She had been Mrs. Hale, and then she had been the widow Hale, and somewhere on the trail from Missouri she had become simply a woman moving south with no forwarding address. She had a sister in San Saba who may or may not have still been waiting. She had $23 in a cotton pouch sewn into her underskirt.
She had a husband in the ground outside of Sedalia who had not been cruel, exactly, but who had left her carrying a child and a name and no plan, which amounted to the same thing. She did not tell Edmund any of this. She ate the food his boys put in front of her, salt pork and cornbread and a cup of coffee so thick it was nearly solid.
And she sat at the long kitchen table with her hands wrapped around the cup and felt the warmth move through her hands and into her arms, and she did not cry. The room off the kitchen was small and smelled of cedar, and dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams. Someone had put a fresh candle on the washstand. She lay on the narrow bed with her hands folded on the highest point of her belly and listened to the sounds of a house settling into night.
Voices in the other room, low and indistinct, the creak of boots, a door closing, the coyotes beginning their conversation out across the grass. The child came four days later. Edmund Vass sent his oldest boy, Eli, on horseback for the midwife in Cutter’s Bend, which was 11 miles away, and the woman arrived on a buckboard with a leather bag and the unruffled competence of someone who had done this in worse circumstances.
Margaret labored through the day and into the dark. She did not scream. She made sounds that were not words, and she gripped the iron headboard, and at one point she said something in a language she had not spoken since childhood and did not remember afterward. The twins were kept outside. The younger boys were sent to the barn with strict instructions.
Edmund stood in the kitchen and split a cord of wood that did not need splitting. The baby was a girl, small, outraged, already working her fists. When the midwife brought her out and showed Edmund, he looked at the baby with an expression that was difficult to categorize, not sentimental, not cold, more like recognition, like he had known something was coming and now it had arrived and that was simply where things stood.
He asked if Mrs. Hale was all right. The midwife said she was tired but strong. He nodded once and went back to the kitchen to make coffee. What happened over the following weeks happened slowly, the way water finds its level, without drama, through persistence and gravity. Margaret was not the kind of woman who accepted help gracefully, and Edmund Vass was not the kind of man who offered it smoothly.
They were awkward around each other in the way of two people who understood that proximity had an arithmetic and neither was ready to do the math. But the boys were not awkward. They moved around her and the baby with the adaptability of children raised in a world that did not ask their permission before changing.
Eli, the oldest, found reasons to be useful that did not draw attention to themselves. A bucket of water appearing on the washstand, a load of firewood materialized without comment. The second boy, Pell, showed her how the cook stove ran hot on the left side and had to be compensated for. The third, whose name was Rance, taught the baby to grip his finger two weeks before any of them expected her to.
The fourth, Duff, brought her a flower once, a scrubby yellow thing from the pasture, and set it on her windowsill and walked away before she could say anything. The twins, August and Avery, competed to make the baby smile and were devastated in turns when she slept through their efforts. Edmund fixed the wagon.
He did not announce that he was going to do it. One morning it was simply there in the yard near the barn, the wheel repaired, the board replaced where it had cracked in the fall. He brought the mule back, too. He had tracked it 5 miles east and found it tangled in a fence line with more dignity than it deserved. Margaret stood on the porch and looked at the wagon for a long time.
She had the baby against her shoulder, wrapped in a flannel cloth, her small face invisible. The wind came soft from the south, carrying dust in the distant smell of rain that would not arrive. Edmund came out of the barn and stopped when he saw her looking. She said, “I could go to my sister’s in San Saba.
” He stood with his hat in his hands. He had a habit of holding his hat when he did not know what to do with himself, and she had come to recognize it. “You could,” he said. “She might not be there anymore.” “She might not.” The silence between them was long, but not uncomfortable. That was the thing about Edmund Vass.
He did not fill silence the way most men did, with words that meant nothing and served no purpose except to keep the air occupied. He was comfortable in the quiet, and she had started to find that quality, which she had first mistaken for coldness, to be instead a form of respect. She looked at the baby’s face, visible now as the child turned slightly, eyes closed against the light.
She had not named her yet. She had been afraid to, as if naming her would make her more real, and therefore more possible to lose. “What was your wife’s name?” Margaret asked. She had not asked before. The boys had mentioned her once obliquely, in the way of children who have learned that certain subjects cause their father to go still in a particular way.
Edmund looked out at the horizon, at the place where the land met the sky in a line so flat it seemed drawn by a hand. “Rosalind,” he said. “She died four years ago, fever.” “I’m sorry.” “She would have liked having another girl in the house.” He said it plainly, without sentiment, the way he said everything.
“She always said there was too much hat smelling and boot dragging.” Margaret almost smiled. It moved across her face and then settled into something quieter. That evening she sat at the kitchen table after supper and wrote the name on a piece of paper in her careful schoolteacher’s hand. The baby lay in the drawer they had padded with blankets and set on the table beside her.
The candle threw warm light. In the other room she could hear the boys arguing about something in the low-grade, permanent way of brothers who have given up trying to resolve anything, and have settled for the argument itself as a form of companionship. Edmund came in for a cup of coffee and stopped when he saw the paper.
Rosalind, Margaret said, if you don’t mind. He looked at the paper, then at the baby, then he set down his cup and pulled a chair out and sat across from her, and he did not say anything for a long while, but his face did something that it did not usually do, something that broke open a little at the edges and let the light in.
And she thought that she understood then what kind of man he was, not a man who had stopped feeling things, but a man who had learned to feel them somewhere private and protected, deep enough down that they could not be taken from him again. I don’t mind, he said. Outside the coyotes were at it again, calling and answering across the black expanse of grassland, that ancient lonesome sound.
