She asked good questions, not showy questions, practical ones. She knew something about horses, not a horsewoman's knowledge exactly, but a working knowledge, the kind you get from being around working animals your whole life and paying attention. She'd grown up on a farm in Illinois, she said, "horses and mules both." I asked her what brought her west.
She thought about it, not hesitating but actually thinking, which was different.
"There was nothing left to stay for," she said. "That's the honest answer. My mother died 2 years ago. The farm was sold to pay the debts.
I was working in the city keeping ledgers for a shipping company living in a rooming house. It was a fine enough life." She paused. "But it was the same day every day and I'm not built for that."
I understood that. I didn't say so, but I understood it.
She slept in the spare room and was up before me in the morning, which I didn't expect. When I came out to the kitchen, she'd already been to the barn, checked the mare's leg, and come back. She told me the swelling was down, and the horse was putting weight on it, which was good news. Then she asked if she could have some of the flour and salt and make proper biscuits because the cornbread last night had been fine, but she'd been thinking about biscuits.
I told her to help herself to whatever she could find. She made biscuits.
She also found the half-smoked ham I'd forgotten about in the cold box and sliced it thin and fried it. And there were eggs from the three hens I kept for no good reason except habit. And we ate better at that table than I'd eaten in six months. She drank her coffee black and ate without speaking much and looked out the window at the pasture while she ate, watching the horses move, studying them.
"The dark chestnut gelding," she said, "he's off." I looked out. The horses were all moving around the hay I'd pitched in. "Which one?"
"The one with the flaxen mane. Watch how he carries his left shoulder." I watched. She was right. There was a slight stiffness in how he stepped out on that side, nothing dramatic, something you'd miss if you weren't looking for it.
"He hit something in the storm, probably," I said, "running in the dark." "Probably. He'll work it out." She said it casually, the way you say something you know to be true, and went back to her coffee.
I didn't ask her to stay. I want to be clear about that because what came after can sound like I planned it or maneuvered it, and I didn't. She decided on her own, in her own time, for her own reasons, and the fact that she did is the only part of this that I still think about when I can't sleep.
What happened was the weather. Second storm of the season came in hard the afternoon she was supposed to leave. She'd loaded the mule and said her goodbyes and gotten maybe a mile down the trail when it hit. And she came back because she had enough sense not to push a mule into a mountain blizzard and enough pride not to look upset about it. She came in shaking snow off her hat and said she supposed she'd need that spare room another night.
She stayed four more days. In those four days I learned several things about Nora Voss. She didn't sleep late and she didn't leave work undone. She had a system for everything. The way she organized the kitchen, the way she kept track of what was used and what was left, the way she fixed things.
On the second morning she found a crack in the mortar around the kitchen stove pipe and pointed it out to me and asked if I had the mix to fix it. I did. She watched me do it and asked one question about what I was using and why and I could tell she was filing the answer away for later.
The third day she rehung the kitchen door, which had been dragging on the sill for two winters. She didn't mention it before or after, just did it. I came in for the noon meal and the door moved clean.
She wasn't soft. That's maybe the clearest way to say it. Not hard, not cold. She laughed when something was funny and she could sit quiet in a room without making it feel like something was wrong.
But she wasn't soft. She'd done hard things and expected to do more hard things and didn't waste time minding that. She also read. She had two books in her saddlebag and she'd read them both already on the trail, she said. And when she found my three books on the shelf above the desk, she asked if she could borrow one.
I told her they weren't much, a farm almanac, a history of the territory, and a novel Margaret had brought from her mother's house, and I'd read twice because there was nothing else to read. Nora took the history of the territory and read half of it the first evening and the rest the second, and then talked about it at supper on the third night. Things she'd noticed, things she had questions about. The land grant system and what it meant for the smaller ranchers, where the water rights had gotten complicated.
She'd been thinking about the territory she was riding into. That was the thing. She wasn't just passing through on her way to something else. She was learning the place.
The fourth night the weather broke and we sat by the stove and I told her more about the ranch than I told anyone in years. The original claim, what it had looked like when I first ran cattle on it, why I'd switched to horses. The two years when things went badly and I'd sold down to the studs and started over. She listened to all of it and didn't say anything reassuring, which was the right call.
There's nothing reassuring to say about a man selling down to the studs and starting over. It's just a thing that happened. She did say, "But you built it back." It was not a question, just a statement.
"Took a while," I said. "Most things do," she said. Then she asked about Margaret.
I don't know why I told her. I don't talk about Margaret easily, not with anyone, but I told her. The way we'd worked this place together in the early years, the way she'd read a ledger. The way the cancer had come on slow and then fast and then she was gone. The way the ranch had gotten harder after, not just because of the labor, but because when you're doing it alone, the point of it gets harder to keep track of.
Nora listened to all of that. She didn't say I'm sorry, which I appreciated because I've heard I'm sorry from enough people that the words have gotten worn smooth. She said, "She sounds like she was someone worth knowing." "She was," I said.
"And you've run this place 15 years without her." "I have." She nodded. And then she let it go, which was exactly the right thing.
The fifth morning was clear and cold, and there was no good reason for her not to ride. She'd been in my spare room five days, and she had a woman waiting in Caldwell Wells and a job to get to. I fed the mule and got him ready and brought him out to the yard, and she came out of the house with her bag and tied it on. She stood by the mule for a moment.