“They Said No Man Would Take a Woman With Two Children,” She Said… The Rancher Replied, “I Will”

PART 2:

 Alderman in Laramie. Ellaner Alderman. Yes. He looked at the  children again, at Sam’s suspicion, at Bee’s wondering, at Clara, who  was holding herself with the posture of someone who had been refused 11 times and was not going to show that it had cost her anything, even though it had cost her considerably.

Come in, I’ll make coffee. He turned and went inside, which meant they were supposed to follow, which they did. Clara first, Sam  close beside her. be holding the back of Clara’s skirt with both hands in the way she had been holding things since her father died. As though letting go was a risk she was not currently prepared to take.

Here at Heaven Beyond the Dust, our stories don’t just entertain,  they teach. Every episode, we bring you something real from the era we’re living in together. Today, widows and work in the American West,  1880s. In 1885, a widow with children could occupy one of the most economically precarious positions in American society.

 The loss of a husband’s income could leave a family without ready money,  while inheritance depended on local law, the title to the property, and whether a valid will existed. But Wyoming was unusual. Women in the territory had held the vote since 1869. And under the Federal Homestead Act, single,  widowed, divorced, or deserted, women could claim land in their own names.

Legal eligibility, however, did not provide the money, labor,  transportation, or child care needed to survive. The frontier could make her position worse and  better at the same time. Distances were vast, winters were severe, and maintaining a household while earning  a living was especially difficult with children.

 Yet growing settlements also needed teachers,  seamstresses, cooks, laresses, boarding housekeepers, and skilled domestic workers.  A woman who could cook, keep accounts, manage a household, and learn what she did not know, offered abilities that were genuinely valuable, where dependable labor was scarce.

 What Clara Ren was proposing,  arriving at a rancher’s door with her children, her references, and her willingness to work, was entirely plausible in 1885.  But employers who had room for one worker did not always have room, food, or patience  for a family of three. Her children made every negotiation harder.

 And they were the one part of her life she  was not willing to negotiate. That is this story. If this story is already reaching you tonight, this is  the moment to subscribe to heaven beyond the dust. We’re building this channel one story  at a time, and every subscriber matters. Leave us a comment telling us where in the world you’re watching from.

 We read every  single one. Now, back to Clear Water Ridge and a kitchen and a cup of coffee. That is  the beginning of something neither of them has planned. The kitchen was functional and clean and had the organization of a man who had been managing it alone long enough to develop systems that worked and didn’t need to be beautiful.

  Clara noted this in the way she noted most things accurately without judgment, filing it as information rather than criticism. He made coffee competently.  He set three cups on the table, which he noticed because not everyone said cups for the children without being asked. Sam sat at the table with his arms folded in the way he sat at most tables lately,  which was the posture of a child preparing to be disappointed.

Bee sat beside Clara and looked at the kitchen with the absorptive attention she brought to new places, cataloging everything she found interesting, which was most things. Tell me about the operation. Gabe looked at her across the table. 400 acres,  cattle primarily. I have one hand, Roy, who manages the south pasture.

 I manage the north in the house. He  paused. I’ve been managing the house badly. How badly? The garden died in June. The accounts are 6 weeks behind. I had biscuits for supper four nights this week. That’s quite badly. Yes. Sam, who had been maintaining his posture  of skeptical self-sufficiency, leaned forward.

 Can you fix a fence? Gabe looked at him. I can fix most  fences. Our fence in Laram kept coming loose on the east side. Papa couldn’t fix it either. What kind of post?  Sam blinked. What? What kind of post was it? Cedar, pine, or locust?  Sam looked uncertain. I don’t know. That’s why it kept coming loose. Pine rods fast in wet  ground.

You need locust on the east side if the drainage is bad. Gabe offered the information without condescension, simply answering someone who had asked. I’ll show you if you want. Sam looked  at him. The suspicion was still there, but it had acquired a small addition, a tentative interest, the beginning of a recalibration.

Maybe. Be pointed toward  the window. There’s a horse in the corral. There are two. The bay and a ran that’s still  deciding what it thinks of people. I like the bay. His name is Fletcher. He likes people who like him. I like him. Be spoke  with the complete simplicity of a 5-year-old stating a fact. Then you’ll get along.

Clara was watching all of this.  She had learned in the four months since her husband died to watch the way people spoke to her children before she trusted the  way they spoke to her. It was a better indicator. Adults could perform courtesy for other adults. Children were harder to perform for  and the performance showed.

 Gabe Mercer was not performing. What are your terms?  He looked at her. Room and board for you and the children. Wages  not much but fair. You keep the house, the garden, the accounts. Sundays are yours. He paused. The children are not hired. They’re here because you’re here. If they want to work, they can.

