The Cowboy Waited Months for His Mail-Order Bride — Then She Rode Into Town Like a Legend
Chapter 6
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Then the storm that had been making up its mind beyond the ridge finally made it up.Edwin Crowe's want was not mysterious: the Bennett lower pasture held the only reliable water in the valley in a dry year. In the second week of June, he tried pressure on Willa in Marta's dooryard, where he calculated wrongly that she would be softer alone.He was courtly about it, which was the worst of it. He brought flowers and news."A marriage without the bureau certificate could find itself examined. A foreign-born woman might find a wedding more like a fence than a door. You have ridden a long way, Miss Sorenson, on a dead bureau and a man's desperation. Bennett will wake one morning and see a hired rider where he promised to see a wife. There is a train east every Friday."Willa shelled that speech the way Peter was meant to shell peas—every pea in the bowl."Mr. Crowe, two of your facts are wrong and the third is your hope dressed as one. Letters are not certificates, and I am not foreign-born. My father was, and he became a citizen before I was born, in a courthouse with a flag he cried under. So, I will thank you not to make offense out of him. As for what Isaac Bennett sees when he looks at me, that is between him, me, and God. It is not a market you trade in. Good day."That night the rain arrived all at once. By the second day, the lower pasture was a lake with fence posts in it, and the creek was working on the ford.Isaac rode out at first light on the fourth morning in oilskins to move the last yearlings off a point the water was surrounding. Marta laid her late husband's oilskin coat and a coil of rope over the porch rail for Willa without a word. Some sermons are just equipment handed over at the right time.Down at the creek, Isaac moved the yearlings the hard way, swimming them across in relays. The last crossing betrayed him: a young bay lunged at a floating limb and rolled in deep water with a man's leg under him. The horse got up on the far bank and did not run, which was the luck, and did not help, which was the terror.Isaac came up against the half-sunk wagon the flood had parked in the ford in April. He got an arm over its bed. The current took his legs sideways. His left boot was wedged below in the wagon's sunken running gear, and the water began the arithmetic water always does.He shouted until the rain ate the sound. Then he prayed, the hinge broken open at last:Lord, the boy. Let the boy not be the one who finds... And then he added the harder thing:And if this is the whole of it, she will raise him honest. Thank you for sending her. Even now, thank you.The water reached his chest.