She Sighed, “No One Wants A Bride With Three Kids” The Cowboy Smiled, “I Always Wanted A Big Family”

Chapter 15

Gideon Hale had grown up in Missouri, in a house full to the rafters, one of seven children.

Seven. Willa could not imagine it — could not imagine a house with seven children in it, a house that was never quiet, that was always full of crying or laughing or small feet underfoot, always too many at the table, always noise. She had grown up an only child, in a quiet house, and she had married Peter and had three children and had thought that was a great deal of noise.

But Gideon told her about the house in Missouri, and his voice was low and faraway, the voice of a man looking back down a long road, and he told her about the noise.

“There was never a quiet hour,” he said. “Never. Someone was always crying or laughing or getting into something they shouldn’t. My mother used to say that if the house was quiet for more than five minutes, she’d go looking, because it meant somebody was either sick or up to something, and she wanted to know which. We were always underfoot. Always in the way. Always too many at the table, and my father used to say grace over a table that was so crowded you couldn’t see the wood, and he’d thank God for it, for every single one of us, and I used to think he was just saying the words.”

He was quiet for a moment. The lamp guttered. Somewhere outside, a horse stamped in the barn.

“I loved it,” he said. “That’s the thing I never knew how to say until it was gone. I loved it the way you only understand you loved a thing after it’s gone. The noise. The crowding. The being one of seven. I thought it would always be like that. I thought that was just what a house was — full.”

The fever, Gideon said, came the way fevers came in those years.

It came in the winter, and it moved through the town, and it did not care how full a house was or how much a boy loved his brothers. It took two of them — two of the seven, two boys, one older and one younger than Gideon — in a single hard week.

Gideon’s voice did not waver when he said it, but Willa saw his hands stop moving, saw them go still on his knees, and she understood that the stillness was not calm. The stillness was the thing a man does with his hands when he is holding something very heavy and does not trust himself to put it down.

“I was seven years old,” he said. “Same as Ellis. And I remember my mother sitting up with them, night after night, the way you’ve been sitting up with Lily. I remember the lamp burning all night. I remember her voice, low and steady, talking to them the way I talked to Lily tonight, telling them to hold on, telling them she was right there. I remember my father carrying them to the window to see the stars, the way I carried Lily.”

He looked across the sleeping child at Willa, and there was something raw in his face now, something he had been carrying for a very long time.

“I could not do a thing,” he said. “I was too small. I sat at the top of the stairs and I watched my mother sit up with my brothers, and I watched them go, one and then the other, in a single week, and there was not a thing in the world I could do about it. I have carried that my whole life. I have carried the being-too-small, the being-useless, the watching and not being able to help. You asked me why I rode a hard hour in the dark for a child that is not mine.”

He looked down at Lily, flushed and sleeping, her small chest rising and falling, Winky clutched under her arm.

“I could not do a thing for my brothers,” he said. “I was too small, and I have carried that my whole life. But I can do something for this one. Do you understand? I can sit up with her, and I can carry her to the window, and I can talk to her in the dark until the fever turns. I can be the man I could not be when I was seven years old. You think these children are a thing you are asking me to carry? They are not. They are the thing I have been waiting to be allowed to carry.”

The house was very quiet.

Willa sat across the small bed from him, and she could not speak. She had thought she understood. She had thought she knew what kind of man advertised for a wife — a practical man, a lonely man, a man with a good house and good land and an emptiness he wanted filled. She had not known that the emptiness had a shape. She had not known that it was shaped like the house in Missouri, full to the rafters, never quiet, too many at the table.

The rest of it came out of him then, the whole of it, the way water comes out of a cracked jar.

The brothers who were left grew up and scattered, the way children do, west and south and away, looking for land of their own, looking for the lives the fever had interrupted. Gideon’s mother passed. His father passed. And Gideon, who had built a fine ranch in Montana with his own two hands, who had raised the barn and dug the well and driven the fence posts into the good black earth, found himself standing alone in a good house on good land, in a silence so complete it rang in his ears at night.

“I built all this,” Gideon said, and he looked around the quiet kitchen below them, though they could not see it from the upstairs room, and every nail I drove, I was thinking it was for a house full of people. I was thinking about the noise. I was thinking about my father saying grace over a table you couldn’t see the wood. And then the house was finished, and there was no one in it but me.”

He looked at Willa, and his eyes were bright in the lamplight, and his voice was very quiet.

“Do you know what that is like, Mrs. Brenner? To get the thing you worked for and find that the people it was for are all gone, or grown, or never came? I had everything a man was supposed to want. I would have traded a good deal of it for the sound of too many feet on the stairs.”

The fever that had taken Daniel — no. The fever that had taken Peter Brenner in Ohio, and the fever that had taken two of Gideon’s brothers when he was a helpless boy of seven, and the fever that had burned through the valley that autumn and taken the McAllister boy — it was the same fever. The same sickness, moving through the years, taking what it wanted.

And this time, Willa understood, it had not taken.

This time there had been a man who would ride an hour in the dark, and a doctor brought back before dawn, and two people sitting up across a small bed, taking turns, talking to the child in the dark, until the fever turned.

This time, the fever had met something it had not met before.

This time, there had been a man who was too small once, and who had waited his whole life to be big enough.