The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive

Chapter 11

They watched it take.

The yellow paper curled at the edges, held its shape a moment — the creases had folded so deeply into it that the paper refused to lie flat even in dying — and then caught, and lifted, and was gone. The telegram had arrived on a Tuesday. It left on a Thursday in May, fed to the same stove that had heated the water for their two-o’clock tea, and the ash fell through the grates and the draft took it up the chimney into the morning.

Nolan said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had done the thing that needed doing, the way she did everything — plainly, precisely, without ceremony and also without apology.

“Will you take me out to see the view?” she asked. “The one you wrote about.”

It was barely light. The coffee she had made at six stood on the stove. He looked at her — at the shawl over her shoulders, the undressed hair, the bandage gone now from her arm, a pale new scar in its place — and he said, “This is a good time of day for it.”

The hill east of the house was a twenty-minute walk through the pasture gate and up the long grass slope, and he did not hurry her, and she did not ask him to. The April light came up over the rim of the world and laid itself across the grass, low and level, the way it only does at the edges of the day, and the grass held the light in the exact particular way he had described in a letter he had written to a woman he had never met, six weeks before he saw her face.

He stood beside her at the top of the hill and did not point anything out. There was nothing to point out; it was all there, the way he had written it: the house below with its smoke going straight up in the windless air, the barn square in its frame of corrals, the range rolling away gray-gold to the horizon, the creek line of cottonwoods marking the road to town. Five years he had stood on this hill alone, and on the worst days of those five years he had come up here because it was the view, because the size of it put his own smallness in order, because the grass holding its color was a promise the country made that the country kept.

She stood beside him for a long time without speaking.

Then she said, “The grass does hold its color,” and he heard, in her voice, the thing he had written the letter for in the first place: that she had understood it, that she had recognized it, that the letter had not been a solitary act of a lonely man addressing a hill.

He found his voice had things in it again.

“I wrote that letter,” he said, “and read it back, and nearly did not send it. It seemed like a foolish thing to put in a letter about cattle.”

“And yet you sent it,” Alice said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He thought about it, standing in the April light with his hands in his pockets. “Because it was the truth,” he said, “and I had promised you the truth, and I decided the whole thing would stand or fall on that.”

She nodded. She did not tell him she had read that paragraph three times, in a room above Beacon Street, with the lamp burning low. She did not tell him the letter had been the reason she had written back a second time, or that she had packed her sentiment kit after all, weight be damned.

She said, “It was the letter,” and that was the whole of it, and both of them understood they were no longer talking about the view.

They walked back down the hill as the sun cleared the rim, and Alice cooked breakfast in a kitchen that belonged to her now as much as to him, and that afternoon — in the slanting light of the afternoon, at the table where he had read her letters — she asked him, plainly, in the way she asked everything, whether a justice of the peace came out this far from town.

He said he could ride into Stone Creek and ask.

She said, “Ask him for a Saturday in June. I have been wearing this dress for three weeks, and I am ready to be married in it.”

Nolan Reeves stood up from the table very slowly, the way a man stands up when the ground beneath him has been quietly replaced with something better, and he said — it was not what he had planned to say, and he surprised himself with it — “Alice, I want you to know that I spent twelve days grieving you before I’d ever set eyes on you, and I have not yet decided if that is the most foolish or the most serious thing I have ever done.”

She looked at him across the table, and there was something in her face he had not seen there before — a softness that was not weakness, a shine behind the measuring eyes.

“It is the most serious,” she said. “Anyone can grieve a person they have held. It takes a particular kind of man to grieve a person he has only promised to hold, sight unseen. That is the kind of man I came west for.”