Wed to the West (Wild Hearts Ranch #11)

CHAPTER 1

Willa

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Saint Louis lay four days behind me, in coal-soot and dust and the smell of my own collar.

The Kansas Pacific had set me down at Granite Forks at twenty minutes past two, and I had slept four hours at the railway hotel on a horsehair mattress that smelled of camphor, and now I stood at the pike-coach's iron step at quarter past seven with one tin trunk on the roof and one carpet-bag at my feet.

The driver, a long man with a cracked thumbnail and bay-rum on his collar, took my fare in silver and did not look at me twice.

That is a smell of a man who has been somewhere, I thought, and tucked the thought away as a tailor tucks a pin.

The carpet-bag went under the spring-seat. Inside it was my mother's Bible in brown calf, my father's brass thimble in a paper twist, and, pinned inside the bodice of my traveling-dress, a small drawstring purse with one dollar, sixty-five cents in folded notes and stamped silver.

The wheels turned. The dust came up yellow.

A seam holds if you set the tension before the first stitch — not after.

My father at the cutting-table. I sat with my gloved hands flat on my knees and set my tension.

I had come west on the answer to an advertisement.

I had not yet seen the man whose name the advertisement carried.

I had not yet seen the country. I would see both before sundown.

I lifted my own collar to my nose for the dust. Coal-soot from four days of train had darkened the wool; the mended seam at the inside of the collar held, my mother's hand in a Cherokee Street upstairs room last March, the velvet trim turned out so the lavender could be pressed into the lining.

Mein Liebling, she had said, biting off the thread, and I had not let her say more.

I pressed my thumb hard to the cleft between my eyebrows and refused to weep.

The pike-coach took the better part of four hours.

The Bear Fork valley opened at a bench of pale cottonwoods; the driver called Larkspur Bend before I could see the buildings — a dust-blue false-front on the east side of the street, a smithy at the north end, a chapel without a bell at the south.

A hand-lettered sign above the porch read Doss Boarding House — Post Office — Stage Stop.

The driver came round and took my hand to get me down.

His palm was hard. The bay-rum was nearer now, and under it leather and brass and the iron-tang of harness rivet. That, I thought, is the country's smell.

A square-built woman came out wiping her hands on a clean white apron — iron-gray streaks through dark hair braided round her head, brown eyes, big knuckles. "Miss Greer."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Sit, child. Eat. Talk after."

I sat. I ate. She set boiled mutton and brown bread before me at the trestle table and let me have a quarter of an hour to put bread in my mouth without speaking.

The dining-room smelled of mutton-broth and the shellac on the post-office pigeon-holes.

Behind her shoulder, thirty-two boxes of pale pine; two of them with slips of card tacked at the front.

The slip on the second column from the left read CARROW / HALLORAN / THORN. Three names on the slip of one box.

I set my fork down.

She sat across from me with her own coffee and laid her square hand flat on the table.

"Three men sent that letter, child, but they only had the postage for one signature.

" Her voice was Cornish at the corners and German underneath.

"Beckett Carrow is the one named in the paper.

Levi Thorn and Tate Halloran are the other two.

They are partners of the same claim and they have come down with one wagon and three faces. They will be at the porch by four."

I lifted my coffee. I did not lift it fast. I counted pulse beats at the inside of my own wrist with the fingers of my right hand under the table — one, two, three, four. The cup met my mouth. The coffee was hot enough to scald. I did not say Lord, though I thought it.

"Three," I said.

"Three. They wrote the ad between them at my parlor table in March.

Tate's hand wrote it down — his is the cleanest. Beck signed because the law names a principal.

Levi laughed and went out to the horses because he was not yet sure he wanted his name on a piece of paper meant to fetch a wife.

They mean nothing dishonest by it; they only had the postage for one signature. "

"I see."

"I think you do."

"And the marriage of record — does the statute —"

"I am a postmistress, child, not a lawyer. Beck will tell you the statute on the ride up. He has it by heart. The Reverend will tell you over again on Monday in the back parlor with the certificate on his knee. You eat the rest of that bread and then I will take you up to Room Seven."

I ate the rest of the bread. The crust was hard and good. I have always trusted a woman who can set a good crust. The lavender at my collar mixed with the mutton-broth in the air, and the coal-soot of the Kansas Pacific sat under both.

