A Cowboy Followed His Horse Into the Mountains—Then Discovered a Woman Everyone Thought Dead
Chapter 19
The party was held in the church hall, because nothing in Blackwater Creek was ever held anywhere else, and the church hall had been strung with more lights and crepe paper than Wyatt had seen since he was a boy at his own birthday.
Every face in the valley was there — the ranchers, the feed store clerk, the Swede from the smokehouse, the Reverend, Doc Harris, Jim Dawson with his wife and his new truck. And there was a banner over the door that read, simply, CLARA’S HOME, and beneath it, in smaller letters, THANKS TO A RED HORSE AND A STUBBORN MAN.
The evening went the way evenings in the valley went: potluck ham, stacks of fried chicken, three kinds of potato salad, and the women’s circle hovering around Clara like hens around a chick. Wyatt kept to the wall by the coffee urn, letting the warmth wash over him, and he let himself be glad. It had been a long time since he’d stood in a room full of people and felt glad without working for it.
Then Clara stood on a chair, and the room went quiet.
“Most of you know my story,” she said. “I’m tired of telling it, so I’m not going to. But there’s one part I’ve never told, because it’s the part I only understood this winter, and I want you to hear it before I do anything else.”
She looked at Wyatt, and the room followed her eyes.
“When I was up on that mountain, I used to talk to the sky. I made deals with it — my left shoe, my wedding ring, anything I thought I could trade. And one night, in the deep of the cold, I made the biggest one. I said, if you send me somebody, if you send me anybody, I’ll spend whatever pieces of me are left making sure somebody else’s story has a better ending than mine.”
The room was so quiet Wyatt could hear the coffee urn hissing.
“I don’t know if the sky had anything to do with what happened,” Clara said. “The doctor says it was infection and starvation. The horse says it was his nose. Wyatt says it was dumb luck. But I decided, that winter, that it didn’t matter. The sky kept its end of the deal, and now I keep mine.”
She stepped down off the chair and walked over to the wall where Wyatt stood, and the crowd parted.
“I’m starting a fund,” she said. “The Cutter’s Pass Fund. Every winter we’ll stock the cave with emergency blankets, sealed food, fire-starting supplies, and basic medicine for anyone the mountain catches short. The rest of what the valley gives will stay in town to help families through bad weather. And it’s named for the place that taught me the one true thing I know: nothing up there comes to you. You have to go up and find it, and you have to take somebody with you.”
She looked at him, and her eyes were bright.
“Will you be that somebody, Wyatt? First day of every winter, you and that red horse, and me and a pack mule full of what the valley gives us?”
Wyatt stood with his hat in his hands and his heart doing something unfamiliar in his chest.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be that somebody.”
The hall erupted, and Clara hugged him hard enough to creak his ribs, and Jim Dawson said, “There it is,” and even the Reverend clapped.