**Part Two**

Gideon’s blood was already on my sleeves when I understood there would be no time to be frightened in a useful way.

“Wyatt rides,” I said. “Caleb with him. Take the ranch hand and whoever else is in the bunkhouse. Elias stays. I need hands that can fetch and hold. Twins, you are doors and lamps and Levi. Levi does not go into the yard.”

Wyatt’s face flushed dark.

“That’s my father.”

“Yes. And those are his cattle. If both are lost, this ranch dies before morning and your arguing will not bring either back.” I met his eyes and did not look away from the disgust that was still there, only crowded now by panic. “You know the north fence. I do not. I know a broken leg and a bleeding head. That is the split. Go.”

For a heartbeat I thought he would refuse me in front of the others and the night would split a second time. Then Gideon made a sound that was not a word, and Wyatt’s jaw locked.

“Caleb.”

Caleb had already reached for his coat. He did not look at me. He looked at Elias’s throat, at the marks his own hands had left, and something complicated passed through his silence. Then he was gone into the roar with his brother, the ranch hand shouting about rope and the river timber.

The door slammed. Wind sucked the lamp flame sideways.

“Blankets,” I said.

Elias ran.

I got Gideon off the threshold and onto the rag rug by the stove, which was as close to a mercy as the house could offer. His leg was wrong below the knee, a boot still on, the leather swelling against the bone’s new idea of itself. The cut at his hairline was ugly but not the thing that would kill him. Shock would. Cold would. A son seeing too much would.

“Elias. Scissors. Then the boot. Cut it. Do not pull.”

The boy’s hands shook, but he cut. Abigail’s sewing scissors, still sharp. The boot opened like a wound of its own. Gideon groaned through his teeth and tried to sit, and I put my palm on his chest.

“You will lie still, Gideon Hayes, or I will have your six-year-old sit on you, and then you will never recover your dignity.”

A flicker—almost a look—crossed his gray face. Then he went out again.

Levi began to cry.

Josiah took one of his hands. Jeremiah took the other. They stood like small fence posts on either side of their brother and stared at me as if I were the next disaster.

“He is hurt,” I told them, because lies are a poor bandage. “Hurt is not the same as gone. Your mother is gone. Your father is here. You will help me keep him here.”

Levi hiccupped. “Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

That, oddly, steadied him.

Elias came with cloth, whiskey, the sewing kit, a length of cleanish board from behind the stove. I packed the head wound first, tight enough to teach the blood manners. The leg I splinted the way a farm woman splints what she cannot afford to lose—board, cloth, the whiskey only a little in the mouth and more on my hands, because I did not trust the barn’s dirt not to follow us inside. Gideon came back into himself once and said a name that was not mine.

“Abby—”

“She isn’t here,” I said, as gently as the work allowed. “I am. Bear it.”

He bore it. Ranch men do. When it was done his face was the color of old snow and my jaw throbbed where Caleb’s elbow had found me, and the pie on the table had gone cold in a room that smelled of wet wool, iron, and fear.

“Elias. More wood. Twins—lamps in the windows. If they find their way back in this, they should see a house that wants them.”

They moved.

I sat on the floor with Gideon’s head turned so he would not choke, and I held a cup to his mouth when he could take it. Levi crept close enough to touch my skirt, then Gideon’s unhurt hand, then my skirt again, as if choosing a country.

“Ma used to sing when Pa was late,” he whispered.

“I don’t know her songs.”

“I do.”

So a six-year-old sang, off-key and stubborn, a hymn with half the words missing, while the storm tried to take the roof and I counted the minutes by the slam of rain.

—

Time in a disaster does not pass. It accumulates.

Elias stood watch at the dark glass until his breath fogged it blind. The twins fell asleep sitting up against the broken chair and then woke when the wind changed pitch. I changed the cloth at Gideon’s head. The bleeding slowed. His skin stayed too cold. I piled every blanket in the house on him, including one that still held, faintly, a lavender that did not belong to me.

Abigail’s.

I did not put that one back.

Near what I guessed was midnight the front door burst again, not Gideon this time but Wyatt, iced to the thighs, rope-burned, a welt across his cheek.

