Nobody Hired the Plus-Size Widow—Until a Rancher Tasted Her Food at the Church Fair

PART 2:

 She stood near enough to be heard saying that certain entries had been sampled at home so thoroughly there was hardly any left. Two women covered their mouths. The premium committee worked down the table with knives and small white plates. They tasted, they conferred, they wrote. Susanna stood at the back fence where she could see and not be seen.

 Both hands nodded in her apron. He came for salt and he stayed for the plates. He was no judge and had no business at that table and he ate the sample off number 41 anyway. Then he stopped moving. He cut a second slice with his own knife. He chewed it slowly the way a man reads a letter twice.

 The committee waited to be angry with him and somehow could not manage it. He asked whose number 41 was. the secretary told him. The sound that went around those tables was not a gasp. It was a hush, which is worse. Somebody said the word poison, not loudly. Somebody else said that two men from the grading camp had gone into the ground behind that woman’s barrels.

 The minister looked at his shoes. Owen Hail cut a third slice and ate it while they watched him do it. He said it was the finest thing he had put in his mouth in 9 years and that if it was poison he meant to die standing up with his mouth full. He found her at the back fence. Up close he was enormous and quiet and his eyes went over her the way a man looks at good country, taking its measure without insult in it anywhere.

He asked if she had cured that ham herself from the salt up. She said she had. He said that nobody in that town had hired her and that he was hiring her now out here in the open so the whole county could hear it done. He wanted his winter provisions put up at Cedar  40 men at fall Roundup, a smokehouse he did not know how to use, a seller full of things going soft.

 He offered shares instead of wages, a third of all she made, hers to sell under her own name. She heard herself ask him why. He said a town had called his mother things once, and that he had learned young to eat first and listen afterward. Virgil Chadwick stood at the edge of the crowd in a tan linen duster.

 He said pleasantly that Hail ought to think hard about what he hauled up into his own valley. He said it in the tone of a man giving sound advice about the weather. She set her terms before she said yes. Every barrel and every jar she filled would carry her own stamp with her own name cut into it. If her name was poison, let it stand on the goods where any man could read it.

 Owen Hail said that was the first sensible thing anybody had said to him all day. They went up the next morning in a spring wagon loaded with salt and sugar and one crate of empty jars. 18 miles of sage and red clay, with the wind coming steady off the west the whole way. She was miserable and would not say so. Her hip achd and her dress stuck to her and she braced all morning for the look she always got in the end.

 The flicker of disgust a man cannot quite keep off his face. It never came. At the halfway creek he watered the team and handed her the dipper first. He carried her crate of jars up the bank without one word about the weight of it or the weight of her. Cedar Culie lay in a fold of the hills with cottonwoods along the water, a log house, a pole corral, a hay shed, and a stone smokehouse with a slate roof that stopped her where she stood.

 Behind it sat a cellar mound with slanted plank doors. She had expected a hvel. The house was swept, the beds made, the tin scoured, and a shelf of books ran the whole length of the north wall, with the spines worn soft from handling. The provisions were another matter. He showed her a barrel he had bought that spring from the county storehouse, and she pried up the head and put her face over it, and went very still.

 What came up out of that barrel was wrong. The top was clean, bright pork in good white brine, but under it the smell carried a sweetness that belongs nowhere near salt. She set the head back down and said she would look at that one again. He gave her the smokehouse, the cellar, and the bunk room off the kitchen with a bolt on the inside of the door.

 He put that bolt on himself the first evening while she stood in the yard and watched him do it. The agreement got written out on a page torn from a tally book. Thirds, tools found, her stamp on her goods. They both signed it, and he slid it behind the clock on the mantle, and that clock became the place where their paper lived.

She started at 4:00 in the morning because she could not sleep anyway. By the end of the first week, she had scalded every croc on the place, rebuilt the smokehouse fire pit, and hung the first 11 hams. She made herself small inside the house. She took her plate out to the step. She spoke when spoken to, and she waited for the thing that always came. It did not come.

 He was gone at first light and back at dark, and what he said was mostly weather and water, and a bull that would not stay in the north pasture. He never once looked at her plate. The crew was another matter. Two riders came in from the summer camp in July, and one of them looked at the supper table and said he had heard about her.

