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

Chapter 20

The planting of the hill happened on the last Saturday of May, and the whole town of Stone Creek came out for it, because there was nothing in the territory that Mrs. Gurney loved better than a project that could not be finished in a day.

The seed had come from the catalogue out of Denver — a pound of wildflower mix, field daisy and coneflower and prairie flax, with a hand-inked note from the seedsman that Alice had read aloud at the kitchen table: Sow thin on well-turned earth and trust the rain. What comes up will come up where it means to. She had ordered three pounds. The hill was large, and Alice Reeves did nothing in halves.

The wagons came up the Cross Fork road in the morning, and the children of Stone Creek were turned loose on the hill with the seed in their aprons and orders to walk in straight lines, which the children of Stone Creek failed at with great enthusiasm, and the grass came up green around them, and the wild sage that seeded itself years ago at the head of a grave stood at the edge of the work like an old neighbor who had been there longest.

Ruth’s grave was not seeded.

That was the decision, and Alice had made it herself, and she had said it plainly to Nolan in the kitchen the week before: “The grave is hers. The hill is ours. They can share the view without being sown over each other.” Nolan had not argued. He had put his hat on and gone out to the barn to sharpen the spades, which was his version of agreement.

They planted all morning. The Vances came with a wagon of the cake Mrs. Vance had been famous for since the funeral of ’77, and the Freemans brought their boys, and Otis Fuller brought the town’s bellows and opinions, and Walt Pellar came up from the station in the afternoon with his new wife — he had married in March, a girl from the east side of the county, and the town had decided it was good altogether that Pellar had found someone to hand bad news to instead of carrying it.

Alice moved through it all with the basket of seed, sowing thin, walking her straight lines, and the measuring look was on her face all day, but it was a different measuring — the look of a woman laying in stores, taking stock before the winter it would carry.

It was near dusk when the last of the seed went in, and the town streamed back down the hill to the wagons, and the light went gold, and Alice stood at the top of the hill, above the fresh-sown ground and the wild sage and the grave, with her hand flat on the earth in the way she had put her hand flat on the earth at the head of Ruth’s grave in October.

Nolan came up the last of the slope to stand beside her.

“You gave the whole town the hill,” he said.

“No,” Alice said. “I gave the whole town a reason to return to it. The hill stays ours.”

The light went red at the rim of the world, and below them the wagons threaded down the road toward town, and the house stood square in its frame, and the new-sown ground lay dark and waiting for rain, and Alice turned to him and said, in her ordinary voice, the voice she used for the garden and the stove and the two o’clock tea:

“Nolan. I have been carrying something since the winter, and I have known what it was since April, and I have been saving it for the hill.”

He looked at her.

“You’re going to be a father,” Alice said. “Before the snow flies.”

The world below them — the house, the barn, the fence line, the town threading home — went quiet around the edges, the way the platform had gone quiet when he went to his knees in the dust, and Nolan Reeves stood at the top of the hill with the wild sage at his boot and the grave at his shoulder and the new-sown earth at his feet, and he understood, with the clarity that comes to a man only a few times in his life, that the letter he had written in March of ’82 — the one he had nearly not sent — had gone out into the world and fetched this.

He said, “Alice.”

“There is more,” she said. “I have known the other thing longer. I have known it since the station.”

“What other thing?”

“Nothing is ending,” Alice said. “I used to think the arithmetic of a life ran out — that a person gets so much and then it is closed, the account settled. When I stood on the platform and watched you fold at the knees, I saw a man who had spent his whole account and been told there was more. And I have spent this whole year learning the truth of it, which is that there is always more. The account is not a box you draw from. It is a hill. You plant it and it comes back.”

She looked down at the dark earth at her feet.

“Everything I came west for,” she said, “is standing on this hill, right now, with me. And in January, it will be a family.”