The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive
Chapter 21
The trip to Denver happened in October, as planned, and it was the first time Nolan Reeves had been off the ranch in three years and the first time in his life he had ridden the rails.
Alice insisted on the train. That was the whole of the argument: she had crossed the country on the train; she had been burned and carried and miscounted on the train; the train had delivered her alive to the platform where her life turned; and she would not see the country that had given her so much from the window of any other conveyance. Nolan packed the grip, and checked twice on the windows and the stock, and rode to the station with his heart doing something it had not done since April of ’82: climbing into his throat at the approach of a train.
The train came. He helped his wife aboard — she was five months along now, and the condition announced itself in her stride, the deliberate care of a woman carrying something she was in no hurry to put down. They found their seats. The car filled. The conductor called the departure, and the train pulled out of the Stone Creek station going west, past the freight platform and the bench where two people had once knelt in the dust, and Nolan looked at the bench going past and felt the strangest combination of weight and weightlessness a man can feel, and Alice put her hand over his on the window sill and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the window was not already saying.
They went through Kansas at night.
He woke at two, the hour, and found the train sitting at a siding in the dark — a freight had the right of way, the conductor explained, rattling down the corridor with his lantern — and Nolan sat awake in the dark with his wife asleep beside him and the Kansas night coming up against the glass, and he thought: This is the country where it happened. This is the ground she crossed, sleeping, in the car behind the fire. And he was not afraid of it. That was the discovery of the night: he had carried the fire here in his chest for a year and a half, and the fire had been fed to a stove in May of ’82, and the country it happened in turned out to be just a country — flat, dark, enormous — the same country he had been driving across all his life, only this part of it had once briefly held the worst news of his life and had let it go, the way all country lets everything go eventually.
In the morning they came into Denver, and the mountains rose up out of the plains like something a man builds in a dream, and Alice stood at the window with her hand on her belly and her face lifted to them, and Nolan watched her and did not watch the mountains, because he had seen enough of what she was looking at by looking at her.
The city was a city. That was the whole of it, to Nolan: streets, windows, more people in a block than the whole of Stone Creek. But Alice moved through it with a familiarity he would not have expected — she was Boston-born, a city girl returned to her element, and he watched her give directions to a man at a corner with the same plain confidence she brought to a seeding row, and he loved her newly for it, the way a man loves again what he has only ever known in one country.
They saw the physician on the second day.
The physician was old now, the same brisk competent man who had dressed her burn in ’82, and he recognized her, which surprised her, and he said, without looking up from her wrist — the scar, the pale line — “Kansas,” he said. “Fourth car. You were the one who was not on the manifest.”
“I was the one who was,” Alice said.
“Nonsense,” the physician said. “You were the one standing on the platform. I remember the burn. I remember telling you you’d carry a scar and a story.” He put the wrist down gently. “You’ve carried them both well. The child is in good order, Mrs. Reeves, and so are you. You are the healthiest woman who has walked into this office in a year, and I suspect you do your own weight in work and your husband’s besides.”
“He does his own,” Alice said. “I do mine.”
It was on the third day, in the hotel lobby, that the letter found them.
It had been forwarded from Stone Creek by the station, and Walt Pellar had written on the envelope, in his careful clerk’s hand: This came for you care of the hotel. It has been waiting two weeks. I judged it not bad news, so I did not open it. — W.P.
Inside was a single sheet, written in a hand Nolan did not know, on paper with a Dallas County letterhead.
It said: Mr. Reeves. I am withdrawing my interest in the western section. I have been informed — by the general store in your town, the church of it, and a lady at a fence-raising who took the time to finish what she started — that the land I wished to purchase is not the land on any of my maps. The maps show range; the county shows neighbors. I have no arithmetic for neighbors, and I have taken my money elsewhere, where the land is only land. I bid you good farming, and I apologize for the wedding day. — J. Voss.
Nolan read it twice, and he laughed — once, a short sound that startled him — and Alice read it over his shoulder, and she said, simply:
“I told Mrs. Gurney she could write to him.”
“Mrs. Gurney wrote to Voss?”
“Mrs. Gurney dictated. I wrote it down.” Her eyes were bright, measuring. “The fence-raising food paid its way.”
They rode home on the train in the third week of October, east now, into the country of their own life, and Nolan slept through the whole of Kansas this time, at two in the morning and at every other hour besides, with his head against the window and his wife’s hand in his — asleep, the two of them, in the dark country that had once held the worst news of his life.
Outside Stone Creek, in the cold gold of the October evening, the hill east of the house stood full of light, grass holding its color into the failing season exactly as a letter had promised, with wildflower stems gone to seed standing tall in the fading rows.
The first of them were already in the ground, come up and gone to seed and waiting for spring.