He Pretended To Be A Penniless Farmhand To Test Her HeartThen He Arrived In A Carriage To Propose

Chapter 3

She laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a rusty sound, like a pump that hadn’t been drawn in a long time. Walt Sutter looked at her over the rim of the cup, and something in his face went very still and very soft, and Cora looked away and pretended she hadn’t seen it.

They worked the east fence line that morning. Cora worked it beside him, not ahead of him and not behind, because she was not the kind of woman to sit in the house while a man did the labor on her place. He didn’t argue with her about it the way Grant’s old hands used to argue, with that patient condescension that made her want to throw things. He just handed her the wire stretcher and took the post end himself, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that they should split the work even.

“You’ve done this before,” she said, mid-morning, wiping sweat from her forehead with her sleeve.

“Yes, ma’am. A place or two.”

“You talk like a man who’s run a place, not worked one.”

He was quiet a moment, hammering a staple. “I’ve been around farms all my life,” he said, which was true, if you counted the thirteen thousand acres as a farm.

Cora let it go. She filed it away, the way she filed away everything, in the careful ledger of her mind. A drifter who worked like an owner. A drifter with good manners. A drifter who held his fork like he’d been raised to it.

That evening she dished up supper — stew, and bread that was mostly crust because she was running low on flour — and set two plates on the table without thinking about it. Walt Sutter stood in the doorway of the kitchen with his own plate in his hands, and Cora turned and saw him and frowned.

“What are you doing with that?”

He nodded toward the door. “I figured I’d eat out in the barn, ma’am. Out from under your feet.”

Cora Vane set her hands on her hips. “You’ll do no such thing.” And then she said the words that would follow Gideon Marlowe for the rest of his life, though she would never know it: “I’ve got a table and a roof and food enough for two. On my place, a body doesn’t eat alone like a stray dog. Set yourself down, Mr. Sutter, and eat like a person.”

He set himself down.

He ate her plain stew at her small table, across from her, and she asked him how the fence looked and whether the mule favored its off hind leg and what he thought about the south pasture, and she listened to his answers, really listened, the way you listen to someone you’ve decided is decent. And Gideon Marlowe, who had eaten alone at a table that could seat twenty, in a dining room so quiet he could hear his own fork against the plate, felt something crack open in his chest that had been sealed shut for ten years.

Nobody had asked him how his day went in ten years. Nobody had handed him coffee without keeping count. Nobody had made him sit down and eat like a person, when he had spent a decade being a prize to be won, a ranch with a man attached to it.

He ate until his plate was clean, and then he sat there a moment too long, and Cora looked at him oddly, and he said, “That’s the best meal I’ve had in a long while, ma’am.”

“It’s stew,” she said, but she was pleased. He could tell she was pleased. It was in the way she wouldn’t quite meet his eyes.

That night, in the barn, with the animals sighing in the dark, Gideon Marlowe lay on the straw pallet she’d made up for him and stared at the rafters and let himself remember the day he had first seen her.

It had been four months earlier, in town, outside the grain store. He had been himself then — Gideon Marlowe, the great man, the richest in the valley — and he had been surrounded, as always, by the little court that gathered whenever he came to town. The merchant being twice as friendly as he needed to be. The mothers steering their daughters into his path like cattle to a gate. The men who wanted something from him, which was all men, which was everyone.

And through the middle of all that fawning, a woman had walked. She was loading sacks of feed into her own wagon by herself, hefting them like a man, and she had glanced once at the great Mr. Marlowe and his little crowd, and her face had held the plain, faint disinterest of a person looking at a passing cloud. Then she had gone right on loading her sacks, and driven away, and never looked back.

That look had stayed with him for weeks. A woman who had looked at the richest man in the valley and seen nothing she needed.

He had asked about her, quietly. A widow. Struggling alone on a small place down the south road. Too proud to ask for help. Too stubborn to sell. And Gideon Marlowe, who had spent ten years being loved for his acres, had become fascinated by the one woman in the valley who had looked at his acres and shrugged.

So he had hatched his foolish, hopeful plan. He would go to her, not as the great Mr. Marlowe, not as the thirteen thousand acres walking around in a fine coat. He would go as Walt Sutter, a penniless drifter with nothing to offer but his two hands, and he would find out once and for all whether a woman could want the man when there were no acres in the picture at all.

It was a lie. He knew it was a lie. But it was a lie born of a wound so old and so deep he had stopped being able to tell the difference between the wound and himself.

In the dark of the barn, Gideon Marlowe pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

He had given himself until harvest to learn the truth. The trouble was, he was already beginning to understand that the truth might destroy him either way.