She Said, “My Son Can Eat—I’m Not Hungry”… But the Rancher Noticed Her Empty Plate
Chapter 5
The frost on the kitchen window had grown teeth by mid-November, and Anna worked against it with her back to the stove, remembering the spring she’d married.
Samuel Whitaker had come to Sundance on a freight wagon with a hammer in his bag and a thumb he’d nearly lost to a green log, and he’d looked at the territory like a man looking at a woman he intended to court — with patience, and appetite, and no intention whatsoever of losing. He’d filed on his homestead the same year he married Anna: one hundred sixty acres, claimed clean and proper under the government’s promise that hard work alone could turn raw prairie into a life worth keeping.
For six years, it had kept that promise.
Six years of fences that stayed up and wells that stayed wet, of a house that grew a room at a time, of a corn crop and a calf crop and a second child that never came but a first one that had, a boy with his father’s stubbornness and his mother’s careful eyes. Six years inside which Anna had never once believed the arithmetic was going to run out on her.
She remembered the autumn it did.
The old-timers were calling it the Big Die-Up before the snow even finished falling. The worst winter Wyoming men had ever lived through. Cattle froze standing upright in the coulees, whole herds simply gone by spring, their owners walking out to find nothing but wind and horns and the silence of a ruined ledger. Samuel had lost most of his stock that winter. He’d borrowed heavy against the homestead that spring to rebuild, because hard work alone was supposed to be enough, and he’d believed it the way men who’d never lost a crop believe anything.
He’d never fully recovered. The fever took him the following autumn.
Anna remembered the day — how could she not; she had built her whole life on its foundation. The doctor had come and gone, and come and gone, and on the last visit had stood in the doorway with his hat in his hand and all the honest words in the world failing him. Samuel’s hand had been hot in hers. His eyes had roamed the ceiling as if he were looking for something beyond it.
“Eli,” he’d whispered. “Where’s Eli?”
She’d brought the boy to the bed. Eight years old, with his father’s jaw and his mother’s eyes, and Samuel had taken his son’s hand and pulled him close and said, low enough that only the three of them heard it, “Take care of your mama, Eli. She won’t ask for help even when she needs it most. You watch out for her. Promise me.”
Eli had promised.
The boy had been kneeling at his father’s bedside with the solemnity of a man taking an oath he knew he’d spend his life keeping, and Anna had stood behind him with her hand over her mouth and a grief too huge to have a shape, and she had not once — not once — let a tear fall in front of her son.
She’d made a private rule about that the day Samuel died: her son would never see her fall apart. The world had taken his father; she would not let it take his mother’s courage too. She would pack the grief into the same place she packed her hunger, into the same place she packed everything, and she would ration it out — a little at night, alone — like flour.
The bank had called the note two weeks after the funeral.
Mrs. Whitaker, the banker had said, in the tone of a man reading mathematics at a coffin — your husband’s loan carries terms that — The homestead had been pledged. The land was theirs only by paper, and paper had signatures, and the signatures didn’t care about six years or a dead man or an eight-year-old boy who’d promised to watch over his mother.
Anna had signed the surrender with a steadiness that surprised even the banker. She’d gone home, packed what little they could carry into a single trunk, and set out toward Casper before winter closed the roads again. She hadn’t cried in front of Eli that day either. She’d saved it.
She still had some saved.