I know you didn't plant enough this spring because you were dealing with that late snow rot. You don't have a cushion. I'm aware of what I have and don't have, Bram said. Then you know you can't afford a woman and five children eating your winter supply. Silas kept working.
His jaw was tight. They're working the ranch, Bram said. Not taking charity. Orson looked at Silas with a faint smile that wasn't really a smile. Son, how old are you?
Silas looked at him steadily. 13. 13. Orson looked back at Bram. A 13-year-old boy and a woman in a dress are going to work this ranch back into shape.
He said it. The way you'd say something was the wrong answer. Bram, I'm trying to give you an exit before this gets embarrassing. 60 cents on the dollar today. That's a fair offer given the shape you're in.
Bram drove the fence post driver into the ground once hard. The post didn't budge. I'm not selling, he said. Orson stayed another 10 minutes and used all of them, running through every variation of the same argument. The water situation, the debt, the coming winter, the way sympathy had a way of becoming a noose.
He was smooth about it, never overtly cruel, never quite crossing into something Bram could grab hold of and push back against directly. It was the practiced pressure of a man who'd done this before, who'd waited out enough struggling neighbors to know exactly which words to press on. Bram didn't say much, just kept working. Eventually, Orson got back on his horse. You'll think about it, he said.
I expect I'll think about a lot of things, Bram said. Orson rode away. Silas watched him go, then quietly he wants the land. Yeah, he's been waiting for you to fail. Bram looked at the boy.
13 years old, thin arms, serious eyes, working a fence post in July heat without complaint. Where'd you learn to read people like that? Silus shrugged. My dad was real good at making everything sound like it was going to work out fine. He picked up the wire and started threading it through the post.
I got good at telling the difference between someone who meant it and someone who didn't. Bram absorbed that. He didn't ask anything else about Eloin's husband that afternoon. But later, when the children were settled and the fire was low, and it was just the two of them at the table with the remains of dinner between them, he looked at Eloin and said it plainly. "He's not coming back, is he? " She looked at her hands.
A long moment went by. No, she said he's not. She said it with the finality of someone who'd already finished grieving the thing, or at least started the long work of it. I've known it longer than 4 days. I just let myself believe the other thing.
She looked up. You already knew. I had a suspicion. How? Bram thought about the best way to say it.
Because a man who goes for help comes back running, he said. A man who goes, he just goes slow. Elo looked out the window at the dark. Then she picked up her fork and finished her dinner, and that was all either of them said about it that night, and somehow that felt like the right amount. The weeks that followed were not easy.
The vegetable garden came back slowly, grudgingly, the way things that have nearly died do, and Eloin worked it in the early mornings, and the evenings when the heat dropped, and Nell helped, and Maisie helped in her own way, which mostly involved singing to the plants, which Bram privately thought was probably harmless and possibly useful. The chickens improved once Silas started managing the coupe with actual attention, cleaning it properly, adjusting their feed, checking the water twice daily. By the end of the third week, they were getting six eggs a day instead of two. Bram and Silas repaired the south fence and two sections of the east pasture fence and patched the gap in the storage building wall where wind came through. Silas was not a strong boy, yet he was still growing into his frame, all joints and angles, but he was tireless and precise, and he learned fast.
He asked questions, which Bram appreciated. He asked them plainly, without pretending to know things he didn't, which Bram appreciated even more. Tobin turned into Bram's unofficial shadow. It happened without ceremony. The boy just started appearing beside Bram in the mornings and following along on whatever Bram was doing, asking questions about everything.
Why does the pump arm need to be primed? What makes a good fence post? Why do you check the horse's feet that way? Bram answered all of it. Because there was something about Tobin's particular brand of curiosity that was hard to resist.
It came out of genuine interest, not performance. One morning, Tobin said, "My daddy never let me do stuff. " Bram kept working. What kind of stuff? Fix things. Help.
Tobin watched Bram's hands. He said I was too little. I'm six. Six is old enough to help, Bram said. Tobin considered this with great seriousness.
Can I hold the handle thing? The pump handle? Yeah, you can pump it. So Tobin pumped the handle while Bram held the bucket and Tobin pumped with his whole body, leaning into it, and he spilled water on his boots and looked furious about it and tried again and got it right on the second pass. And the look on his face when the water came clean into the bucket was the kind of look that makes a person remember six was not actually that long ago.
Finn recovered fully. By the middle of August, the boy was running. He had dark eyes and a tendency to collect things, rocks, feathers, pieces of interestingl looking wood, and he brought them to Bram with great regularity, presenting each one with the somnity of someone offering a particularly fine gift. Bram accepted all of them. He had a growing collection on the window sill beside the pump that he did not move, and did not think much about except to notice when it got bigger.
He noticed the day Finn added a small flat piece of red shale and then stood and looked at it for a while and then said without turning around, "I like it here. " Bram was behind him at the workbench mending a harness. He kept working. "Good," he said. "Is that okay? " Finn asked. "Yeah," Bram said.
"That's okay. That same week, the first real trouble hit the surrounding settlements. " Bram heard about it from Merendale, a farmer from the valley 2 mi south, who came by to check on a property boundary question, and stayed long enough for coffee and news. There was sickness moving through, not the same kind Finn had weathered. Something respiratory spreading from a trading post to the east. Two children down in the Halloway family.
Rumor of three more cases in the settlement near Ketaridge's north grazing land. Spreading fast, Mertin said, holding his coffee cup. Not sure if it's the same thing killing cattle down near Pueblo or different. Doc Fenwick's already out of his best remedy, Bram was quiet after Merton left. He sat with it for a while before he went and found Elo at the garden.
"There's sickness in the settlements," he said. "She kept her hands moving in the soil. " "How close? " "South Valley and Northeast, moving around us on two sides. " She was quiet. Then Tobin gets cold hard. He always has. She sat back on her heels.
If it comes here, I know neither of them said anything useful for a while because there wasn't anything useful to say. They were doing everything right already. Keeping the water clean, keeping people fed, keeping the place orderly. You couldn't fence out sickness. You could only stay ahead of it and hope.
They didn't get to stay ahead of it. 9 days later, Tobin woke with a cough. By noon, it was in his chest. By evening, he had fever. Bram sat at the edge of the boy's bed roll and pressed the back of his hand to Tobin's forehead and felt the heat coming off him and thought of Finn and about how that had turned out and tried to remember what Coulter had told him about this kind of fever versus the kind that Finn had.
They weren't the same. He knew that, and the medicine he had left was for the kind that Finn had. We need to go to town, Eloin said behind him. Doc Fenwick's out of the best thing, Bram said. Coulter might have something.