 Owen Hail paid that man off in the yard before the coffee was poured. He did it quietly, without heat, the way you cull an animal. The other rider ate two helpings and said nothing at all. In town, it got worse instead of better. The freighter would not haul her barrels. The storekeeper was out of salt whenever she came in and had it again by afternoon for anybody else.

 Then a stone came through the smokehouse window at night and broke nine jars. She swept the glass up alone before daylight so he would not see it. He saw it anyway and said nothing until supper. He said it plain across the table. The only roof in that county nobody could take off her was a roof with his name on the deed.

 And he was asking her to marry him for that reason. And for no other reason he was willing to speak aloud. She said one year. One year written down. And on that day, either of them could walk out of it, and neither would be permitted to call the other a failure. He got the pen without arguing. That paper went behind the clock beside the first one.

 The justice married them in the front room with two riders standing witness. Nobody kissed anybody. She wore the brown calico because it was the best thing she owned, and she caught him looking at her hands. Elma Krenshaw drove out to Cedar Culie in August. Her husband was one of the two men in the Methodist ground, and she had washed sheets at the county poor farm ever since.

 She wanted to know why the county fed its poppers out of barrels the graders refused. She brought one of them on the wagon bed, drawn that week, from the storehouse. Susanna set it on her kitchen floor, and did not open the head and taste the top. She turned the whole barrel over and emptied it onto a sheet all the way to the bottom.

 The top third was sound pork in clean brine. The bottom two/3s was another animal entirely, dark and slack, packed in coarse gray rock salt, with the grain of it big as gravel. No inspector alive ever empties a barrel. They taste the top and they pass it. She knew that salt. She had never bought coarse rock for meat in her life, and neither had Thomas.

 Whoever repacked those barrels had bought the cheapest salt on the river, and laid the good layer over it like frosting on a bad cake. The head had been planned. Under the lamp she found the ghost of her husband’s stamp shaved down, and a fresh inspection date burned over the top of it. She sat on her own kitchen floor and understood what had been done with,00 barrels.

Simon Pratt wrote out on Alma Crenshaw’s word. The county physician had never signed those death certificates and had said so at the time to a room that did not care to hear it. Those graders had not died of camp fever, and he had been kept from the bodies. Elma Krenshaw had one thing more copied out in her own hand from the clerk’s book.

 Virgil Chadwick had filed a claim against the estate of Thomas Grady for $4,000 in damages from spoiled provisions. He had filed it 11 days before the first man got sick. 11 days before. He had written the ruin down ahead of the deaths, the way a man writes a receipt for something already bought and paid for. She had been the answer to a question nobody had asked yet.

 Owen Hail found her on the floor with barrel staves scattered around her. He took the shares agreement from behind the clock and burned it in the stove. She was no hired woman here. He said she was his wife. And Chadwick would learn what that cost. Something in the house changed after that stove door shut. She quit taking her plate to the step.

 He began coming in at noon, which no rancher does in August, and inventing reasons for it. He taught her the rifle on the seller mound with a row of bottles. She was a poor shot for two weeks, and a fair one after that. He never laughed once, and he never touched her arm to correct her without asking first. He watched her lift a full croc of lard onto the high shelf one morning and said it out loud.

Half the men he had ever hired could not do that. Whatever the town believed her body was for, it was plainly built to last. She said nobody had ever put it to her that way. He said the country kills the thin ones first. That substance survives and then he went out to the corral before she could see his face.

 By the middle of August, there were 90 hams hanging, 400 lb of sausage, 12 crocs of lard, and the cellar shelved to the roof beams. The riders started calling it the store instead of the seller. He came to the smokehouse door one evening at dusk with the fire banked and the smoke low and blue. He took her hand and held it and did not do the other thing.

 And she stood there and watched him decide against it. He said he would not, not while the year on that paper was still running, because he would not have her lying awake, wondering whether a kiss was part of the arrangement. Then he went and slept in the hayshed for no reason he would explain. A week later, he tried to be noble at her.

 He began saying that the year could be ended early, that the place could be signed over, that she would be better off free of a man the whole county was about to come after. She stopped the sentence with her mouth. She got a hand in his collar and kissed him in the middle of the word better. And he stood like a man hit with a plank and then put both arms around her.

