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

Chapter 7

Some men will tell you the moment is what matters — the two of you at the front, the words you trade, the rings. The words did matter. I said mine with a voice that shook less than I’d feared, and she said hers like she’d been practicing them her whole life, and when the preacher said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the fiddler struck up and the whole yard erupted.

“You may kiss your bride.”

I cupped Clara’s face in my hands — the same face I’d first seen bending over my wrist with a knife, cutting the death out of me — and I kissed her, and the children cheered, and I heard Sadie’s small proud voice rise over the noise:

“Papa kissed Livia!”

Everybody laughed, and Clara knelt in her blue dress in the grass and opened her arms. “That’s right, sweet girl. And now I’m your mama too, if that’s all right with you.”

Sadie’s eyes went wide as saucers. “My mama?”

“Yes. I’ll be mama to all of you, if you’ll have me.”

The twins hit her like a small double freight train, arms around her neck. “Mama!” they shouted in unison, and I realized they’d understood more than any of us had given them credit for. Mrs. Pruitt brought Caleb over, and he reached for Clara and babbled happily as she lifted him, and I stood in the middle of my own front yard with my heart too big for my ribs, watching my wife hold my children, and I knew Susannah was somewhere watching too, and that she was glad.

The celebration ran until the lanterns came out and the fiddler’s fingers went raw. Mrs. Pruitt took the children for the night — “so you two can start your marriage properly,” she said, with a wink that could have powered the threshing machine — and Clara and I stood alone at last in the cabin that was finally, truly, a home.

“I have something for you,” I said, and I fetched the package from the bedroom.

She unwrapped it and found the sign I’d been carving in the evenings after she’d gone to bed — a slab of oak that read THE WHITFIELDS in letters I’d gouged out one careful stroke at a time.

“Oh, Elias,” she breathed, running her fingers over the letters. “Did you make this?”

“I want to hang it by the front door, so every person who comes to this place knows they’re walking into our home. A family home.”

She was crying again, the good kind. “Our family. I love the sound of that.”

“So do I. And it’s all because you walked into our lives with that loaf of bread.”

“The best bread I ever baked, it seems.”

“Indeed. Though your biscuits run a close second.”

She laughed, that clear, unafraid laugh that had pulled me back from the edge of the fever. “I love you, Elias Whitfield.”

“And I love you, Clara Whitfield.”

I hung the sign the next morning, and the days that followed settled into a rhythm so good it felt borrowed.

Clara began teaching at the schoolhouse, riding the three miles to Harmony each morning on the gentle mare I’d helped her pick from a neighbor’s herd, and coming home to us in the evenings with her hair full of road dust and her eyes full of stories about her students. Mrs. Pruitt minded the children through the school day, though the twins were already pestering Clara to teach them their letters so they could “go to school with Mama.”

In the evenings we ate at a table that was always a little too crowded and always exactly right. We read to the children by the fire. We made new traditions out of whole cloth — Sunday pancakes, Friday reading night, the ritual of checking the henhouse together in the last of the light, which was, I admitted to myself, just an excuse to be alone with her for ten minutes at a stretch.

Autumn came down gold over the mountains, the aspens turning to flame, and I watched Clara move through the house with the baby growing inside her — though I didn’t know it yet — and I caught myself thinking, in the middle of chores, that I was the luckiest man in Wyoming, and the guiltiest, because some part of me still expected it all to be taken away.

One evening, after the children were asleep, she came and sat beside me on the porch steps, quiet in a way that made my pulse pick up.

“I’ve been feeling a bit different lately,” she said. “Dr. Marsh confirmed it today.”

I turned. “Different how?”

“We’re going to have a baby, Elias. In the spring.”

The porch, the dark, the cricket — all of it fell away. I gathered her into my arms and held her so tight I could feel her heartbeat through her ribs, and I said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, “A baby. Our baby.”

“Our fifth child,” she corrected gently, pulling back to look at me. “The others are as much mine now as this one will be.”

I understood perfectly. She had never been a stepmother to my children. From the first day, she had simply been their mother — and I had simply been a man she’d decided to love.

The children were overjoyed when we told them the next morning. “A baby?” Matthew’s eyes went huge. “A brother or a sister?”

“A baby,” Clara confirmed. “He’ll come in the spring, when the wildflowers are blooming.”

“I want a sister,” Sadie declared, climbing onto her mama’s lap.

“A brother would be better,” Matthew countered, because Matthew argued with everything.

“We’ll be happy with either,” I said, “as long as it’s healthy.”

And winter came down over the valley, white and quiet.

And every night, after Clara fell asleep, I lay awake in the dark and remembered the way Susannah had bled after Caleb was born, and how she’d survived that, and died anyway, three months later, of a sickness no doctor could name.

I held my wife’s hand in the dark, and I did not tell her that I was afraid.

But spring was coming. And with it, everything.