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

Chapter 6

Her hand was warm, and it was steady, and it had saved my life once, and I had the feeling it was about to save it again.

“I wasn’t going to ask for time,” she said. “I was going to say that I’ve fallen in love with you too. With you, and with Micah and Matthew and Sadie and Caleb. This month has shown me what I truly want — and it isn’t only teaching in a frontier town.”

“What is it you want?” My voice came out rough, because I was afraid of the answer and terrified I already knew it.

“A family,” she said simply. “This family. If you’ll have me.”

I brought her hand to my lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Nothing would make me happier. But I don’t want you to give up your position, Clara. You worked hard to become a teacher.”

“I don’t intend to.” There it was again, that stubborn, wonderful certainty. “The schoolhouse is only three miles away. I can ride there each morning and be home by suppertime. Mrs. Pruitt has already offered to mind the children while I teach.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“Not everything. I haven’t considered what people will say when the new schoolteacher marries before her first term even begins.”

“Marries,” I repeated, and my heart went up in me like a pheasant flushed from cover.

Clara blushed a deep, lovely red. “I’m being presumptuous. I meant if —”

“No.” I took both her hands and went down on one knee on the porch boards, in the dark, like a fool, and a happy one. “You are not being presumptuous. Clara Nichols — will you do me the honor of becoming my wife, and a mother to my children?”

The tears came then, spilling onto her cheeks in the last of the light.

“Yes, Elias. Yes. I would be proud to be your wife. And their mother.”

I drew her into my arms, and when our mouths met, it felt like coming home — like finding a part of myself I hadn’t known was missing, not replaced but renewed, the way a winter field comes back green.

We agreed to a short engagement. Mrs. Pruitt took charge of the business with the grim efficiency of a general, and to my surprise the news rippled through Harmony with a warmth I hadn’t expected from a town that gossiped about everything. At the general store I overheard Mrs. Peterson say, “That Clara Nichols is exactly what those children need. And Elias Whitfield deserves some happiness after all he’s been through.” I had to walk out of the store to keep from weeping in front of the molasses barrels.

Two days before the wedding, I rode out to the little graveyard on the hill and sat down in the grass beside Susannah’s stone, and I talked to her.

I told her about Clara. About the bread and the bite and the fifteen miles in the dark, and the way my children had come back to life like grass after a hard winter. I told her I was sorry — sorry for being happy, sorry for the shame I felt at it, sorry for every way I’d failed her and the babies in the year since she’d left.

And I heard her answer the way you hear a thing you already know: not in words, but in the memory of one.

She’d said it on the last bad night, when she could barely breathe, holding my hand with all the strength she had left. “Elias. When I’m gone, don’t bury yourself with me. Find a way to be happy. For the children, and for you.”

I’d promised her I would, the way a man promises a dying wife anything.

“I kept my promise,” I said out loud, to the grass and the wind and the stone. “I just didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”

And I walked away from her grave carrying a lighter heart, and the sun was going down over the mountains in a glory of gold, and I thought: she would have liked Clara. She would have been first in line with the wildflowers.

The wedding morning came up clear and warm, the last Saturday of August 1876 — two months to the day since a rattlesnake had tried to kill me.

Neighbors came from all over the valley, filling the yard with chairs and children and a fiddler from town. They hung wildflowers everywhere, from the porch rails, from the fence, from the gate, until the place looked less like a hardscrabble ranch and more like a garden that had decided to stay.

And then the music started, and I turned, and there she was.

Clara wore a blue dress that matched her eyes, and she’d woven wildflowers into her hair instead of a veil, and she was walking toward me on Dr. Marsh’s arm — because she’d asked him to give her away, and he’d cried when she asked.

Behind her, in a crooked little line, came my children. Matthew carrying the rings on a pillow. Sadie scattering petals she’d picked herself. Micah leading baby Caleb by the hand, all of them so solemn and so dear that I thought my heart would come right out of my chest.

She reached the front of the yard, and she took my hands, and the preacher opened his book, and the whole valley went quiet.

“Dearly beloved,” he began.

And I realized, in that hush, that I had never in my life been this afraid of being this happy.