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Part 2 — The Deed

The rest of the letter was short. Her father had filed a timber claim in Hannah’s name the winter he died. Mercer was to hold the paper only until she was of age. He was not to lease it, log it, or sign it over to the town. If he tried, the witness was Mrs. Bell at the hotel, and the copy was with a surveyor in Missoula.

Hannah read it twice. “He told me there was nothing left.”

“There was a slope of pine the railroad still wants,” Gideon said. “Mercer has been cutting it quiet and calling the money town relief. Mrs. Bell wrote me in the fall. She couldn’t get you out. I could get meat in. Meat was the only language he was hungry enough to hear.”

“So you bought a wife.”

“I bought a door. The ring is so he can’t call you back as unfinished business. The bed is yours. The floor is mine. The deed is yours if you want to fight him for it, and mine to ignore if you don’t.” He nodded at the paper. “I don’t need your land. I needed you off his ledger.”

She sat down because her knees had opinions. Ten years of linens and floors, and a mayor who had called it an agreement. A man with a scar who had asked Mrs. Bell her boot size before he ever stood at the altar.

“Why me?” she asked. “He would have sold anyone.”

“You were the one the claim was under. The others weren’t being robbed in their own name.”

In the morning he showed her the copy he had already made, hidden in a tin behind the flour. Not romantic. Useful. She wrote Mrs. Bell in a hand that shook and then steadied. Gideon did not read it over her shoulder.

That night she slept in the bed. He slept on the skins. The wind moved in the pines, and Pine Hollow was a long way down a trail she no longer had to walk for someone else’s meat. She was still a wife on paper. She was no longer a price. The six words on her father’s letter had been a warning. The man who dragged six sleds into a starving town had finally let her read it.