 He called her plentiful. and then a great many other things in a voice she had never heard him use. She had spent 26 years being told her body was a debt somebody owed. He talked about it the way men talk about weather over good country. They came up the  on the last Thursday in August. Virgil Chadwick in a buggy with the top down.

 Hoit Draper riding alongside with a rifle across the bow of his saddle. and two more men behind them. Chadwick got down and admired the place. He said it was a pity to see a good outfit put at risk over a woman, and he looked her up and down and said the county had never yet lost a contract to an appetite. Draper laughed the way a paid man laughs.

 He said something about a smokehouse having to work overtime with her on the place. Owen Hail did not move and did not answer, and the yard went quiet. Chadwick made his offer. $2,000 for the three barrels she kept in the cellar and her signature on a paper saying she had been mistaken about the salt. She asked him what the two dead graders had cost him.

 He answered her, and that was his mistake, because he answered her the way a man answers furniture. A barrel with a pasted inspection stamp burned in the head, he said, is worth 11 times whatever is inside it. He had bought a condemned consignment off a wrecked packing house at 11 cents on the dollar and,00 stamped barrels off a dead Cooper’s widow for 90.

 340 of them had gone to the county and to the railroad camps. The poor farm ate them. The jail ate them. The graders ate them. Two of them died. And the coroner wrote camp fever because the coroner is a man who enjoys being paid. He said all of it standing in her own yard in the sunlight. He said it because he held a contract, a bond, a deputy, and 40 years of being believed, and because he had decided long ago exactly what she was.

Then he told her what would happen if one barrel got opened in public. He would swear the repacking had been done at the Grady Cooper Bridge before her husband died, and the county would put her and not him on trial for those two men. That was the true shape of the thing. He had not merely used her husband’s barrels.

 He had built the whole fraud so that when it finally came apart, it would come apart on top of her. They rode out. Owen Hail stood in the yard a long while afterward and then went and oiled the rifle he never carried. She did not run. She wrote three letters that night and Elma Krenshaw carried them to the county seat in the morning.

 One to the district attorney, one to the territorial auditor, and one to the three men whose names sat on Chadwick’s $20,000 bond. Simon Pratt agreed to say in public what he had said in private. Elma Krenshaw filed her copy of the claim with the clerk and made him initial the date in front of two witnesses. The county board sat the second Tuesday in September.

 Susanna asked for exactly one thing on the agenda. That the storehouse barrels be emptied to the bottom in the open air. All of them. in front of anybody who cared to stand and watch. That gave Virgil Chadwick 11 days. She kept three barrels in her cellar and slept badly and knew the way you know weather that he was not going to wait 11 days.

The wind came up out of the southwest at dark on the last night of August. It came the way it does on that country twice a year, steady and enormous, bending the cottonwoods flat and taking the hay shed door off its hook. It covered everything. It covered hoof beatats, and it covered the sound of breaking glass, and when she blew the lamp out to see better, the dark outside the window was full of moving men.

Owen Hail went to the corral to cut the horses loose so they could not be run off. Somebody shot him out of the dark at 30 yards. She heard the shot and never heard him fall because of the wind. She found him against the corral post with his hand pressed low on his left side and his blood gone black in the starlight.

 There were four of them and they had coal oil. She could smell it coming across the yard and she understood they had come for the three barrels and for the woman who could read them. He told her to get in the house. She did not get in the house. She got both arms under him, stood up with 250 lb of husband against her chest and carried him 60 yards to the stone smokehouse.

She laid him on the brick floor between the salt boxes and dropped the bar across the door. Then she opened the fire pit and did the one thing on that place nobody would expect a woman to do in a wind. She threw on green hickory and two handfuls of dried red pepper and pulled the smoke vent wide open. The wind took that smoke and laid it flat along the ground across the whole yard, thick and white and murder to breathe.

 Men she could not see began to cough. Above her hung the gaml pole, 12 ft of ironwood with 20 hams on it, 400 lb of cured meat swinging on the hooks. Two of them came at the door together. She lifted the bar, swung that loaded pole out through the doorway at the height of a man’s chest, and swept both of them off the step into the dirt.

 Two more got to the cellar mound with the coal oil. She let them go down the steps. Then she dropped the slanted plank doors on them, walked a 340B salt barrel over on its chime, and set it down square on the doors. Hoit Draper came around the corner of the smokehouse with his rifle up and his eyes streaming from the smoke.

