She Sighed, “No One Wants A Bride With Three Kids” The Cowboy Smiled, “I Always Wanted A Big Family”
Chapter 9
It was Ellis who broke the careful quiet first, and it was over the horses.
Ellis had been staring at the horses since the platform. Willa had seen it — the way his whole small body would go still and intent whenever the animals moved in the corral, the way he would drift toward the fence when he thought no one was looking, the way he had asked, in the first week, in the hopeful, dangerous voice of a child who has not yet learned which questions are allowed: “Mama, can I go see the horses?”
And Willa had said no.
She had said it gently, because she loved him, and she had said it firmly, because she was afraid. Horses were big. Horses were unpredictable. Horses belonged to the man who owned this house, and the man who owned this house was being kind to them, and kindness, in Willa’s experience, did not survive having its property climbed on by other people’s children.
Ellis had not asked again. He had simply gone quiet, the way he had learned to go quiet, and he had watched the horses from the kitchen window, and Willa had told herself it was for the best.
Then one morning, in the second week, Willa turned around from the washboard and the kitchen was empty of her son.
She stood very still for a moment, the suds dripping off her fingers, and she felt the cold hand close around her heart the way it had closed around it on the platform, and in the river crossing, and in every moment since she had let herself begin to hope. She dropped the cloth and she went through the house calling his name, her voice going up and up, and Ada appeared at the top of the stairs with a white face, and Lily started to cry in the parlor, and Willa ran out the back door and across the yard, already composing the apology, already bracing for the anger, already seeing in her mind the terrible scene she would find — her son trampled, or thrown, or worse, her son in trouble with the man whose patience she had been so carefully trying not to test.
She rounded the corner of the barn and stopped.
There was no trampling. There was no anger. There was Ellis — her loud, quieted, stone-carrying Ellis — sitting on the top rail of the corral fence, his legs dangling, his whole face alight with a joy she had not seen on it since Ohio. And there was Gideon Hale standing beside him, one hand resting easy on the neck of the old bay mare, talking low and unhurried, the way you talk to a nervous horse and a nervous boy at the same time, because they need the same thing, which is to be told that nothing bad is going to happen.
“—and the thing about horses,” Gideon was saying, “is that they can smell fear, but they can also smell a lie. They don’t care how big you are or how old you are or whose son you are. They only care whether you’re honest with them. So you let her smell your hand first, like this, slow, and you don’t grab, and you don’t crowd, and you wait. That’s all it is. You wait, and you let her decide you’re worth knowing.”
Ellis was listening with his whole body. He was leaning forward off the rail, his small hand extended, trembling with the effort of keeping it still, and the old mare — Sadie, Willa remembered, Sadie the gentle one, the one who knew the road in the dark — was lowering her great head toward him, her nostrils fluttering, her breath ruffling his hair.
Willa stood at the corner of the barn and watched, and she did not know what to do with what she was seeing, so she did the only thing she knew to do. She said, too sharply, the words that came out of two years of fear like water out of a cracked jar:
“Ellis. You mustn’t trouble Mr. Hale. Get down from there this instant.”
Ellis flinched. His hand dropped. The joy went out of his face the way light goes out of a room when a door is shut, and he began to scramble down off the rail, small and apologetic and already bracing —
“Mrs. Brenner.”
Gideon Hale’s voice was not sharp. It was not even firm, exactly. It was simply there, the way a fence is there, and it stopped her.
He looked at her across the corral, and there was something in his face she had not seen before — not anger, not patience, but a kind of plain, unhurried certainty, the look of a man who has thought about a thing and knows his own mind on it.
“A boy who wants to learn horses is not trouble,” he said. “A boy who wants to learn horses is the best company a man can keep. Let him be.”
And then he turned back to Ellis and the mare, and he said, low and easy, “Come on back up here, son. She wasn’t done deciding about you. Neither was I.”
Willa stood at the corner of the barn with her apology still in her mouth, unused, not knowing where to put it.
She watched her son climb back up onto the rail. She watched the old mare lower her head again to the small, trembling hand. She watched Gideon Hale stand there in the morning light, patient as the mountains, and she heard herself think, in a voice that was not the cold voice, not the two-years-in-the-making voice, but something smaller and younger and more dangerous by far:
What if he means it?
She pushed the thought away. She pushed it down so hard she felt it in her chest, and she turned and went back into the house, and she picked up Lily, who had stopped crying and was watching her with those open, unafraid eyes, and she buried her face in her daughter’s hair and stood very still in the middle of the kitchen while the morning went on around her.
Because it was early yet. It was always early yet.
Kindness wore thin. Kindness wore out.
But her son was on the corral fence with a man who had called him son, and the old mare was breathing her warm, grassy breath over his hand, and Willa Brenner, who had not cried in front of anyone in two years, felt something dangerous move behind her eyes, and she pressed her face harder into Lily’s hair and did not let it come.