The Cowboy Was Left With Four Babies After His Wife Died, Until She Walked In With A Loaf Of Bread

Chapter 4

The doctor came with the dawn, wet through and grumbling, and the first thing he did when he looked at my arm was whistle low through his teeth.

“She’s good,” he said.

Dr. Marsh was a gray old badger who’d delivered half the babies in Harmony and buried the other half, and he didn’t hand out compliments like change.

“That schoolteacher cut you open and took the worst of it out before it set. If she hadn’t, I’d be measuring you for a box instead of scolding you for getting out of bed. Where’d you say she’s from?”

“Boston. Her father was a doctor.”

“Then her father did God’s work before he died, because that girl knows her remedies.” He dosed me with antivenom and bitter pills. “You’re lucky, Whitfield. Lucky twice over — once to have been bit at all, and again to have been bit in front of her.”

He told me I’d live. Then he told me the harder truth: I’d be a week at least on my back, that arm would be no good to me for a month, and a man who can’t work in June on a small Wyoming place is a man watching his ruin arrive on schedule.

I lay there doing the arithmetic. The garden would go to seed. The cows needed milking twice a day. The fences, the horses, the hay — and the babies, always the babies, who had no idea their papa was a failing business.

He was still repacking his bag when Clara Nichols came back from feeding the children their breakfast and stood in the doorway.

“I’ll stay,” she said.

The doctor blinked at her. I tried to sit up.

“Miss Nichols, I couldn’t ask —”

“You didn’t ask. I offered.” She didn’t look away from me. “School doesn’t start for another month, and I’ve nowhere I need to be that matters more than right here. Besides” — and here she glanced down at the twins, who had followed her in and planted themselves on either side of her skirt like small guards — “I’ve grown rather fond of your brood in a single day. It would be a shame to abandon them now.”

And so it was settled, the way the best things in a man’s life are always settled: not by his plan, but by a woman’s certainty arriving like weather.

She took the little storage room I’d been converting into a bedroom for the twins, and she asked for nothing else. She washed the dishes. She mended the shirts. She planted a second row of beans in the garden, sang Caleb to sleep, taught Sadie to carry a wooden spoon without dropping it, and turned the morning egg-hunt into the greatest adventure ever invented.

By the end of the first week, the cabin didn’t just look different. It smelled different — soap and bread and the particular warm smell of children being loved.

One evening I found her in the rocker by the fire, darning a sock that belonged to a child she wasn’t related to, all four of them asleep down the hall like a row of wheat she’d sowed.

“You’re a natural with them,” I said.

“I always wanted a large family.” She didn’t look up from her needle. “My parents died in a fire when I was sixteen. I was their only child. In one night I went from being somebody’s whole world to being nobody’s anything.”

Seven years, she told me. Seven years studying to be a teacher in Boston, saving coins, and then running as far west as the railroad would take her, because the city held too many corners that still smelled of smoke.

“And instead,” I said, “you landed in a cabin with a widower, four babies, a snake-bit arm, and a pot of stew.”

“It’s not such a terrible fate.” And when she finally looked up, her eyes caught the lamplight, and my heart turned over in my chest like a thing that had forgotten it was alive.

She corrected me gently when I thanked her as “Miss Nichols.” “It’s Clara. If we’re to share a cabin, you may as well use my first name.”

“Then you must call me Elias.”

The nights that followed were the first nights in a year I hadn’t dreamed of dying.

By the end of her second week, I was well enough to work again. There was no reason for her to stay. And yet I couldn’t bear the thought of the evening silence returning — of four children asking, over and over, Where’s Livia?

The children sensed it, too. The twins grew clingy, following her like shadows. Sadie asked “Livia stay?” a hundred times a day. Even Caleb fussed when she set him down, the way he’d fussed when Susannah — no. I wouldn’t let myself finish that thought.

The night before she was meant to leave, after the children were asleep, I found her at the kitchen table, staring at a letter.

“Bad news?” I asked, sitting down across from her.

“The school board.” She folded the paper slowly. “They’ve delayed the start of term by two weeks. The summer storms did more damage to the schoolhouse than anyone thought — half the roof’s gone and the stove won’t draw.”

I hid my relief so badly it might as well have been a flag.

“I see. What will you do?”

Clara looked up at me, and the lamplight moved across her face, and she said, very quietly: “That depends on whether my being here is still wanted.”

And I knew, sitting in my own kitchen with the fire ticking and the babies asleep down the hall, that the next thing I said would be the most important thing I’d said in a year.

The cabin was so quiet I could hear the mantel clock counting out the moments of my cowardice.