The Mountain Man Started Buying Baby Clothes — But Everyone Knew He Lived Alone
Chapter 11
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"I told myself this cabin was all a man could want. It was an empty house." He drew a breath. "I did not know it had room." He reached out and took her hand with as much care as he had used on the baby. "I would miss you humming. I would miss being told I am doing it wrong. I would miss coming in from the cold and finding you arguing with the stove. I love you, Hannah. I love those girls. I do not want any of you to go."She was very still."I was afraid," she said at last. "That you would feel bound. That in ten years you would wake up and find a family you never chose.""No one ever made me love anyone," said Thad. "It was the first thing I ever chose without being afraid.""Thaddeus Rourke," said Hannah. "That is the longest speech I have ever heard you make.""I have been working on it since November."She laughed, and cried, and put her forehead against his shoulder. He held her with a hand that did not know what to do with itself.And she said into his coat, "I love you, too, you great, stubborn fool. I have for weeks. But I will not live on your land and sit in your house with nothing of my own.""I would not ask it.""Then you will not mind," said Hannah, "that I am going to work."She did not go to Pueblo. In March, Clara Brandt came up the trail in a borrowed wagon with a bolt of calico and a list of orders: she had been thinking since January about the lining of Lucy's coat."The store could sell ten ready-made dresses a month," she said, "if anyone could make a seam like that."Hannah would be paid by the piece."I looked at the doll, too," said Clara. "You can do a great deal with a poor ear."They were married on Saturday, the 22nd of June, 1889, in the little church at Alder Gap.The whole town came: some came to see, and some came to be forgiven. Mrs. Hollis wore her best hat and a look of pained goodwill; Wilbur Hatch had trimmed his own beard with disastrous results; Granny Pruitt sat in the front pew and told the pastor in a whisper that carried to the choir that she had delivered the bride's baby on a mountain before dawn, and that he would do well to remember it.Thad stood at the altar in a new suit: Clara had chosen it, and he looked like a bear who had been persuaded into a coat. His hands were steady; he had faced a blizzard and felt that a church, by comparison, was a moderate danger.Hannah came up the aisle in a pale blue dress she had sewn herself. Lucy walked ahead of her with a basket of wild columbines and a ribbon in her other hand with two rings tied to it. She did not drop them: she delivered them to the pastor like a diplomat.Then she turned to the congregation and announced in a voice that carried to the back:"He is my papa now. He said I can still call him Mr. Thad if I want to. And Congress is not coming in. He tried."