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

Chapter 4

To understand the woman who sat in that lamplit room with her hands twisted in a cloth, you have to go back before the stagecoach, before the letter, before the advertisement that almost went unanswered. You have to go back to Ohio, to a small house on a lane where the snow came up over the windowsills, and to the winter the fever came for the first time.

Willa had been Willa Mercer then — no, she thought, she had been Willa Brenner, married two years to a good man named Peter Brenner, and in that house on that lane they had been, for a while, ordinarily and quietly happy. Peter worked at the mill. Willa kept the house and the children and the garden, and when the babies came — Ada first, then Ellis, then Lily, small and squalling and perfect — she had believed, with the full, unearned confidence of a young woman who had not yet been tested, that this was how life would go. Small and warm and enough.

The fever came in the winter the way fevers did then, moving house to house down the lane like a thing with feet. It took the old first, the ones who had already lived their lives, and everyone said what a shame it was but it was also, in a terrible way, expected. Then it took the young, and the lane went quiet, and the women stopped visiting one another and started keeping their children indoors.

Peter came home from the mill one evening with a flush on his cheeks and a crossness she had never seen in him, and he said he thought he might have caught a chill, and he would be right as rain by morning. Willa put him to bed with a hot brick at his feet and a bowl of broth she had to coax him to finish, and she told herself the same thing he told her, because that was what you did when the alternative was unbearable.

By the third day he could not get out of bed. By the fifth he did not know her some of the time, and his eyes would go wide and panicked and he would call out for his mother, who had been dead six years. By the seventh, Willa had stopped sleeping entirely and had started counting the hours the way you count the coins in a jar you know is nearly empty.

Nine days. From well to gone in nine days, in that small house on that lane, with the snow piling up against the door and the doctor coming twice and leaving nothing behind him but the smell of his coat and the weight of his silence. Peter Brenner was thirty-one years old and strong and should have lived to be old, and the fever did not care any of that.

Willa had stood at the graveside with her three children — Ada, who was eight then and who had watched the whole thing with a stillness no child should own; Ellis, who was five and kept asking when his papa was coming home because no one had found the words yet; and Lily, who was not yet one and who slept through the funeral in a neighbor woman’s arms because a baby cannot grieve what it cannot remember — and Willa had kept her chin up, because that was what a widow did, because if she let her chin drop she would let everything else drop with it, and there were four mouths to feed and a rent to pay and a winter still to get through.

Peter had left some savings. Small savings, carefully kept, the kind a mill hand and his wife put away for a bad year without ever saying out loud that a bad year was what they were saving for. But small savings do not last long when there are four mouths and a roof and a winter, and Willa watched them go down like water in a cracked jar, watched them go down no matter how many seams she sewed at night by the lamp until her eyes burned, no matter how much washing she took in and hung out in the cold until her hands cracked and bled into the water.

And it was not the work that hardened her. Willa could work. Willa had always been able to work, and work, at least, did not lie to you. It was the way people looked at her three children.

The landlord looked at them and saw three more reasons the rent might come up short, and he started knocking a little harder and a little sooner each month. The women at the church looked at them and made the soft, pitying sounds that cost nothing and meant less. And the men — the few men who came around after a respectable interval of mourning, the ones who sat at her table with their hats in their hands and their intentions poorly hidden — the men looked at Ada, watchful and polite, and at Ellis, who was six by then and could not sit still and knocked over a cup at supper one night, and Willa watched their faces change.

She watched it happen once, at her own table, in real time. A man named Miller, a widower from two towns over, a decent enough man by all accounts, had come to call. He had complimented her preserves. He had asked about her garden. And then Ellis, excited and clumsy and desperate to be liked, had lunged across the table to show the man the bird’s nest he had found, and his elbow had caught the cup, and the milk had gone everywhere, and Willa had watched Mr. Miller’s face change.

It was not a cruel face. That was the worst of it. It was the face of a reasonable man doing arithmetic he had not expected to have to do. Counting the cost. Counting the years. Counting the ways a widow with three children was not the same bargain as a widow alone.

A widow alone, Willa understood in that one changed face, might be a prize.

A widow with three children was a debt.

She saw Mr. Miller to the door with a smile she had to hold up with both hands, and she stood in the cold for a long time after he had gone, watching her breath come out in clouds, and she understood exactly what she was now worth on the open market.

So when she saw the advertisement, months later, wedged between a notice about a lost horse and an auction of farm implements in the county paper the storekeeper saved for her, she almost did not read it. And when she read it, she almost did not answer it.

It had been placed by a rancher in Montana Territory, a man seeking a wife, a man who wrote that he had a good house and good land and that he was lonesome on it.

Willa read that advertisement four times.

The first time she read it with her heart beating hard and fast, the way you read a door that might be opening.

The second time she read it like a woman checking a floor for weak boards.

The third time she read it and told herself she was a fool.

The fourth time, she folded the paper, and she went to find her writing things, and she sat down at the kitchen table where Mr. Miller’s face had once changed over a knocked-over cup, and she took up her pen.

She wrote, in the very first letter, in the second line, before anything else, the truth.