She took me up to Room Seven — a single iron bedstead, a pine washstand with a chipped white pitcher, one window onto the alley. She set my carpet-bag at the foot of the bed and stood at the door an instant longer than she needed to.

"Your mother packed lavender," she said. "So did mine."

She touched the inside of my collar with the back of her knuckle — once, dry, not a kindness so much as a recognition — and went down the stairs.

I sat on the bedstead and took the small drawstring purse from inside my bodice and opened it on the spread.

One dollar, sixty-five cents.

A half-dime, a quarter, two dimes, four nickels, and the rest in tan paper notes folded the way my father had folded them — corners aligned, the printed face down.

Sixty cents in coin, one dollar and five cents in paper.

I laid them out and added them twice, the way a tailor's daughter adds: by sight first, then by hand.

The total did not change between countings.

Nine dollars was the return fare to Saint Louis on the Kansas Pacific, going east.

Nine I did not have. Nine my mother in her kinswoman's upper rooms on Cherokee Street did not have either, because the creditor had closed my father's shop within ninety days of his burial.

My father had been dead a year and two months.

The seamstress shop on Olive Street had closed at Easter when the milliner who held the lease took sick.

There was no Cherokee Street I could go back to that would not be a smaller room than the room I had left.

I had answered two advertisements in the Globe-Democrat. One was a stationer in Topeka. The other had been answered. The other was three men.

I pressed the cleft between my eyebrows hard with my right thumb until I felt the small bright pain and the pink half-moon I knew would stay an hour. I did not weep. I had other work.

I gathered the coin and the notes back into the purse and pinned it inside the bodice.

I unpinned my hair. The bone pin came out smooth — six inches of polished elk-bone, the head carved into the small five-petaled edelweiss my grandmother had brought from Bohemia in 1840, the other end sharpened just enough.

I laid it on the dresser. I brushed my hair with my mother's tortoise-back brush.

I braided it again at the nape in the low coil I had worn since I was thirteen, and pinned it again with the bone pin.

I put my gloves back on. I went down.

A boy sat cross-legged on the boards of the porch with a small black slate and chalk-stub in his lap — fifteen, red-blond, freckled over the bridge of the nose.

Hattie had named him in the dining-room: Davie Pell, the Reverend's nephew, who heard with his hands.

He looked up at me and touched the brim of his hat in the country way, and wrote on the slate in a careful printed hand: GOOD DAY MISS GREER.

I smiled for the first time in the chapter of my life that had begun in Saint Louis.

"Good day, Mr. Pell."

He grinned. He wrote: MA HATTIE SAYS YOU HAVE A LETTER. THE WAGON COMES AT FOUR.

"It is half past three by the clock in the dining-room."

He nodded. He wrote: I CAN SEE FROM HERE. I WILL TELL YOU. He shifted on the boards so he was facing the corner of Bear Fork Street.

Hattie came out with a worn cream-and-pink double-Irish-chain quilt folded over her forearm and laid it on the porch bench. "Take this up with you, child. The basin's cold at night even in June. It was my sister's. She is dead. It is not doing anything in my linen-press."

"Thank you, Hattie."

She stood at the rail and watched the corner with me.

Three, I thought. I went over the names in my head the way I had gone over buttonholes on a coat — by row, by count. Beckett Carrow. Levi Thorn. Tate Halloran. I did not yet have a face for any of them. I said the names in my head as a tailor's catechism of buttons and seams.

The bone pin pressed at the back of my neck.

Davie's chalk went up. WAGON.

The wagon came around the smithy. Two mules in the trace, a third tied behind.

A buckboard with a hooped canvas top folded down.

Three men. The driver in a low-brimmed felt hat with a silver streak at his left temple visible under the brim — the freight pilot, Tate, the reins in his right hand and the brake-bar in his left with the wrist-only attention of a man who had taken a six-mule string up a switchback in worse weather.

On the spring-seat beside him a broad-shouldered man with sandy-brown hair cropped close, the back of his neck unbarbered on the left so a small dent ran below the collar-line.

The foreman. Beck. On the wagon-bed, his back against my second trunk lashed beside a slat-sided crate, a long lean man with copper-red hair tied at the nape with saddle-leather.

Freckles heavy across the nose at twenty feet.

He grinned before he could stop himself, caught his own mouth and made it sober, and lifted his hat.