Then he climbed down from the roan with the careful movements of a man whose knees had opinions about such things. He walked to meet her. Not all the way. He stopped about halfway between where he dismounted and where she stood. And she realized with a tired sort of clarity that he had ridden out to meet her and then walked the last of the distance so she wouldn’t have to look up at him on horseback.
It was the kind of small thing that people either thought about or didn’t and she filed it away without comment. “Della Marsh,” he said. It was not a question. “Garrett Hollis,” she replied. He looked at her for a moment, not at the children, not at the pack on her shoulders, not at the boy sleeping against her neck, at her.
Then he said, “You look like you could use some water.” “We all could,” she said. He went back to the horse and unhooked a canvas-wrapped canteen from the saddle and another and brought them both without making anything of it. He handed them to Ren and Thomas without instructions and they drank with the focused seriousness of children who had understood thirst at a cellular level for the past 2 days.
Della drank last. The water was warm and tasted faintly of iron, and she thought it was one of the finest things she had ever put in her mouth. Garrett Hollis took the reins of the roan and turned the horse so it walked alongside them as they continued toward town. He did not offer to take her pack. He did not offer to carry Ben.
He walked beside her at her pace, which was slower than his natural one. She could tell by the occasional adjustment of his stride, and he did not seem to resent it. “Harrow Flats isn’t much,” he said after they’d walked a quarter mile in silence. “Two saloons, one of which I’d recommend avoiding, a dry goods, a blacksmith.
Church hasn’t had a regular preacher in 8 months. The doctor is competent when he’s sober.” “Is he often sober?” “More than people give him credit for.” A pause. “The cottage needs some work. There’s a gap in the kitchen roof I’ve been meaning to address.” “I can address it,” she said. He glanced at her sideways.
“I wasn’t asking you to.” “I know. I was telling you.” He didn’t argue. She respected that. They walked the remaining distance as the sun finished its descent, the sky layering itself in bands of amber and dusty rose behind the town silhouette. Iris had finally found the ending of her dust song and was humming it softly.
Thomas had given up counting jackrabbits and was instead walking with a focused expression of a boy constructing some interior architecture she would probably hear about later. Ren had moved up to walk closer to Della, not quite touching her in the way she sometimes did when she was quietly checking that her mother was still intact.
Della reached back and briefly pressed Ren’s hand, once. That was enough. The foreman’s cottage sat at the western edge of the Hollis property, a squat structure of weathered pine and river stone with a porch that listed slightly to the left. The gap in the kitchen roof was real.
She could see the pale evening light coming through it when Garrett pushed the door open and held it. Inside it smelled of dust and old wood and something herbal she couldn’t name. Someone had left a lantern on the table already lit. She did not ask whether that had been planned. “There’s firewood stacked at the side,” Garrett said from the doorway.
“Larder’s got basics. I’ll send Emmet over with more in the morning. He’s my other hand, good man, talks too much.” Della set Ben down on the rope bed in the back room and he did not wake, simply curled into himself like a question mark. She straightened and came back to the doorway where Garrett Hollis was still standing, hat in hand now, looking at the porch floor in the way of a man deciding whether to say something.
“The pay is fair,” he said finally. “I’ve written the terms down. You can read them over, change anything that doesn’t sit right. “And if I want to change something?” “Then we talk about it like sensible people.” He put his hat back on. “I’m not looking for someone to say yes to everything I write, Della. My eyesight’s failing, not my judgment.
I need someone whose judgment I can trust.” She looked at him for a long moment. He didn’t look away and he didn’t fill the silence with more words and she found that she appreciated both of those things in equal measure. “I’ll read them tonight,” she said. He nodded and walked back toward his horse and stopped once halfway across the yard and turned back.
“There’s a second lantern in the chest under the window,” he said, “in case that one burns low.” Then he mounted up and rode back toward the main house through the deepening dusk. And she watched him go with her arms crossed over her chest, the evening wind lifting the loose hair at her temples. Behind her she could hear Wren coaxing Thomas away from something he was investigating on the porch railing.
She could hear Iris start the dust song again, quieter now, more like a lullaby than a complaint. She could hear the creak of the rope bed from the back room where Ben slept, like something poured into the mattress. Della turned and went inside. She lit the second lantern before the first one had a chance to burn low.
She found the terms Garrett had written in a plain hand on two folded sheets of paper beneath the lantern base, as though he had placed them there himself earlier in the day. She sat at the table and read them once carefully. Then she read them again. The wage was more than fair. The terms were straightforward.
There was a line at the bottom that said simply, “Any arrangement that doesn’t serve both parties should be renegotiated, not endured.” She set the papers down on the table. Outside a coyote started up somewhere distant and was answered by another farther off, the two of them conducting some conversation she couldn’t interpret.
The prairie wind pressed itself against the walls of the cottage, probing for gaps. The lantern flame shifted and straightened. Della Marsh pressed her palms flat against the tabletop and felt the grain of the old wood beneath her calloused hands. She had carried 40 miles in her bones and the weight of the last 2 years behind her eyes, and she was not finished carrying.
She understood that. Some weights don’t get set down so much as shifted into different positions. But this table was solid. The lantern held. And somewhere in the main house across the dark yard, Garrett Hollis had probably already put his kettle on because men like that always put the kettle on.
And eventually, not tonight, not this week, but eventually, she thought she might walk across that yard herself in the early morning light and knock on the door of a man who had ridden out to meet her halfway. Not all the way, just halfway. She was beginning to think that was the right distance.
