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

Chapter 13

Voss came back on a Wednesday in July.

Nolan saw the dust column from the barn and knew before the rig crested the rise who was in it, and he stood in the corral gate with his arms crossed and watched the approach without moving. The coat was the same. The smile was the same. The arithmetic in the eyes was the same, and it was counting the fence line and the water and the herd with the hunger of a man who has learned that everything in the Territory is for sale at the right price.

“Mr. Reeves,” Voss said, climbing down.

“Mr. Voss.”

“I’ve come with a figure,” Voss said, and said it, and the figure was a good one — Nolan’s own arithmetic, done honestly in the long winters, had never once produced a number that size for the ranch that he had built with his own hands from a treeless piece of the prairie.

“That’s a fair number,” Nolan said.

“It’s a fair number for a fair spread. It goes up if you’ll throw in the cattle at market price. I’m consolidating the whole section. Yours is the last piece I need, Mr. Reeves, and I’ve found that the last piece is always the one worth paying for.”

Nolan looked at the house. Alice was in the kitchen garden; he could see the crown of her sunbonnet moving along the rows, and he could hear — faint on the wind — the sound of her voice, which she lifted to the garden as she worked, something half-sung that carried.

“I’ll have to think on it,” Nolan said.

“Take the week,” Voss said. “I’ll be at the hotel in town.”

He drove away, and Nolan stood in the corral gate and watched the dust settle, and when Alice came up from the garden with her arms full of beans she found him still standing there, and she looked from his face to the road and back again, and she said nothing, because she was the kind of woman who could see a question hanging in the air and had learned that it helps a man to arrive at his own answers.

But she had seen the checkbook. She had seen the dust. And she had heard — from Mrs. Gurney, from Otis Fuller, from the town that streamed through the general store with news as regular as its bread — that Jacob Voss of Dallas County had been buying up the ranches on the western reaches one by one, and that the men who sold to him were men who had stopped being able to see themselves keeping what they had.

She went into the house and made supper, and they ate it at the table by the window, and the conversation was ordinary, and neither of them mentioned the dust that had come and gone.

The papers sat in the barn for a week.

Voss had left a folded document — an offer of purchase, the number filled in, a line for the signature — and Nolan had taken it for the reason a man takes a document he has decided in his heart to refuse: to hold it, to measure himself against it, to see if the number changed anything about the way he saw his own life.

It did.

And what changed it was not arithmetic.

The ranch had been his whole world for eight years. It had been the thing that held him when nothing else would, the work, the fence lines, the squares of the buildings, the cattle that depended on him. He had built it for a wife who had died, and he had kept it because keeping it was the thing he knew how to do, and every one of its posts had been driven for a future that had never arrived.

And now Alice was in the kitchen of it, and the chair by the stove was hers, and the garden was hers, and the hill east of the house was hers by right of the letter he had written before he ever saw her face.

The offer was for enough money that a man could start again anywhere, and that was the trap in it, because the one thing the offer priced correctly was the land and the one thing it priced not at all was the thing the land had come to hold.

He kept the papers in the barn, folded in his coat pocket.

He did not sign them.

He did not tear them up either — and that, more than anything, was the thing that would not let him alone at night, lying in the dark beside a sleeping wife, listening to the wind work the roof: that he had not signed them, and had not torn them up, and had not told her about them.

On a Saturday at the end of July, Alice came in from the garden with dirt on her hands and a question she had been carrying for a week, and she asked it the way she asked everything, plainly:

“Nolan. Are we selling the ranch?”