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

Chapter 19

They marked the fourteenth of April the way they had decided to mark it, on a fine spring morning, with the grass coming up green on the hill and the world opening out in every direction.

They walked up the hill together, the way they had walked it on the morning after the stove, and they stood at the top of it in the April light — the same light, the one from the fourth letter, the one that had come to her in a room above Beacon Street and had turned out, when she finally stood in it, to be exactly as promised.

They did not speak of the telegram. That was the decision, made in the kitchen in the winter, in the ordinary way they made decisions now — Alice proposed, Nolan agreed, both of them understood the arithmetic: the telegram had done its worst and its best, and it had been fed to the stove in May, and there was nothing further to be done with it but to let it be done.

They spoke of the other things instead.

They spoke of the spring planting — the wildflowers for the hill, Alice had the seed ordered from a catalogue out of Denver, and there was a question about whether the sage should be moved or left where it had seeded itself, and they settled it in the way they settled everything, by walking the ground and looking at it.

They spoke of the cattle, the new calves in the corral, the season’s figures in the ledger that Alice kept now with an exactness that made the buyers raise their eyebrows and then their bids. They spoke of the fence — the new fence, the north line, the one the town had raised — and of the summer to come, and of the trip to Denver that Alice had decided they would make in the fall, because a woman should see the city where her life had turned, and because the physician who had dressed her burn had written to ask after her, and because the season for it would be exactly right.

And they spoke, in the way of people who have learned to say the large things plainly, of what the year had been.

“One year ago today,” Alice said, standing at the top of the hill with the wind in her hair, “you were standing at the freight window with your back to the train, and I was twenty feet away holding a piece of paper with your name on it, and I did not know your face, and I knew who you were.”

“I knew who you were before you said my name,” Nolan said. “I did not know your face, and I knew who you were.”

They stood a moment in the light.

“I have been loved twice in my life,” Nolan said. “Ruth loved me through a fever, and it took eleven days, and it was the whole of my world for three years. And I did not think — I had built the arithmetic of my life, Alice, and I had built it on the understanding that one love is what a man gets, if he is lucky, and that mine had been spent on a hill with a grave on it.”

“And now?” Alice said.

“Now the hill has a grave and a garden on it,” Nolan said. “And the garden is not a replacement. It is not a second thing patched onto the first. It is — I have stopped being able to put it into the arithmetic of my old life, because it does not fit there. When you came, the arithmetic changed. The numbers grew.”

“There is a word for what grows,” Alice said.

“I am not good with words,” Nolan said. “You have seen me try.”

“Try.”

He stood at the top of the hill, in the light of the letter, with the woman who had come to him out of a fire and a mistaken pencil in the station dust of an April morning, and he said:

“I spent twelve days grieving a woman I had never met, and I would not trade them for a single correction, and I told Walter Pellar that and meant it, because they taught me what you were worth before I had the chance to learn it from your face. And now I have had a year of learning it from your face, and the year has taught me that I was counting in the wrong currency the whole time. The ranch is not the thing. The fence is not the thing. The view — even the view

is not the thing. The fence is not the thing. The view — even the view, the one I wrote you before I knew your face — is not the thing.” He stopped, and swallowed, and said, “You are the thing. The ranch is where you are. The fence is what keeps you safe in it. The hill is where I take you in the evening. But the arithmetic — the whole of it, Alice — the arithmetic was always you.”

She stood at the top of the hill in the April light and looked at him with the measuring look she had worn on the station platform a year ago, the look that had recognized him before she knew his name.

“That’s a better speech than the letter,” she said.

“It’s a longer letter,” Nolan said. “I’ve had a year of practice.”

Somewhere below them the house was square in its frame and the smoke went straight up in the windless air, and the new fence ran true to the horizon, and the world was exactly the size it had always been, and for the first time in his life Nolan Reeves found that size sufficient for everything he held in it.

Alice took his arm.

“There is something I have been meaning to tell you since April,” she said. “And I have been waiting for the right hill to say it on.”