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

Chapter 4

The weeks that followed were the strangest of Cora Vane’s life, and she would have been hard-pressed to explain why.

It was not that the work changed — the work was the same work it had always been, the endless, bone-deep labor of keeping a dying place alive. It was that she was no longer doing it alone.

Walt Sutter was not a man who did things halfway. In the first week he mended fences that had been broken since before Grant died. He rehung the corral gate that had dragged in the dirt for two years. He patched the barn roof with shakes he split himself, and when Cora came out to tell him it was suppertime he was up on the ridgepole with the sunset behind him, and he looked down at her and grinned — an actual grin, white teeth in a sunburned face — and Cora’s heart did something it had not done in three years.

She told herself it was the surprise. She told herself a lot of things.

Then there was the well.

The pump had been failing since the winter Grant passed. It would draw for a while and then spit air, and Cora had learned to live with hauling buckets from the spring a quarter mile away, which added an hour to every day and a particular ache to her back. Walt Sutter looked at that pump the way other men looked at a puzzle. He took it apart, piece by piece, laid the pieces out on a clean sack, and spent an afternoon coaxing them back into order with patience Cora had never seen a man apply to anything but cards or cattle.

When he primed it and the water came up clean and steady, Cora stood at the trough and watched it run and did not say anything for a long moment.

“That pump’s been ailing since before my husband passed,” she said finally.

“Needed new leathers and a bit of patience,” Walt said. “Nothing wrong with it that a careful man couldn’t fix.”

Nothing wrong with it that a careful man couldn’t fix. Cora repeated the words to herself that night, standing at the kitchen window, watching the lamplight in the barn where her hired hand was reading some book he’d brought in his pack. She caught herself planning breakfast for two. She caught herself buying the coffee he liked. She caught herself listening for his step in the yard, and she caught herself catching herself, and she stood in her dark kitchen and talked to the empty air the way she had talked to Grant’s ghost in the first terrible months.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she told the dark. “I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m too old to be this foolish.”

She was thirty-two. She was not too old for anything, though she would not have believed it if you told her.

For his part, Gideon was learning the shape of her life the way a man learns a country by walking it. He learned that she was up before him every morning and asleep after him every night. He learned that she kept a ledger in her own hand, every penny accounted for, and that she went without things she needed so that the stock could eat. He learned that she had refused three offers for the farm from men who wanted to buy it cheap and turn it into grazing for the Marlowe herds — offers that would have been more than fair, offers that would have saved her. She had refused them all.

“Why?” he asked her one evening on the porch, when the light was going amber and the work was done. “Why not sell and be shut of the worry?”

Cora was quiet a moment, looking out over her tired fields. “Because it would be kneeling,” she said. “Selling this place to the first man who smells blood — that’s not selling, Mr. Sutter. That’s kneeling down so somebody can step over you. I’d rather lose it standing up than save it on my knees.”

Gideon heard the words and felt them land somewhere in him that he had thought was dead. He opened his mouth. He had not meant to say it then, but it came up out of him like water finding a crack:

“Cora — there’s something I should have told you the day I came.”

She turned to look at him. The light was behind her, and he could not read her face, and he was suddenly and terribly aware of the weight of his lie, the whole rotten architecture of it, the months of it, the way it had grown around him like a cage he had built bar by bar.

Then, from down by the creek, the mule brayed — a long, panicked sound — and Cora was on her feet and moving before the echo died, because a bray like that meant a leg through the fence or a coyote in the fold, and the moment was gone.

By the time they had the mule untangled and the fence patched and the animals settled, it was full dark, and the words did not come again. Cora said goodnight to him at the barn door, and Gideon stood in the dark and listened to her footsteps cross the yard, and he wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to call her back and tell her everything.

But he heard, as he always heard when he came to the edge of it, a woman’s laugh from ten years ago — light, careless, cruel — and the arithmetic question that had followed him through every kindness since:

Does she want you? Or does she want what you own?

He lay down on the straw and stared at the rafters, and he understood, with a clarity that felt like a knife, that he had maybe a dozen days before he either told her the truth or watched the bank take her farm out from under her.

And he still did not know which of those things frightened him more.