He had $17 in his pocket, a bedroll, a canteen, and a letter in his saddlebag that he hadn’t been able to open in 3 years. The letter was from his wife. It had arrived the day after his daughter died. He kept it because throwing it away felt like throwing away the last unheard thing Bess’s mother had to say. He didn’t open it because he was afraid of what it would cost him to read it.
Oren Suture looked at the girl on the porch and felt something move in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Not pity, something older than pity. He dismounted. “Morning,” he said. The girl looked at him. She didn’t run. She didn’t smile. She held her doll tighter. “Is your father here?” Oren asked. Phoebe looked at the door behind her.
Then she looked back at the man. “He’s sleeping,” she said. “He’s been sleeping for a long time.” Oren felt the ground shift under him. Not physically, but something in the way she said it. The careful, practiced way she said a long time told him that this child had been alone with a truth she couldn’t name for longer than any child should have to be. “Can I come up?” he said.
“Papa said not to let strangers in.” “That’s a good rule. What’s your name?” “Phoebe.” “Phoebe, my name’s Oren. I’m not going to come inside, but I’d like to check on your papa. Would that be all right?” She thought about it. She looked at his horse. She looked at his hands. They were at his sides, open, not reaching for anything.
“You have to be quiet,” she said. “He’s sleeping.” Oren climbed the porch steps. Phoebe moved aside, not away, just aside, the way a child moves when she’s making room but not giving ground. He put his hand on the door. The smell hit him before he crossed the threshold. He stopped. He breathed through his mouth.
He looked back at Phoebe, who was watching him from the porch step with her enormous brown eyes and her ruined doll, and something terrible locked into place. He stepped inside. He saw the bed. He saw the man in it. A man who had been dead for days, whose body had passed through the stages that a September heat brings, whose face was no longer a face a child should see.
He saw the water glass on the chair. He saw the egg beside it, saved for a man who would never eat again. Oren Suttry backed out of the house and pulled the door closed behind him. He crouched down in front of Phoebe. He put himself at her height, the way you do with horses that are frightened. Low, slow, no sudden movements.
“Phoebe,” he said. His voice was steady. His hands were not. “How long have you been out here by yourself?” “I’m not by myself. Papa’s inside.” He closed his eyes. One second. Two. “Phoebe, has anyone come to visit? Anyone from town?” “No, but Papa said if I waited a good man would come.” She looked at him. “Are you a good man?” And Oren Suttry, who had ridden past more trouble than he’d stopped for, who had buried his own daughter in hard ground and ridden away from her grave because staying felt like drowning, looked at this girl and
understood that the road had brought him here for a reason he had spent 3 years trying to outrun. “I’m going to try to be,” he said. He buried Phoebe’s father that afternoon. He found a shovel in the lean-to and he dug the grave beside a cottonwood that stood alone in the yard, the only tree on the property, the kind of tree a man plants when he means to stay.
He dug it deep because the prairie has a way of returning what you give it too shallow, and this man deserved to stay where he was put. Phoebe sat on the porch and watched. She didn’t cry. She held Miss Pryne and she watched, and when Oren carried her father out of the house wrapped in the bed sheet, she stood up.
“Is he going in the ground?” she said. “Yes.” “Will he be cold?” Oren stopped. He looked at the sky, which was wide and blue and utterly indifferent. “No,” he said. “He won’t feel the cold anymore.” “Promise?” “I promise.” She sat back down. She watched him lower her father into the ground and fill the hole and tamp the earth flat.
When he was done, she walked over and put her hand on the mound of dirt. “Good night, Papa,” she said. Oren turned away. He walked to the well and he cranked the bucket up and he poured water over his hands and his face and he stood there for a long time with the water running off his jaw and his shoulders shaking and he told himself it was the cold water that did it and it was not the cold water that did it.
He cleaned the house. He opened every window and let the September wind scour through it. And by evening the smell had faded to something bearable. He found a sack of flour and a tin of lard and he made flatbread on the stove, rough, uneven, but hot. And he set a plate in front of Phoebe at the kitchen table. She looked at the plate.
She looked at him. “You’re allowed to use the stove,” she said. “I am.” “Papa said only grown people can use the stove.” “Your papa was right. I’m a grown person.” She picked up the bread and ate it in the way children eat when they have been hungry for days, fast, without tasting, swallowing before the body can object.
He put a second piece on her plate, then a third. “Slow down,” he said. “There’s more.” She slowed down, not much, but some. “Mr. Oren?” “Just Oren.” “Oren, are you going to leave?” He looked at her across the table. The lamp light made her face golden and made the dirt on her skin look like shadow.
She had asked the question the way she’d asked everything, directly, without pleading, with the composure of a child who had already learned that the answer might be no. “Not tonight,” he said. “What about tomorrow?” “We’ll figure that out tomorrow.” She thought about that. She took another bite of bread. “Miss Prine says you should stay,” she said.
“She says you’re the good man Papa told me about.” Orin looked at the doll in the chair beside her. Its button eyes stared at nothing. One arm was coming unstiched. “Miss Prine is a smart lady,” he said. In the morning, he rode to the nearest neighbor, a man named Foley who ran sheep 3 miles east and who answered the door with a rifle and a suspicious expression that softened only slightly when Orin explained what he’d found.
“Lund’s dead?” Foley said. He said it the way a man says something that doesn’t surprise him but does inconvenience him. “Days ago, his girl was alone with the body.” “Lord.” Foley shook his head. “I told him last spring he looked poorly. He said he was fine. Did anyone check on them?” Foley was quiet. “There’s a 5-year-old girl who spent 4 days feeding chickens and saving eggs for a dead man,” Orin said.
His voice was level but the level itself was the warning. “Someone should have checked. The county has a children’s home in Grand Island.” “I didn’t ask about that.” Foley looked at him. “What are you asking?” “I’m asking who this child has. Who’s her family?” “There’s no family I know of. Lund came out here alone with the girl after his wife died in childbirth.
No people that ever visited.” Orin stood on Foley’s porch and looked east across the flat Nebraska grass and felt the the of it, the particular weight of knowing that a child’s entire world has contracted to a dead man, a cloth doll, and a stranger on a buckskin horse. “I’ll be at the Lund place,” he said. “If anyone from town wants to do right by that girl, they know where to find her.
