That's what matters. " She carried Finn straight to the pump without being told where it was. Just followed the smell of it and soaked a cloth and pressed it to the boy's forehead. Maisie came and stood beside her without being asked. Nell started looking in the storage building like she was taking inventory. Silas walked the fence line, not playing, not wandering, actually looking at the fence same as Bram would have.
Tobin, the six-year-old, came and stood beside Bram and looked up at him. Is our house going to be that building? Tobin asked, pointing at the storage structure. I was thinking it could be. Yeah, Bram said.
If that's okay, Tobin said, and went to help his sister. Bram stood in his own yard and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. He couldn't have named it right then. He just knew it wasn't the loneliness he'd woken up with that morning. He gave them an hour to settle, got the storage building cleared out, and laid bed rolls on the floor and found his extra blankets, which wasn't much, and got the well bucket going so there was clean water.
He found the dried beans in his pantry and what was left of his cornmeal and set a pot on the fire, basic quick as it was, and went out to find Eloan standing at the vegetable garden, not looking defeated by it, but studying it. Specifically studying it. When did this last get water? She asked without turning around. 3 weeks, maybe four.
Some of it salvageable. She crouched down and pushed her hand into the soil near one of the desiccated tomato plants. The roots on this one are still alive. You'd know that if you worked them. I haven't had Tino, she said not dismissively.
Just acknowledging it. You've been doing everything alone. She stood up, pressed the dirt off her hands. We can work the garden if you'll let us. Bram opened his mouth and she cut him off before he could start the sentence that was coming the one about charity or needing nothing or being fine.
Don't, she said flatly. I'm not asking permission to accept handouts. I'm telling you, we'll work. Silus can fix fence. I can cook and preserve and sew.
Nell keeps house better than most women twice her age. We are not going to sit in that building and eat your food. She met his eyes, and there was something almost fierce in it, like a fire that exhaustion hadn't quite managed to put out. We pay our way or we go back to that ravine and figure something else out. There's nothing to figure out in that ravine, Bram said.
No, she agreed. There isn't. So, we work. That was the whole negotiation. He rode for medicine that same afternoon.
Didn't tell her he was going, just saddled back up and rode toward Greybend, 15 mi of hard ground, and he made it in under 2 hours because his horse knew the road, and because Bram pushed him a little harder than he should have in the heat. The town was small enough that he knew the pharmacist, a wiry man named Coulter, who wore the same tan vest 7 days a week, and kept his shelves in better order than any man Bram had met. Fever medicine, Bram said when he walked in. Four-year-old boy, running dry fever, skin hot to touch, not drinking water even when it's offered. Coulter looked at him over his spectacles.
You got a kid sick? Neighbor's child? He paused. Just what do I need? Coulter told him.
And the price wasn't small. Bram paid it without flinching, which meant he paid it with money he had been thinking of differently. That morning money earmarked for fence wire he actually needed. He bought the medicine and a secondary treatment Coulter recommended and rode home in the early dusk. And when he came back through the gate, he could hear Finn crying inside the storage building, which was actually a relief because it meant the boy was conscious enough to cry.
Eloin met him at the door with her hand out and he put the medicine in it without any ceremony and she went straight back inside. T Bram unsaddled his horse and rubbed him down and listened to the sounds from the storage building change. Over the next hour the crying got weaker. Then there was quiet. Then a murmuring that he recognized as Eloin's voice low and steady.
The way you talk to someone you're pulling back from a bad place. He ate beans alone at his table and told himself this was temporary. A few days, maybe a week, the child would get better. He'd help them find somewhere to go, some relative somewhere, some town, some kind of plan. He didn't believe it, even while he thought it.
The next morning he woke before dawn, which was habit, and went to start the fire for coffee, and found a pot already on the coals, still warm, and the coffee already made, and Elelloin at the garden in the gray pre-dawn light, not weeding exactly, but doing something methodical along the tomato rose, careful and precise. Silas was already at the chicken coupe, talking to the hens in a low voice that seemed to amuse him and them both. Bram stood at his door with his coffee and watched them work. Nell came out of the storage building with a broom and started on the area in front of the door without being asked, sweeping the dust away from the step with the focused energy of a child who's been taught that clean spaces matter. Saw her.
Maisie appeared behind her and went straight to the pump with a bucket, not playing, not dragging her feet, just doing what needed doing. Tobin was the last one out. He came and found Bram at the door and looked up at him with the same frank consideration he'd had the day before. Silus says he can fix that section of fence. Tobin said the one on the southside that's leaning.
He's 13. Bram said he fixed fence on the farm we had before. Tobin said before Daddy sold it. He said it without bitterness, just as information. He knows how.
Bram looked toward the south fence, the section he'd been meaning to get to for a month. All right, he said. I'll show him where the wire is. He didn't think much about what Tobin had said the before daddy sold it not right then. He had too much else to attend to, but it sat in the back of his mind the way splinters do, small and persistent, working itself deeper as the day went on because Eloin had said her husband went for help 4 days ago.
And 4 days before that, they'd been traveling. And before that, a farm they used to have sold. And a wagon that shattered in a ravine with no man to fix it, no money to replace it, no plan beyond, "Ride ahead and find help. " Bram was not a man who made fast judgments, but he was a man who noticed patterns. The man who rode away 4 days ago had not gone for help. He had gone.
There was a difference between those two things, and Bram knew it, and he thought maybe Eloin knew it, too. But she was not a woman who would let herself fall apart about it when there were five children depending on her to hold things together. So she didn't and so they didn't talk about it and the ranch kept moving. Finn improved. By the third day his fever had broken enough that he could sit up and drink water on his own.
And by the fourth day he was standing at the door of the storage building watching the chickens with an expression of absolute delight like he'd never seen a chicken before. Maybe he hadn't. Not ones that were actually his. Elo stood behind him with her hand resting on his small shoulder and she watched Finn watch the chickens and some and something in her face was so complicated relief and grief and exhaustion and something else that might have been gratitude or might have been something harder than gratitude that Bram found a reason to look somewhere else. 3 days after that, Orson Keteridge appeared for the first time.
Bram was at the east fence with Silas when he heard the hoof beatats. He turned and saw Orson coming up the road at a slow, deliberate pace that Bram recognized. It was the pace a man rides when he wants you to see him coming and to think about why. Silas kept working on the fence post, but his hand slowed. Who's that?
Silas asked. Orson Keteridge, Bram said. Bones Black Spur east of here. Bigger operation than mine. He watched Orson come.
Don't say anything to him unless he speaks to you first. Silas nodded once the way he nodded to things that were instructions, not suggestions. Orson pulled up on the other side of the fence. He looked at Silas for a moment, then looked at Bram. Heard you took in some strays, Orson said.
I heard about that, Bram said. He went back to the fence. How can I help you, Orson? You can help yourself is how you can help me. Orson swung down off his horse uninvited and came along the fence line toward them.
He was a big man, gray-haired and solid, built like someone who'd done 30 years of hard work and now paid other people to do it. His boots were better than Brams. His saddle was significantly better than Brams. I know you're behind, Bram. I know your well situation.