 She took the barrel of it in her left hand and turned it away and took a 30 lb smoked ham off its cord with her right. She broke the rifle with it. She broke his forearm with the second swing, and he sat down in the smoke and did not get up. And she left him sitting there. The hay shed went up and the wind tried to hand that fire to the house.

 She threw a log chain over the burning corner post, laid the chain across her shoulder, and pulled the whole shed down into itself and away, and the fire had nowhere left to walk. Virgil Chadwick came to the smokehouse door at last because he believed it was over. He came the way a man comes to collect a debt with a handkerchief held over his mouth.

She opened the door and took him by the front of his coat with one hand and pulled him inside off his feet. She set him down on the brick floor beside her husband and put the bar back across the door. She had not once stepped out into the open. Every man in that yard had come to her instead, and every one of them had been taken at that doorway, and the smoke had done the rest of the work.

Then she went out and got the two men off the cellar. She rolled the barrel back, hauled the doors up, and dragged them out by their collars so they would not smother inside her own root cellar. She roped all four to the gaml pole, and went back to her husband. She cut his shirt away, packed the wound with clean salt cloth, and held the bleeding shut with her hands and her whole weight for as long as it took.

He came around at dawn when the wind died. He looked at the ruined yard, at four men tied to his hamph pole, at the smoke still standing in the cottonwoods. Then he looked at her. He said she was not a wife. She was a standing army. He said it with tears running into his beard.

 And he told her he had married a queen and had been too polite to mention it until somebody shot him. The board sat on the second Tuesday of September and did not adjourn for two days. They emptied 340 barrels in the open air in the courthouse lot to the bottom, every single one of them. The men who did the emptying were graders and poor farm inmates, which was the part Virgil Chadwick had never planned for.

The smell reached Front Street inside two hours, and after that, nobody in Roundstone required a chemist. Every barrel came out the same. A clean layer on the top, a condemned lot beneath it, coarse gray rock salt all through the bottom, and a plained head with a shaved stamp hiding under the burn. Simon Pratt testified about the two graders.

 Alma Krenshaw laid the claim in front of the board and let them do the arithmetic on those 11 days. Susanna Hail did nothing but empty barrels and answer questions about salt. The contract was declared forfeit that afternoon. The three men who had signed Chadwick’s $20,000 bond were called on inside the week and they paid. And then they came for him and took the store, the freight outfit, the house, and the buggy.

 The criminal case ran on into the spring. Manslaughter for the two graders and 11 counts of obtaining public money by false pretenses. He got seven years at the territorial prison and Hoit Draper got three. Mini Lumis lost the eating house contract in that same session and moved to Rollins. The county wrote a standing order that no barrel would be received and no voucher paid until that barrel had been emptied to the bottom in the open air.

Every barrel still carrying the Grady stamp was burned in the courthouse lot except one. That one stands in the county storehouse yet head off so that each new commissary clerk can be walked over and shown what the bottom of a barrel is for. The year on the paper behind the clock ran out on a Saturday in June.

 He took her to the church fair. He walked her to the same plank table under the same cottonwoods where she had once stood at the back fence with her hands nodded in her apron. And in front of the whole county he kissed her. Then he took the paper out of his coat and handed it to her and told her to do whatever she liked with it.

 She put it back behind the clock where it is still, because some things are worth keeping past the date written on them. The packing house at Cedar Culie began with 11 hams and a stone building. Inside four years, it was shipping into three territories, and her stamp burned in a barrel head was worth more to a buyer than any inspector’s mark in the West.

 They got rich, which neither of them had planned on, out of beef and salt, and the plain fact that people will pay for goods that are the same all the way down. They stayed in the log house. They added two rooms and a great many books. She became the woman men sent for. When a camp went sick, anywhere between the Sweetwater and the Big Horn, somebody hitched a team and drove for Susanna Hail, and she came and she emptied their barrels for them.

Virgil Chadwick came out at 58 with nothing and no county that would have him. The board sent him to the poor farm outside Roundstone, where he was fed three times a day out of barrels emptied to the bottom first under the rule her testimony had written. They sit on the porch at Cedar when the wind comes up the valley, and he still says it was the ham that decided him.

 She lets him say it. Then she takes his hand and they watch the smoke stand straight out of her smokehouse until