The Mountain Man Started Buying Baby Clothes — But Everyone Knew He Lived Alone
Chapter 12
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The baby, five months old, slept peacefully in Ruth Dowd's arms until the vows. At the words "I do," she woke and screamed."That is a yes," said Granny Pruitt.Afterward, there was a dinner on the church lawn with tables borrowed from three families. The two women from the store found their way across the grass with their eyes on their shoes.Hannah held out her hand. "I forgive you," she said pleasantly. "But I will want the pie recipe."Clara, at the end of the table, told the barber she was sorry she had ever mentioned the dress. Then she looked toward the newlyweds: "Next time, Wilbur, we might try asking before guessing."And the town of Alder Gap, which had spent 20 years not asking its biggest man a single question, understood at last what he had been doing with the pink dress: he had not been hiding a family; he had been getting a home ready for one that did not yet know it needed him.On a Sunday evening in July of 1890, the sun was going down behind the ridge, and the whole valley was the color of honey.Thad sat on the porch of the cabin in the big chair he had built himself, with the green scarf folded on the arm. There were three more rooms on the cabin now, and a well, and a stable big enough for four horses: his furs had paid for the lumber, and Hannah's dress orders for the glass, and he had been told to say so to anyone who asked.In his arms lay Ada, 18 months old, deeply asleep, with one fist in his beard. Out in the yard, Lucy, nine years old now and nearly able to meet his eyes when he sat in the porch chair, was brushing the mule; Congress bore it with the air of a bishop.Hannah came out of the house wiping her hands, and stopped behind the chair, and bent, and kissed Thad on the top of his head."She is asleep," she said."She has been asleep for an hour. I did not wish to move.""I know.""My arm has gone numb.""I know that, too."He did not move it.Lucy came to the foot of the steps with the currycomb in her hand, and stood looking up at him with her head to one side, exactly as she had on the day she came."Mr. Thad?""Yes, Lucy.""Do you still like being alone?"He looked at his wife with her hands in her apron; he looked at the sleeping child, and the girl in the yard, and the mule, and the cabin behind him full of lamplight and a smell of bread.For a moment, he did not answer. Then he smiled—the slow, broad smile that Alder Gap had once thought it would never see."No, little one," he said. "I do not think I ever did. I just did not know it before."A pink dress, a cradle carved with pine trees, a green scarf a little crooked at one end—a man who needed nothing learned, one purchase at a time, how much he had been missing. And somewhere in the Colorado hills, there is a porch with four chairs on it, and the biggest one is never empty.