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

Chapter 3

“It’s a bad fever,” Doc Ellsworth said at last, and Willa’s heart went down like a stone. “But it’s a child’s fever. The kind that turns, if it’s watched and cooled and kept. It hasn’t touched her lungs. That’s the thing to be afraid of, and it hasn’t touched her lungs.”

Willa felt the stone stop falling. It did not rise again, but it stopped.

“She’ll need to be cooled and watched, round the clock, and kept drinking,” the doctor said. “If she sweats it out in a day or two, she’ll be cross and hungry and entirely herself, and you’ll want to strangle her by the end of the week, which is how you’ll know she’s well.”

Willa almost smiled. She could not remember the last time she had almost smiled.

Doc Ellsworth looked at her then, properly, for the first time, and whatever he saw in her face made him set his bag down and take her by the elbow and sit her down on the chair by the window, the way you sit down a person who is about to fall.

“You’ve seen this before,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” Willa said. Her voice was very small. “My husband. Two winters ago. It took him in nine days.”

The doctor was quiet for a moment. Through the window, the first pale edge of light was touching the ridge, and the whole world looked rinsed and new and utterly indifferent to whether one small girl lived or died.

“Then you know what to watch for,” Doc Ellsworth said gently, “and you know the thing most people don’t know, which is that watching is not the same as helplessness. Watching is what keeps them here. And you are not watching alone tonight.”

Willa looked past him, down the stairs, where she could hear Gideon moving around the kitchen, banking the fire, putting water on. She had not asked him to do any of it. He had simply come back through the door before dawn with the doctor, his coat dark with dew, his face gray with the hard ride, and he had not gone to bed.

She had watched him, all that first night, through the crack in the door. He had not slept. He had sat in the chair across from her with his elbows on his knees, and when she had needed the cloth wrung or the basin changed or the lamp trimmed, he had been there before she could ask, as if he had been waiting his whole life to be useful to somebody in the middle of the night.

And all the while, the voice had been talking. The voice that had moved west with her, that had ridden in her trunk between the folds of her best dress, that had sat with her through every meal in this house and whispered while Gideon taught her son about horses and sewed her daughter’s doll and gave her oldest girl room to breathe. The voice that had been two years in the making, and that knew exactly what a sick child in a stranger’s house meant.

Now he sees, the voice said. Now Gideon Hale sees what a ready-made family truly costs. A sick child in the night. A doctor’s bill. A fever that might run through all three of them before it’s done. Now he’ll start counting, the way they all start counting. The way they counted in Ohio. The way they counted at your own table, that night, when Ellis knocked over the cup.

Willa had almost wished he would count. It would have been easier, she thought, to lose this thing now, clean and early, before she had let herself want it. Easier to watch his face change and know, and to pack the trunk and take her children back out onto the road, than to keep hoping through another night that this time would be different.

But Gideon Hale did not count.

He sat up the rest of that night and the whole of the next day, and he sat up the night after that. He took turns with her at the bedside, and he wrung the cloths and talked low to the little girl when she fretted, and once, in the small hours, when Lily woke crying for the stars through the window, he carried her there, blanket and all, and held her up so she could see them, and Willa stood behind them and watched his big, calloused hands steady around her daughter’s small, burning body, and she could not make herself look away.

On the second night, with Lily finally sleeping a true sleep and the worst of the fever turning at last, Willa sat across the small bed from Gideon Hale in the lamplight, both of them gray with tiredness, and the thing she had been holding for weeks rose up in her throat and would not be swallowed back down.

She asked it in a whisper, so as not to wake the child.

“Why are you doing all this?”

Gideon looked up from the cloth he was folding.

“She’s not yours,” Willa said, and her voice shook, and she did not care anymore whether it did. “None of them are yours. You could have answered any letter in the Territory. You could have had a wife with no children at all, no trunk full of somebody else’s ghosts, no doctor’s bills, no fever in the night. So why would you sit up two nights running for a child that is not yours, in a house that was quiet before we came, when you could still send us all back to the road and be shut of us by morning?”

Gideon Hale was very tired. Willa would understand later how tired he was, would understand that what he said next came out of a place that had no walls left in it. He looked across the sleeping child at her, and he set the cloth down, and he said, very quietly, in a voice that sounded like it had been waiting a long time to be spoken aloud:

“Because I know this fever. I’ve known it since I was seven years old.”