 If they  want to leave me alone, they can do that, too. What about Clara? Stopped.  Started again. People will talk. A widow at a rancher’s house. People talk regardless.  I found it waste considerable energy trying to prevent it. She looked at him. That’s easy to say when you’re not the subject  of it. That’s fair.

 What I mean is that I don’t intend for  the situation to be what people would make it. You’d have your room. The children would have theirs.  The arrangement is what it is, household management. And I’ll make that clear to anyone who suggests otherwise. And if they don’t accept that, then they’re  wrong, and I’ll tell them so.

She looked at him for a long moment.  He held her gaze with the steady directness of a man who said what he meant and had nothing to add to it. All right, I’ll need to see the accounts. They’re in the study. They’re not pretty. 6 weeks behind. Never is. He almost smiled.  It was the closest thing to a smile she’d seen on his face, and it changed it considerably.

  Not from serious to unserious, but from serious to something warmer, a face that had humor in it somewhere that it kept for the right moments. No,  it isn’t. She stayed. The first week was the hardest,  which was true of most first weeks in most new situations and was especially true of this one because the hardest things were the smallest ones.

 Learning the way the kitchen stored things,  how Roy took his coffee, the way Gabe indicated something needed doing without saying it directly,  which was by looking at it once and then away, which he decoded on the third day and found both useful and mildly amusing.  She did not mention that she had decoded it.

 She simply addressed the things he looked at. On the fifth day, she found the account ledger in the study and spent an evening with it. It was not as bad as he’d suggested. Gabe Mercer was not a man who let important things go  entirely, just a man who had let them go further than he liked, which was a different  problem and a more solvable one.

 She had the current accounts organized by the end of the week and left the ledger on his desk with a note that read, “6 weeks behind is now current. The feed supplier  is overcharging you for oats. I can write them if you want. In the morning, the note had a single line added beneath hers in his handwriting.  Write them, she wrote them.

 They adjusted the price. Roy found  out about this 2 days later and told her it was the best thing that had happened to the operations accounts in 3 years, which he gathered was a significant statement from Roy  and received accordingly. The garden was not dead. It was badly neglected,  which was different.

 And she told Gabe so on the fourth morning, “The tomatoes are salvageable. The beans are gone.  The squash is actually fine. Squash is hard to kill. If I spend  the next 2 weeks on it, we’ll have something by September.” “I thought it was dead. It’s not dead. It’s just been ignored.” He looked  at the garden at the overgrown beds and the drooping tomato plants and the remarkably healthy squash spreading across its  corner as though entirely unconcerned with the state of everything around it.

 I’ll defer to your assessment. You should. I’ve killed exactly one garden in my life and I’ve learned from it. What killed it? Overwatering. I was 22 and enthusiastic. He looked at her,  the almost smile again. She was beginning to understand that this was the fullest version of the smile she was likely to see in daylight and that it meant  considerably more than a broader smile would have on a different face.

What cured the enthusiasm? 23. This time he actually smiled. It lasted  about 3 seconds and then the seriousness came back, but the 3 seconds were  enough to establish something. that the humor was there, that it could be reached, that reaching it was possible, and that both of them knew it.

 Now, Sam came around the corner of the house at that moment, which  was convenient because it ended the exchange before either of them had to decide what to do with it. Roy says the north fence needs six  new posts. He says he told you two weeks ago. Gabe looked at Sam. He did. I haven’t gotten to it. I could help. It came out as though he hadn’t entirely planned to say it.

 Gabe looked at  him carefully, not in the way of someone deciding whether to take a child seriously, but in the way of someone taking stock of a situation before committing to it. There was a difference, and Sam  felt it. And some of the suspicion that had been his constant posture in new situations shifted slightly.

 Can you drive a post? No, but you said you’d show me. I said  maybe. You said maybe. Sam agreed. Is today a maybe day? Gabe looked at Clara. Clara looked at the garden she needed to attend to. Today is a maybe day. Get your hat. Sam got his hat and went with Gabe to the north fence, and Clara worked the garden, and Bee sat on the porch with Fletcher visible in the corral and informed the horse of her opinion of him at length, which Fletcher received with the patient attention of an animal that had learned that listening was less work than the

alternative.  Roy walked past at one point, heard Bee’s ongoing monologue, and told Clara later that it was the most the horse had been talked  to since the previous owner. Clara found this more comforting than she expected,  an animal that listened, a man who asked what kind of post, a house that was beginning in the small ways that houses began things, to feel like somewhere rather than somewhere else.

