He spent six days grieving the mail-order bride he’d never met—then she stepped off the train alive, carrying the proof that the telegram had buried the wrong woman.
Chapter 17
The winter of ’82 into ’83 was the longest, heaviest winter in the county in four years, and it found the Whitfield place ready: wood stacked, feed laid in, the storm windows in, and a woman in the kitchen who had spent sixteen years preparing for exactly this kind of usefulness.
The sewing trade found her before the first snow. It came through Mrs. Hollis’s counter, the way everything in Red Mesa came through Mrs. Hollis’s counter: a bolt of cloth here, a torn coat there, a question about a pattern that had defeated a woman in town since her mother’s day. Mara took it in the way she took everything — without announcement, at the kitchen table in the evenings, the silver thimble working by lamplight, and by January there was a quiet economy running down the Mesa Road from the Whitfield kitchen to half the households in town, in both directions: cloth going in, coats going out, and small money crossing both ways, honest as the seasons.
The Sundays continued. Otis Piper came with the regularity of the snow — after the first storm, he had taken to riding up on Saturday and sleeping in the barn loft, so as to be present, he said, for the biscuits, and the arrangement stood unchallenged. And with him came, after the second month, Mrs. Hollis, who found reasons: a pie to deliver, a parcel to collect, a question about a pattern. She stayed to heat it by the stove. She stayed to supper. She stayed to infinite Sundays, and no one in the county — least of all two people who had each spent a decade and a half alone — said a word about the way the widow of the general store and the widower of the Hollow Tree each let their coats hang a little longer by the other’s chair on those Sundays, the way coats do when they are in no hurry.
Christmas came to the Whitfield place white and quiet. The table held six: the four of them, Miss Ada Pike, and Rev. Thurlow, who had walked two miles and lied about enjoying it. The gifts were plain, as the house was plain. Mara gave Cole a pair of gloves, sewn in the evenings, the stitching invisible even to him, and he turned them over a long time, and said that suit would be all his winters. He gave her a photograph.
It was a photograph of the ranch — the house, the barn, the east hill behind — taken the thirteenth of April, the day before the fourteenth, by a traveling photographer who had stopped at the ranch on a whim and found a man who, inexplicably, agreed to pay for a picture of his own place on a Wednesday.
“The day before,” she said, looking at it.
“The day before the fourteenth,” he said. “I’d decided the fourteenth was coming, and I wanted there to be a record of the place she was… a record of the place. I didn’t know yet I was losing you. I’d already lost you, of course. The deck was stacked six days ahead. But I wanted there to be a photograph of this house as it was the day before the world’s worst news, so that whatever happened, the house would have existed complete, on purpose, once.”
She looked at the photograph a long time. Then she set it on the shelf under the clock, beside the box of letters, in the light.
“Now it has,” she said.
In the last week of the year, the mail brought a letter from the Denver agency — the same agency, the same careful hand that had written the telegram on the eighth of April. It was addressed to Mara Hall, care of Mr. Cole Whitfield, Red Mesa, and it concerned the belongings of one Cora Hall, deceased, late of Boston and Kansas. The agency, having exhausted the dead woman’s list of addresses, and having learned of a correspondent in Red Mesa, wrote to ask what should be done with a trunk that had been recovered, unclaimed, from the rail line, and that had followed the paperwork slowly ever since.
“I’ll take it,” Mara said, reading the letter at the kitchen table with the snow coming down past the window. “She’s got nobody else with a name.”
“Tell them,” Cole said, “it’s coming home.”