The women in Greybend and the ranch families, they need it, and they either pay to have things made or they go without because there's no one here who does that work at a price they can actually meet. Bram turned his head. I've already talked to Marjgery Dale. Elo said she wants two work dresses and a good visiting dress. She told me two other women who've been wanting the same.
She paused. I can do that work in the evenings and during the children's rest hours. It doesn't take anything from the ranch's operation. It adds income. You're talking about running a business, Bram said.
I'm talking about running several small ones at the same time so that no single bad month can knock the whole thing over. She looked out at the dark. The garden isn't just for us. If we expand it, right, we can sell preserved goods. The chickens are already producing more than we need.
That's eggs for sale. Silas is nearly 14. Ranch families in the valley hire seasonal help at harvest and Roundup. He could earn wages. Bram was quiet for a moment.
He's your son, who is nearly 14 and going to need to learn what real work in the world pays, she said plainly. He can't spend his life in a garden. He needs to learn the larger operation. Working neighboring ranches teaches him things we can't teach him here. Bram thought about Silas on the fence line.
Silas carrying fence wire without complaint. Silas on the horse beside him, pushing toward town, running on determination and not much else. He's a good worker, Bram said. I know he is, Eloin said with the quiet confidence of a mother who knows her child. The question is whether you'll let us try all of this.
Bram looked at her. You're asking my permission. I'm asking your agreement, she said. There's a difference. This is your ranch.
I won't put things in motion that affect it without you knowing what I intend. But I'll tell you plainly, I think we can pull this place out of where it is before winter closes in. I think we can do it without borrowing money and without selling to Ketaridge. At the name Keteridge, something shifted in Bram's expression. He'll come back, Bram said.
I expect he will. He doesn't make offers more than twice. After that, he just waits. Eloan was quiet for a moment. Then we make sure he waits forever, she said.
By the time he figures out this place isn't failing. It won't matter what he wants. They sat with that for a moment. An owl called from somewhere in the scrub east of the fence line three times, then went quiet. All right, Bram said.
All right, we try it. All right, we try it. She stood up. Good. She put her hand briefly on the porch railing, a small decisive gesture, and went inside.
Bram sat alone again. He looked at the two chairs and then at the sky, and he stayed out there a little longer than he needed to. The next three weeks were a different kind of hard. Not the hard of crisis, or fear the hard of too much to do and not enough hours, which is its own specific kind of grueling. Bram and Silas expanded the garden at the south end by breaking new ground, which in late summer Colorado soil that hadn't been turned properly in years meant coming up against roots and rock and clay that fought back.
They went at it with a pickaxe and a borrowed plow attachment and patience. Or at least Bram went at it with patience, and Silas went at it with a stubbornness that produced the same results. Nell took over the household records. This happened naturally, the way things in a functioning group tend to happen. She started keeping track of what was in the pantry and the storage.
And one morning, she appeared at Bram's workbench with a piece of paper and a list. We've got enough cornmeal for 3 weeks, she said. Less if Tobin keeps eating the way he does. Bram looked at the list. It was organized by category and written in a hand that was neater than his own.
How old are you again? 10, she said. She pointed at the bottom of the list. We need more salt and lamp oil. I'll add it to the town run.
I already added it, she said, and pointed to where she'd written it. Bram looked at Nell and thought about the kind of people certain kinds of hard childhoods produced not damaged people or not always. But sometimes instead people who had been forced to be competent earlier than most and had discovered that competence suited them. He thought Nell was one of those. Maisie was different.
Maisie was eight and moved through the world on a different frequency than her sister. More improvisational, more likely to sing to herself or rearrange things according to an aesthetic logic. Only she fully understood. The garden she tended, the small patch Eloin had given her responsibility for, was the most elaborately organized section, with little stone markers at each plant and a careful rearrangement of the chicken fence nearby that actually in inexplicably improved the chicken's access to shade. Bram had noticed that and hadn't said anything, just noted it.
Tobin, cleared for light work 2 weeks after his fever broke, became a genuine small engine of usefulness fetching, carrying, holding things, getting underfoot in ways that were somehow more helpful than not. He had a gift for showing up exactly when an extra pair of hands was needed, which Bram suspected was partly intuition and partly the result of watching everything very carefully. The sewing orders came in. Elo had set up in the corner of the main house. Bram had given her a table near the east window for the light, and she worked in the evenings after dinner with a concentration that excluded everything that wasn't the cloth in front of her.
The first dress she finished was for Marjgery Dale, and when Marjgerie came to collect it and held it up and turned it in the light, she looked at Elelloin with an expression Bram happened to to catch from the doorway. "The particular expression of someone who has received better than they expected. " "You do this again next season," Marjgerie said. And I'll send every woman I know to you. Send them now, Eloin said. I've got time in the evenings.
Marjgerie came back 4 days later with her sister-in-law and a woman from the settlement near Ketarage's north land, who introduced herself as Vera, and had very particular opinions about sleeve lengths. Elo handled all three of them at once, measuring and noting and making small adjustments to her plans without apparent strain. And Bram, watching from across the yard, found himself thinking that Elo and Harrow in her element was a different creature than Elo and Harrow surviving. Both were formidable. One of them was something else as well.
The money started coming in small amounts, not transformative, but real. Eggs, preserved tomatoes that Elo had put up with Maisy's help in a batch that filled 12 jars. Two dresses paid for, two more in progress. Silas had put in four days of fence work at the apprentice spread and come home with wages and a quiet pride that he managed not to make into a performance. Bram added it all up one evening on the back of an envelope, the way his father had always done accounts, and sat with the number.
It wasn't enough to call the ranch saved, but it was enough to call it different than it had been. That was when Orson Keteridge came back. He came on a Wednesday afternoon, earlier than Bram expected, and he came alone this time, which was different. No ranch hands flanking him, just Orson on his gray horse, riding up to the gate at the same slow, deliberate pace as before, and waiting there until Bram came to meet him. Bram came to the gate.
He didn't open it. They looked at each other over the top rail. You look better than I expected, Orson said. I had some help. I heard.
Orson looked past Bram at the yard, at the improved storage building, at the expanded garden, at Silus hauling a bucket of water across the yard in the background. Something moved in Orson's expression that was harder to read than his usual certainty. I heard the Tovers came out. The apprentice boys. They did.
That's not nothing, Orson said, and he said it in a way that surprised Bram, less like a man rec-calibrating his strategy and more like a man genuinely registering something. Ephraim Toiver doesn't haul lumber for people he doesn't respect. Bram leaned on the gate post. What can I do for you, Orson? Orson looked at him.