 Roy,  Gab’s ranch hand, was 48 and had been with the operation since before Gab’s wife died  and had opinions about most things that he kept largely to himself, which was a quality Clara came to appreciate deeply over the following weeks. He said good morning every morning and thank you at every meal, and that the biscuits were better than what they’d been having, which he understood was a significant  statement and received accordingly.

 The accounts took 2 weeks to sort.    They were not as bad as Gabe had suggested he had been keeping them, just not keeping them current. And once she had the system established,  they took her perhaps 4 hours a week, which left the rest of her time for the household in the garden and the children and the small accumulation of daily work that a 400 acre operation generated.

 She found in the fourth week that she was not performing the work. She was doing it. The distinction mattered. In every position she’d held in the four months since her husband died, she had been performing, demonstrating  competence, proving her value, showing that the children were not the liability  everyone feared.

 At Clearwater Ridge, she was simply working because the work needed doing  and she was the one doing it. And no one was watching to evaluate whether she was worth keeping. She was  worth keeping. She knew this. It was a different feeling from being told. The moment that  changed things happened on a Thursday evening in the sixth week, which was not a dramatic moment and was not intended to be one.

 Clara had been in the study working on the accounts when she heard something from the front room.  Not a loud sound, not an alarming one, just a sound that was wrong in the way that sounds in a house with children were sometimes wrong. The frequency of a child crying in the way children cried when they were trying not to.

 She found Bee in the corner of the front room with her knees  pulled up, crying in the small, swallowed way she’d been crying since her father died as though she’d learned that  big grief needed to be made small or it would take up too much space. Clara sat down beside her on the floor.

 She didn’t ask what was wrong because she knew  what was wrong and asking would have required be to name it, and naming it would have made it larger. She just  sat. After a while, Bee whispered, “I miss Papa.” “I know. Does Mr. Mercer have a papa? He had one. He’s gone now, too. Did he miss him? I think he does.

” Be was quiet for a moment. Then, does missing get smaller? Clara put her arm around her daughter. It gets different.  It doesn’t get smaller, but it gets different, and different is easier to carry. She didn’t know Gabe was there until she heard him in the doorway.    She looked up.

 He was standing at the edge of the room with the expression of a man who had not meant to witness something and was not sure whether to stay or go and had stayed because going seemed worse. She looked at him. He looked at her. B  still tucked against Clara’s side looked up at him. Mr. Mercer, does missing get smaller? Gabe came into the room and sat down on the floor across from them, which was not what Clara had expected him to do.

 He sat with his back against the settle and his long legs stretched out and looked at Be with the same directness he brought to everything. No, but you get stronger, so it weighs less. Be considered this. That’s different from what Mama said. We’re probably both right.

 Most things can be true at the same time. Be thought  about this. My papa was funny. He made funny voices for the animals. What voice did he do for the horses? be demonstrated. It was a very deep voice that was not particularly horselike, but was clearly the product of someone who had loved making a  small girl laugh. Gabe kept a perfectly straight face.

 “That’s a good horse,”  Bee giggled. It was the first time Clara had heard her giggle in 6 weeks. She looked at Gabe. He looked at her.  Something passed between them that was not a conversation and did not need to be. The acknowledgement of  two people who had just shared something that mattered.

 He got up, wished Bee good night, and went back to whatever he’d been doing. Clara sat with Bee  until she fell asleep. And then she sat there a little longer because the room was quiet, and the night was coming down over the mountains, and she had the feeling, unfamiliar, slightly alarming, welcome, of being somewhere that was holding her rather than tolerating her.

 She told him  3 weeks later they were on the porch after supper which had become a habit over the weeks. The evening air in the mountains and the quality of conversation that  happened when two people had spent the day working alongside each other and had earned the right to be quiet or not quiet as it  suited them.

 Sam was inside doing his arithmetic. Bee was asleep. Roy had gone to his cabin at the south end of the property. The ranch was quiet in  the way it went, quiet when the work was done, and there was nothing left to do but be in a place. Clara kept her eyes on the mountains where the last of the summer light was turning  the peaks gold before the dark.

 They said, “No man would take a woman with two  children 11 times in 4 months. Different ways of saying it, but the same answer.” Gabe turned  toward her. I will. Clara finally looked at him. His voice remained steady. Who told you that? Everyone in different ways. The man in Laramie who needed a housekeeper.

 He saw Sam and Bee and said the position was already filled,  which it wasn’t. The woman in Cheyenne who needed cooking help. She said she couldn’t accommodate children on the property, which  might have been true, but was said in a way that made it clear it wasn’t the real reason. The ranch south of here that sent a letter 3 weeks after I applied saying the  position had gone to someone else.

