The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive
Chapter 12
The wedding happened on the second Saturday of June, and the town of Stone Creek came out for it in a way that surprised Nolan and did not surprise Alice.
Mrs. Gurney closed the general store, which she did for funerals and weddings only, and stood at the table with the cakes she had made since dawn. Otis Fuller came in his Sunday coat with his wife, and Walt Pellar came in a clean shirt and stood at the back as if he had earned the right by being the bearer of the worst news of the decade and the witness to its correction. Mrs. Beal brought her water pitcher and her authority. The Vances came, and the Freemans from the south section, and the mail-order bride who had been dead and was now a bride sent a shiver of astonishment through the whole of it — the town had buried her, in its way, had spoken her name at suppers, and here she stood in the church that had never had a church, under the porch of the meeting house, in the dress she had worn from Boston, with the bandage scar shining pale on her arm.
The justice came out from town as summoned. The words were the same words that bound every other couple in the territory — property, love, honor, sickness, health — and Nolan said his without consulting the paper, because he had decided weeks ago what he was agreeing to, and Alice said hers the way she did everything, plainly, and the justice pronounced them man and wife and the town made its approving sound.
And that was when the stranger arrived.
He came up the road at the head of a dust column in a coat too fine for the country, driving a rig that had never seen a rut like the Cross Fork road, and he pulled to a halt at the edge of the yard in the middle of the blessing and climbed down and stood there, holding his hat, taking in the gathering with the slow appraisal of a man who has discovered a property that interests him.
“I’d heard there was a wedding,” the stranger said, when the silence had gone on long enough to make his presence known. “Name’s Voss. Jacob Voss, Dallas County. I’m looking for the owner of this spread.”
“Depends on what for,” Nolan said.
“To make him an offer,” Voss said, and his eyes moved over the yard — the house, the barn, the fence line running to the horizon — with the arithmetic of a man who counts things by what they will sell for. “I’ve been buying up the ranches on the western reaches of this territory. Consolidated holdings. The land here’s good, and the water’s spoken of. I was told in town there was a widower here, alone, no family, who might be minded to sell.”
Mrs. Gurney set down her cake knife.
“Mr. Voss,” she said, in the voice she used for measurements that had to be exact, “you have chosen the wrong day, and I believe the wrong yard, to talk ranch business. This is a wedding.”
“I apologize for the timing,” Voss said, without sounding like he meant it. “But timing is the thing that makes a purchase, and a man who waits for the right day to ask a question sometimes finds the land already gone.”
“Then you’ll find the land already gone,” Alice said.
Every head in the yard turned. She was standing in her wedding dress at her husband’s side, and she said it quietly, the way she said everything — plainly, without decoration — and the whole yard understood that a line had been drawn in the dust of this particular ranch.
“Ma’am,” Voss said, with a small smile that did not reach his eyes, “I was not speaking to you.”
“I was not asking permission to be spoken to,” Alice said. “You asked after the owner of this spread. I am the owner’s wife. And the answer to your question — whenever you ask it again, whatever day you choose — will be the same answer it is today. He is not minded to sell. We are not minded to sell. There is nothing further to discuss at this wedding.”
The silence that followed was the kind Mrs. Gurney would talk about for years — the silence of a yard full of people discovering, all at once, that the mail-order bride from Boston was going to be a particular force in the life of the town.
Jacob Voss looked at Nolan. “Is that the way of it?”
Nolan Reeves, who had spent his whole life giving short honest answers to direct questions, looked at his wife of twenty minutes — this woman who had crossed a continent on the strength of six letters and a plain promise, who had sat with him at two in the morning and told him the fear back out of the fire, who had put the telegram into the stove with her own two hands and then gone out to see the hill — and he said, “That is the way of it.”
Voss replaced his hat. “I’ll leave my card at the store anyway,” he said. “These things are seldom settled on wedding days.”
He drove away in his cloud of dust, and the wedding resumed around him, and Alice Hartley, now Alice Reeves, stood in the center of the yard that owned her name and let the town stream past her like water finding its level, and she was not thinking about Mr. Jacob Voss of Dallas County at all.
She was thinking about the thing his question had made her look at clearly for the first time: that the man beside her had been alone here for five years, and that the land was his whole world, and that the land had almost been taken from him today by a stranger with arithmetic in his eyes.
And she was thinking that it would not be taken from him. Not by Voss. Not by anyone.
Not while she stood where she was standing.