on the lowest fork like a sensible person. Higher up, Rhett sat on a branch two-thirds of the way to the crown as if he’d gone to church on Sunday. Four feet under him, Eli clung to a branch.
Nathan stopped under the tree. “Rhett.”
Rhett looked down.
“Get him down.”
“He climbed up by hisself.”
“Now, boy.”
Rhett moved to a branch under Eli and offered the boy his hand.
Nathan opened his mouth to scream no, but the branch said it for him with a dry splintering noise and a crack.
Rhett’s fingers closed on air. Eli followed the branch down.
The boy fell slower than someone his size had any right to fall.
Nathan had caught a hundred falling things in his life, so he caught the boy across his chest and thighs easily enough.
If I was one second late…
If he’d gone round by the irrigation ditch, or stopped at the gate for a few moments longer, or if he hadn’t thought of the creek, Eli would be a splat on the ground right now. His little body would’ve folded wrong in the leaves. He’d have ended up with his arm under him. His mouth would hang open.
Nathan had almost failed him as he’d failed Jacob.
I could’ve lost him.
He sat down with the boy still in his lap.
Eli stared up at him. He hadn’t started crying yet, but it would inevitably come. Nathan knew little of children, he’d be the first to admit it, but he knew that the hurt had a delay to it and a long pause before the wail.
I can’t do this alone anymore.
Not with three of them, a thousand acres of spread, and winter rearing its ugly face.
Whatever ideas he’d had of getting through this by being stubborn and giving long hours to it had died the moment that branch had cracked.
Good heavens, he hadn’t even noticed when Audrey had started crying, but she had.
“Uncle Nate—”
“He ain’t hurt.” Nathan stood up. “Rhett, come on down. Slowly.”
No matter the aunt who couldn’t work a full day, the lack of perfume, the absence of a portrait, and the dry tone of the letter, Nathan had to write June Sinclair a letter of acceptance.
***
Supper might as well have had crickets chirping.
Nathan had cooked beans and side meat. Eli pushed his around the plate.
A bruise was coming up under his jaw, where a branch had clipped him on the way down.
Poor boy hadn’t even cried when Nathan had cleaned it with a wet cloth at the pump, which really signed the dotted line on how much Nathan had messed up his family.
Children ought to cry when something hurt.
Audrey ate half of hers. Rhett finished his own, then Eli’s, and then stared at Nathan like a man at cards with a shady dealer.
Well… No point in delaying it any longer.
Nathan cleared his throat. “Got somethin’ needs sayin’.”
Three pairs of eyes focused on him.
He opened his mouth.
Hell of a thing, telling three children you’d called for a stranger to live in their dead father’s house. A man ought to have words for it, or at least the first word. Nathan only had a mouthful of beans and side meat.
Rhett frowned. “Uncle?”
“I… ” Nathan shook his head. “I’ve written for a woman to come out.”
Rhett clenched his fork.
“Schoolteacher. She’ll see to the three of you, keep the house, all of it.” He stared at the grain in the table. “Bringin’ her aunt along.”
Rhett put his fork down. “Don’t need seein’ to.”
“That so?”
“That’s so.”
“Look at your brother and say that again.”
Rhett’s jaw set. “I had him.”
“You had air, boy. Nothing more.”
Color came up in Rhett’s face, and, Lord, did Nathan know that color.
Pa had backhanded it out of him more times than he could count.
He’d deserved it nearly every time, save when that roan mare had fallen into that hole, because that had been Jacob.
Audrey opened her mouth to say something but quickly went back to looking at her plate.
Rhett squinted. “What makes you think she’ll do right by us?”
“She said she would.”
“Pa said he’d come back from the south range, too.”
Nathan froze.
What am I supposed to say to that?
A man with any business raising children ought to have a response ready.
Good Lord, Nathan had built a stable with his bare hands.
He’d broken a black gelding that’d scared off four other men.
Yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t grasp an answer to an eleven-year-old boy sitting across his own supper table.
Say something.
The clock on the mantel ticked.
Say anything.
Rhett stood up and lifted Eli from the bench. Audrey slipped off her chair.
Nathan frowned. “What’re you three doin’?”
Rhett put Eli down. “Creek.”
“It’s dark out.”
“Goin’ for frogs.”
“Frogs’ll be bedded by now.”
“Then we won’t catch any.”
The latch lifted. The door swung. October air charged in and lifted the edge of June Sinclair’s letter where Nathan had left it on the table as if the woman had reached out from Missouri to touch his hand.
Then the door shut, and his niece and nephews vanished into the dark with no coats between the three of them.