The Cowboy Waited Months for His Mail-Order Bride — Then She Rode Into Town Like a Legend
Chapter 8
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"The door is this one," she said, and laid her hand over his beside the account book for one moment. "It just opens inward now instead of out."The bank visit went as Willa had laid it out: the tin box emptied onto the note, the six steers sold, and the balance was extended to fall.On the Sunday after that visit, Edwin Crowe rode up the Bennett lane in the late light—not in the fine buggy, on a plain horse alone, hat in his hands. He asked with difficulty to speak to Isaac in the barn, not the house. A man does not confess in a house if he can help it.What he said, standing between the stalls, he said to the lantern more than to Isaac."The fences on the south line did not all come down in the flood. Two of my hands cut wire the night before the rain on my word and let the water do the rest. Then my hands came home with the story of the creek and would not meet my eyes at my own table."He turned the hat in his hands."My Mary died in a house that went quiet, too, Bennett. Twenty years I have been making other people's houses quiet and calling it arithmetic. I am not here to be liked. The wire was mine. And the talk in town about her papers, about the bureau—most of that was mine, too. Say what a man does with a thing like that. I have run out of arithmetic for it."Isaac leaned on the stall door and was quiet a moment."A man does three things, Edwin. He mends what he cut: your hands on my south line next week, and I will work beside them. He says the true thing where he said the false one: in the mercantile where you fed it, you can starve it. And then he comes to supper." Isaac's voice did not rise at all. "Sunday. Bring nothing. That is the hardest part for a man like you: bring nothing and sit and be fed in a house that has decided to get louder."The wire got mended.The mercantile got its retraction, delivered by Crowe in a voice like a man swallowing gravel, though no document was read aloud and no court was called—only a man saying in his own words that he had been wrong about the woman and about the debt. Then he went out, diminished and enlarged at once into ordinary daylight.And on Sunday he came to supper and brought nothing except a small wooden horse carved by his own hands, badly. Peter named it instantly: Captain.Crowe looked at the boy at the table, at the noise of the room, and something twenty years old in his face finally set itself down.Pastor Pierce, carving, said the verse under his breath:"The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and he binds up their wounds.""Usually," he added, "with company."They were married on the last Saturday of June, not in the little church at Dryfork, but out at the Bennett place in the lower pasture. And the choice of ground was the bride's.