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

Chapter 15

Saturday came in hot, the way July comes hot in the territory, and Nolan rode into Stone Creek at noon with the scrap of paper in his pocket that was all that remained of Jacob Voss’s offer.

He found Voss on the hotel porch, in his fine coat, in the attitude of a man who has already purchased what he came to purchase. Nolan climbed down off the horse and walked up the steps and held out the scrap — no speeches, no applause, just the fact of the matter, which was how Nolan Reeves did every significant thing in his life.

“I appreciate the offer,” he said. “And the answer is no. I’m not selling. Not the land, not the water, not the cattle, not the hill east of the house. I thank you for the clarity it gave me, but the land’s not for sale.”

Voss looked at the scrap in his hand. The smile that had never reached his eyes stayed put on the wrong side of his face.

“I’ll be here next spring,” he said, “with a better number.”

“Then you’ll be here next spring for the same answer,” Nolan said, “and the same reason, and you’ll be welcome to dinner.”

He rode home, and he did not tell Alice what Voss had said about next spring, because he had understood something in the dust of the Cross Fork road that he could not yet say out loud: that the answer had nothing to do with the number, and everything to do with the fact that there was no number in Dallas County or anywhere else that could buy what was standing in his kitchen in a sunbonnet.

The fence-raising happened the following Saturday, and it was Mrs. Gurney’s doing, the way most of Stone Creek’s good doings were Mrs. Gurney’s doing.

The lightning had taken the north fence in August — a storm had moved through with the particular violence of the high plains, and the north fence had caught the charge and burned a hundred yards of it to ash in a night, and the cattle had gone through it at dawn like water finding a hole in a dam. It had taken Nolan two days and his neighbors a third to bring them back, and the fence had lain, black and useless, the length of the north line since.

Mrs. Gurney had decided this was not to be borne, and Mrs. Gurney’s decisions were weather.

They came on the first Saturday of September — the Freemans with their boys, the Vances, Otis Fuller with a wagonload of posts, the half-dozen men from the south section who owed Nolan a season of goodwill and had been looking for an excuse to pay it. Alice made food enough for an army — the kitchen was the center of the operation, and the women of Stone Creek streamed through it all morning carrying pies and kettles and the particular dry humor of women who have organized a fourth of a town’s worth of work — and by noon the north fence had posts rising out of the ground in a regular marching line, and by evening it was square and true, better than it had been before the fire, and the cowboys had a name for the day that the women took up. It went into the town’s memory as the fence-raising, and it came out as the day Alice Reeves fed the township and the township forgave Boston.

Alice did not forgive, because there was nothing to forgive her for. She had won Stone Creek the way she did everything: by being plainly, completely, and without performance exactly what she was — Mrs. Gurney’s pouring mate, the Vance girls’ seamstress when the dress for the fall dance would not lie flat, the woman who wrote out the town’s letters when a boy needed a reference for a job in Denver and the lawyer’s fee was too high.

On the evening of the fence-raising, with the last post set and the yard full of wagons and the smoke of the cooking fire going straight up into a clear September sky, Alice came and stood beside Nolan at the corral gate and looked at the line of the new fence running square to the horizon.

“Your father’s land,” she said, “and it’s true now.”

He looked at her.

“What did you say?”

“The fence,” she said. “It’s true. Plumb and square. Anyone can see it.”

He looked at the fence, and he looked at her, and he understood that she had not been talking about the fence at all — that she had been talking about the thing the fence had become since the afternoon of the offer: a line that ran around what was his, and hers, and would not be sold, and could not be bought at any number that any merchant from Dallas County could produce.

“Alice,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said, but she was smiling — the first time he had seen her smile since the wedding day without any work in it, without any fence to be raised or pie to be carried. “I came west for a capable man, and it turns out I got a man who raises fences with his neighbors, which is better.”

“I haven’t asked you,” Nolan said, slowly, “what you came west for.”

“You know what I came west for,” she said. “I came west for the larger space. It turns out to be larger than I calculated — it turns out to hold a husband and a fence and a town, and I am still making room.”

She turned and looked at the hill east of the house, lit now in the long gold of the late day, the grass holding its color into the failing light exactly as a letter had promised, and she said, “In the spring, I want to plant the hill.”