Posted in

Everyone Ignored the Obese Girl at the Harvest Feast—Until a Cowboy Sat Beside Her

by dttkcanh•

Outside the last of October sat heavy over the ridge. The trees had gone to rust and amber, and there was a wind coming down from the north that had real teeth in it. Not dangerous, not yet, but the kind of cold that gets inside your coat and stays there. The kitchen was warm. Abigail was grateful for that much.

"
"

Around 6:00 in the morning, she heard a horse on the road, a single rider moving slowly up the approach toward the ranch. She dried her hands on her apron and looked out the kitchen window. The man on the horse was not someone she recognized. He rode a dark bay geling, tall and well muscled, and he himself had the kind of build that suggested a life spent doing actual physical labor, wide through the shoulders, easy in the saddle, dressed plainly in a dark coat and a battered hat that had seen weather.

He pulled the horse up at the fence and looked at the ranch house for a moment before dismounting. Abigail watched him tie his horse and walked toward the front door. Something about the way he moved, unhurried, direct, like a man who had thought about where he was going, made her look longer than she normally would have.

She heard Elellanar’s voice from somewhere in the front of the house a few minutes later, carrying the particular pitch it got when she was performing pleasant surprise. Caleb Thornton, what a completely unexpected pleasure. Abigail turned back to her bread dough. She learned the details. peace meal the way she learned most things in this household through fragments of conversation she wasn’t intended to hear passing through doorways at the wrong moment.

Caleb Thornton had purchased the old Hatcher property 2 months ago. 300 acres on the western side of the ridge. Land that had sat vacant for 6 years since old Henry Hatcher died with no heirs. It was good land, everyone agreed, with a year round creek and solid timber stands and soil that would take grain beautifully. The fact that an outsider had bought it had caused the kind of ripple that outsiders buying good land always caused in a place like Blackstone Ridge.

Not hostility exactly, but a watchful attention. Eleanor had not met him yet. That was clear from the bright calculating edge in her voice as she welcomed him into the sitting room. Abigail could hear her working out his potential usefulness. The way Eleanor worked out the potential usefulness of everything and everyone. Marcus apparently had encountered Caleb in town and extended the invitation without consulting his mother.

This was the kind of impulsive sociability Marcus engaged in when it suited him, not anticipating the complications it created, like the fact that the table now had 12 people for 11 seats, and Eleanor’s precise seating arrangement had an uninvited variable in it. None of this was Abigail’s problem. Technically, she had been assigned a crate.

She focused on the gravy. By 3:00 in the afternoon, the feast was almost entirely assembled. The venison was carved. The potatoes were creamed and buttered and sitting covered near the stove. The beans had been cooked down with salt pork until they were dark and thick. The biscuits were done, cooling on a rack.

The two apple pies were out of the oven, and the kitchen smelled like sugar and cinnamon and wood smoke. Abigail stood back and looked at it all for a moment. Three days of work. four if you counted the planning. Everything was right. The seasoning, the timing, the balance of heavy and light, the visual presentation that Eleanor appreciated, even if she never commented on it directly.

She thought about her grandmother, Ruth, who had taught her to cook in the first place. Ruth, who had said, “A table is an act of generosity, Abigail. It’s how we tell people they matter to us.” She picked up her tin plate and her fork and went outside. The back porch faced east toward the treeine. The wooden crate she’d been directed to was there, broad and flat enough to sit on comfortably, positioned near enough to the wall to catch some shelter from the wind. Almost.

The wind came around the corner of the house anyway. Abigail pulled her shawl tighter and set her plate on her knees. From inside, she could hear everything. The scrape of chairs on the wood floor. Eleanor’s voice rising briefly over the others as she directed people to their seats, the clink of glasswware, laughter, Marcus’ particular bark, Harriet’s higher pitch, the children’s voices tumbling over each other, the sounds of a family eating together.

She ate her venison. It was good. She knew it was good because she had made it, and she made things right. The venison was tender, the fat rendered clean. The gravy had exactly the amount of sage that was correct. She ate it cold because it had cooled on the walk from the kitchen to the porch. She didn’t let herself think about the conversation that would need to happen eventually.

The one where she would have to decide how much longer she could keep doing this, feeding 11 people a meal that took 3 days to build and sitting outside alone with a tin plate while they ate it. That conversation felt enormous and frightening, and she’d been not having it for years.

She ate the biscuit, which was also good. The wind pushed against her from the left, carrying the smell of wood smoke from the chimney above. She heard the back door open. She assumed it was one of the children. They sometimes wandered out during meals, bored or restless, needing air. She didn’t look up immediately. “There’s a fire in the sitting room,” the man said. “Inside.” She looked up then.

Caleb Thornton was standing in the doorway of the back porch holding two plates. His hat was off. He must have left it inside, and the afternoon light caught the angle of his jaw, the slight furrow between his brows. He was looking at her with an expression she had trouble reading at first. “Not pity exactly.

Something more direct than that.” “I can see that,” Abigail said. He looked at her plate. Then he looked at the crate she was sitting on. Then he looked back at the closed door behind him and something in his face shifted. Not subtle, a real movement, a visible response to something he was working out. “They sent you outside,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. She didn’t answer. He walked across the porch and set one of his plates down on the flat top of the crate beside her. Then he looked around for a moment, found a second crate stacked against the wall of the house, dragged it over, and sat down on it. “What are you doing?” Abigail said.

eating my supper. He picked up his fork. It’s cold out here. I noticed. He cut into the venison, tasted it, and something shifted in his expression again to this time simpler. This is remarkable. She looked at him for a long moment. He was eating. Matter of fact, like sitting on a wooden crate in the October wind next to a woman he didn’t know was a completely ordinary thing to do. You don’t have to. No, he said.

I don’t. He didn’t explain further. Abigail looked at the plate he’d brought. It was piled properly. Not a courtesy portion, a full serving, the same she would have put on any plate inside. He’d brought her food, not as a gesture, but as the point. I’m Abigail Mercer, she said. Caleb Thornon. He looked at her with the directness she’d noticed from the kitchen window that morning. I know you made all of this.

She didn’t know what to say to that. Marcus mentioned it in town. Caleb said, “Said you were the best cook on the ridge. Said the harvest feast every year was something people talked about.” Marcus has never said that to me. Caleb glanced at the door. “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine he has. The wind came around the corner again.

Read More