“We got most of them.” His voice was raw. “Lost four in the timber. Maybe five. Caleb’s with the last bunch at the south corral. The hand’s horse went down. He’s walking.”

“And you?”

“I’m standing.”

He looked at his father. The look stripped him of nineteen years and left the boy who had tried to be a husband to a house.

“Is he dying?”

“Not if the fever doesn’t come and the bone doesn’t sour.” I rose, joints stiff, jaw swollen. “Take off what is wet. Eat what is left. Then you will sit with him while I see to Caleb.”

Wyatt stared at the table as if the cold pie were an insult.

Then he sat. He tore a biscuit with fingers that would not close all the way. He did not say thank you. He did not say I had been right to send him. He ate, and that was the sentence he could afford.

Caleb came later, quieter than the wind. He stopped when he saw me standing in his kitchen with his father’s blood on my dress and his own blow darkening my jaw.

His throat worked.

“I didn’t mean—”

“You meant your brother,” I said. “The elbow was only where I was standing. Wash. Eat. Then you will say one thing to Elias before you sleep, and it will not be a knife.”

Caleb’s eyes shone. He nodded once.

He sat beside Elias, not close, but not a room away. After a long time I heard, very low,

“I thought you were going to say she should leave.”

Elias touched the marks on his neck.

“I was.”

They did not embrace. Hayes men, I was learning, did not spend themselves that way. But the silence that followed was not the same silence that had been in the barn.

—

Toward dawn the storm tired itself.

Gideon woke properly just as the windows went from black to a bruised gray. He found my hand on his wrist, counting, and frowned as if the arithmetic of his own pulse offended him.

“The fence.”

“Held enough,” Wyatt said from the chair. He had not slept. “We lost a few. Not the herd.”

Gideon’s eyes traveled the room: sons in various attitudes of exhaustion, Levi asleep against my hip, the splint, the stained cloth, the stranger still in his house.

“Your face,” he said to me.

“Your son has a sharp elbow. Your other son has a sharp temper. Both are alive. Be satisfied.”

A breath that might have been a laugh hurt him and died.

“You should have let Wyatt run it.”

“Wyatt ran the cattle. This room needed someone who would not apologize for giving an order.” I withdrew my hand because it had been there too long to be only medical. “You hired a wife, Gideon. Last night the storm collected on the debt.”

He looked at Levi, at the lavender blanket, at the six boys who had eaten at one table and then spent the night keeping their father on the near side of the dark.

“They called you—”

“They called me nothing I will claim yet,” I said. “Do not rush them. Do not rush me. Your leg will keep you in that bed long enough for all of us to learn whether this house can bear another woman in it.”

Wyatt, from the chair, muttered, “She pulled Caleb off Elias like he was a calf.”

Caleb flushed.

Elias almost smiled, then stopped, as if smiling still cost extra.

Gideon’s gaze came back to me, tired and unsettled, the station-platform surprise passing through him again, slower this time.

“Beatrice.”

“Yes.”

“The letters were not enough.”

“No,” I said. “They never are.”

Outside, a cow bawled from the south corral. The windmill shrieked, then found a rhythm. Someone would have to cook breakfast from the ruins of supper. Someone would have to set a watch for fever. Someone would have to walk the north fence in daylight and count what the river had kept.

I pushed myself to my feet. My corset was a misery. My jaw was a drum. My dress would never be the same.

Levi woke and looked up at me with Abigail’s house still in his eyes.

“Are you staying?”

The room heard him.

Wyatt’s mouth tightened. Caleb stared at the floor. Gideon waited, a man who had bought a solution and been given a person instead.

I thought of the whisper on the platform. Of the word *barn*. Of six boys who had looked at me as if their father had dragged a monster through the door.

Then I thought of a hymn with missing words, and a pie gone cold, and a door that had exploded inward and found me still standing.

“Until the fence is mended,” I said, “and the bone is set in its mind, and you have taught me how she made the biscuits without leaving anything out—yes. I am staying.”

Levi nodded, satisfied in the fierce way of children who have asked the only question that matters.

Gideon closed his eyes.

Not in dismissal.

In the first sleep he had taken that was not a faint.

And I went to the stove, because the house was still cold, and because wanting a place and making one are different labors, and only the second would keep us alive until spring.