The Cowboy Waited Months for His Mail-Order Bride — Then She Rode Into Town Like a Legend
Chapter 2
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He rose before light, worked the ranch his father had fenced, and raised Peter—four years old when his mother died, a boy with her way of tilting his head to listen. He kept the floors broom-clean because Bethany had liked a clean floor, and a clean floor had become a kind of loyalty.Supper was the worst hour. A man alone at a table built for a family learns to eat standing at the stove, and Isaac ate standing for two winters, telling himself a plate did not care where it was held.A house can be kept that clean and still be starving.Pastor Jonah Pierce finally said so one October evening: "A boy needs more in a kitchen than a good man doing his best, Isaac. And a good man doing his best is allowed to need more, too. There is a bureau in Denver that deals plain. Write what you are."Isaac's letter took three evenings: Widower, 32. A ranch of decent size and an indecent mortgage. A son, six, who liked stories and feared thunder. No fortune coming and none promised. A man of faith, though faith had been more holding on than singing. He wrote the loneliness plain, because a letter built on hiding seemed a poor foundation for a house.The answer came from Minnesota six weeks later in a hand so neat it looked ruled.Willa Sorenson was 26, daughter of a Swedish horse breaker who had trained cavalry remounts, then other men's difficult horses. Both her parents were dead. She had taught two winters at a district school and been dismissed, she wrote, for teaching a lame boy to read after the board decided the effort was wasted. She could ride, cook plain, and bake decent; mend, keep accounts, and doctor a horse.She was not a beauty, she wrote, and not a girl, and would not pretend to be either. If he wanted a decoration, Denver was full of them. If he wanted a partner, she would come in March, God willing, and bring her whole self with her.Peter asked what a partner was, and Isaac said it was somebody who carried the other end of the log.That night he wrote back: "Come in March. Bring all of it."In February, she wrote the letter he kept in the drawer by his bed:"A house should be lived in forward, Isaac. Whatever has been loved in it before is not in the way. It is the reason the walls are strong enough to hold more."March came. Willa Sorenson did not.A washout had closed the road west, the Denver agent wrote.April came. No letter.May came, and the silence became a thing Dryfork discussed quietly. Isaac rode in every Saturday and made no excuses for her.That night Isaac took Willa's letters from the drawer, tied in twine, and put them in the stove. He stood with his hand on the stove door for a long count of ten. Then he took the letters out and read the February letter to the end:A house should be lived in forward. He retied the bundle and put it back.