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

Chapter 23

The hill came into full bloom in the April of 1884, and the whole town of Stone Creek made a day of it, because that is what the town did with the hill now.

The wildflowers — the field daisies and the coneflowers and the prairie flax, the seed Alice had ordered out of Denver and sown thin on well-turned earth — came up in waves, blue and white and gold, and the light at five o’clock lay on them the way the light had lain on the grass in every letter she had ever sent him that he had not yet written, and the wild sage at the head of Ruth’s grave had spread in the two years of tending, a green crown above the stones.

They carried Clara up the hill on the anniversary — the fourteenth of April, two years to the day from the train that had not been met and the bench that had — and they stood at the top of it, the three of them, in the light, with the prairie opening out in every direction and the smoke of the house going straight up below them.

“She will not remember this day,” Alice said, looking down at the child in her arms, who was asleep with her face turned to the sun.

“She will remember the hill,” Nolan said. “I will make sure of it.”

And standing there, with his daughter asleep in her mother’s arms and the light on the flowers and the grave holding its peace under the sage, Nolan Reeves understood at last the whole of the lesson the country had been trying to teach him for ten years, the one that had arrived in three installments: a telegram, a train, and a child.

The first installment had taught him to grieve.

The second had taught him to hope again, and to trust the correction.

The third had taught him that the account did not run out — that the terrible arithmetic of a life, the one that said a man gets one love, one chance, one season, and then keeps books on the loss — was wrong. The books were not kept on losses. The books were kept on hills. You plant a hill and it comes back, and every spring it comes back more.

He had buried one wife and grieved a stranger, and he had been loved twice in his one life, and the second love was not smaller for the first — it was larger, because it stood on a ground that the first love had taught him to keep: honest, measured, and square.

“Alice,” he said.

“Hm?” She was looking at the flowers, at the light, with the measuring look that had crossed a continent.

“The fourth letter,” Nolan said. “I want you to know — I still have it. The one about the hill. It is in the box under the bed, with the others.”

“I know,” Alice said. “I put them back in order.”

And there, at the top of the hill, in the light that the letter had promised before either of them knew the other’s face, the grass holding its color into the April evening exactly as it had been written, his daughter asleep in her mother’s arms, his wife beside him, and the whole of Stone Creek below them threading home with supper smoke — Nolan Reeves, who had once believed the second worst thing was not coming, learned the final installment of the truth:

The worst thing had come, and he had survived it. The second worst thing had come, and he had survived it. And the third thing had not been a loss at all, but everything that the first two had prepared him to keep.

In the kitchen that night, after the child was fed and asleep and the lamp was turned low, Alice took down the box from under the bed and carried it to the table, and they went through the letters together — all six of her letters, and the two he had written her that she had kept against every rule of the country, and the seventh sheet, the one she had written in Denver in the spring of ’82 that had arrived too late and had been kept anyway.

She read the fourth letter’s promise aloud, in her measuring voice, to the kitchen where it had been lived in:

The hill east of the house is where the light falls in the late afternoons, and the grass holds its color into November there, long after the rest of the country has gone gray.

“What do you want to do with them?” Nolan said.

“Nothing,” Alice said. “They stay in the box. And when Clara is old enough to ask, we will take her up the hill and read them to her there, where the flowers grow, and she will know that her father loved her mother before they met, and that is a thing a child should know the proof of.”

She closed the box and pushed it back under the bed, exactly where it had been, exactly as though nothing had happened — the same gesture, two years and a lifetime on.

Outside, the wind was down, and the night was clear, and on the hill east of the house the wildflowers held the dark the way they held the light, and the grass held its color into the night the way it had held it into November, and the sage stood green at the head of a grave in the keeping of a family that had learned, finally, the only arithmetic that mattered in the territory:

Grief is what the country does to teach you.

Love is what you plant.

And the hill always comes back.

The End