I Found Her Hiding in My Wagon… She Whispered: ”Pretend I’m Your Wife Until We’re Out of Town”

Chapter 9

He said it that evening. Not dramatically. It was not that kind of evening. It was the kind of evening that comes after a hard day, when the hard part is over and the house is warm and supper is done, and the specific relief of a crisis resolved has settled into the particular quiet of two people who have been through something together.

She was at the table with her mother’s Bible. She read it in the evening sometimes. Not devotionally, exactly — more the way you read something that belonged to someone you loved, and that carries them in it.

He sat down across from her. He looked at the table.

“The pass opens in April,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I can take you anywhere you need to go, when it does.” He looked at her. “Any city. Anywhere you want to start over. The property in Red Willow will be yours — the marshal will see to that. You could sell it or keep it. Either way, you’d have something to go forward with.”

She held the Bible in both hands. “Is that what you’re planning to do?” she said. “Take me somewhere in April?”

He looked at the table again. “I can take you anywhere,” he said. “I just don’t know how I’d come back to this house if you weren’t in it.”

She went very still. She looked at him with the brown eyes that had been doing the calculation of a woman assessing situations since October — and that had, at some point during the winter, stopped assessing and started knowing.

“Elias,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I repaired the curtains in your brother’s room,” she said.

“I know.”

“And the porch railing.”

“I know.”

“And I have been leaving notes on the kitchen table for four months.”

“I know,” he said.

“Because I live here,” she said.

He looked at her. She held his gaze with the steady certainty of a woman who has spent the winter arriving at something and has arrived.

“I live here,” she said again, more quietly. Not a question. Not a statement about the present. A statement about intention.

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. Both of them were still holding the Bible. She held his back.

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

And that was all either of them needed to say.

Outside, the Wyoming February was white and still and enormous. Inside the Ward Ranch, the fire was warm, and the supper dishes were done, and a woman had repaired the curtains in a room that had been unused for four years — and was living in it, and intended to keep living in it.

The days lengthened. The snow, at last, began to soften at the edges. And the pass, which had closed like a door in November, waited on the far side of the mountains to open again.

The first time she sang in that house, he was in the barn and did not know he was listening. She sang the way women sang when they were alone with the work — half to themselves, a tune without a name, something from her childhood and the shop above the street in Red Willow. He stood in the dark of the barn with his hand against the mare’s shoulder and did not move until the song ended. It was a private thing, and he had no claim to it, and yet the knowledge of it settled into him like something he had been waiting all winter to be given. After that, whenever the kettle was on and the work allowed it, she would hum. And the whole house would seem to lean toward the sound of her, the way a garden leans toward a window, unbidden, without knowing it is doing it.