 She paused. 11 times. 11 ways of saying the  children were the problem. They’re not the problem. They were to 11 people. They were wrong. His answer carried no heat.  It had the plain certainty he gave to facts. Sam fixed the east section of the north fence last week better than Roy would have, and  Royy’s been fixing fences for 20 years.

 Be has been teaching Fletcher to take apple slices from her hand. Fletcher didn’t trust anyone that small 6 weeks ago, and now he watches for her in the morning.  They’re not a problem. They’re people who do things. He paused. Good things. Clara looked at him. That’s a generous way to see it. It’s an accurate way to see it. I don’t do generous.

 I do accurate. She looked at the mountains at the last gold going off the peaks, the sky shifting from blue to the deep rose of a Wyoming September evening. the first stars beginning at the zenith  where the sky was darkest. I need to ask you something and I need you to answer me honestly which I think you will because I don’t think you know how to do otherwise.

All right. Is this She stopped. Is what you said to me that first day about the arrangement about what it is. Is that still what it is? because if it is, I need to know that and I can live with it and I will keep doing what I’m doing and be grateful for it.” She paused. But if it isn’t, if it’s become something else, I need to know that, too, because I have  children.

 And I don’t have the luxury of not knowing what I’m standing on. Gabe was  quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that was not evasion, but thought. A man who did not say things until he knew what he meant,  which she had learned to distinguish from a man who didn’t say things because he didn’t know what he meant.

 The distinction  was everything. It’s become something else. Clara looked at her hands. For me,  too. I know. I wasn’t certain you’d say it. I wasn’t certain I would either. I’ve been careful about it. The children. She stopped. They’ve lost enough. I don’t let them attach to things that might not stay. I’ll stay. Not as a speech, as a fact.

 She looked at him.  You sound very certain. I am certain. I don’t say things I’m not certain of. She knew this.  8 weeks of working alongside him had established it beyond question. Gabe Mercer meant every word he spoke, and his words and intentions were  always the same, which was rarer than it had any right to be.

 The children Sam is he’s been the man of the family for 6 months. He takes that seriously. He should. He’s done it well. He’s nine. He’s nine and  he’s done it well. Those aren’t contradictions. He paused. I’m not trying to replace what they had.  I’m not capable of it and I wouldn’t try. What I’m capable of is being here consistently  and completely. That’s what I can offer.

Clara looked at him. That’s what they need. That’s what I need. Then we agree. We agree. Sam from inside the house called out, “Mama, I can’t do the last problem.” Clara looked at Gabe. Gabe looked at Clara. Something in his expression did what it did, the warmth arriving  before the smile. I’m decent at arithmetic. Go.

 He went inside. She heard him sit down with Sam,  heard Sam’s skeptical explanation of the problem, heard Gab’s response, not giving the answer, asking  Sam questions until Sam found it himself, which took about 4 minutes and produced in Sam a sound that was unmistakably  satisfaction. She sat on the porch with the mountains and the stars, and the feeling of a woman who had knocked on 12 doors and been told  11 times no, and had found on the 12th that the answer was different. They were married the

following spring when the Wyoming mountains were coming out of winter and the valley was the pale green of new grass  and the meadowarks had come back to the fence lines and everything that had been dormant was deciding to be alive again. The world had a quality and early Wyoming spring of newness that was not optimism exactly but was the direct  physical evidence of things resuming.

 The creek running fast and cold from the snowmelt. The first wild flowers on the southacing slopes,  the cattle moving into the lower pasture with the ease of animals returning to something familiar. Sam stood beside Gabe during the ceremony he had asked to,  which Gabe had received with the directness he received most things.

 As a decision that deserved respect, as something that did not require elaboration, Bess stood beside Clara with wild flowers. She had picked herself from the meadow south of the house, holding  them with the focused seriousness of a six-year-old who understood this was important  and intended to perform her role correctly.

 Roy stood as witness and cried, which surprised everyone, including Roy, who had not anticipated this  and addressed it by blowing his nose with decisive efficiency and returning to his posture of general competence. Neither he nor Clara mentioned it afterward. It was the kind of moment that was better understood than discussed  after the ceremony when the minister had gone and the small supper had been eaten  and be had fallen asleep in the front room and Sam was sitting on the porch steps with the dog that had

arrived in March from somewhere  and had declined to leave. Gabe found Clara at the kitchen window looking at the mountains in the evening light. 11 times. She looked at him. 11 times and then once. Once was enough. Yes, it was. The mountains  held their evening light for another 20 minutes.

 Clearwater Ridge did what Clearwater Ridge did at  that hour. Settled into itself. The cattle in the pasture, the horses in the corral, the kitchen warm, and the lamp  lit, and the children nearby, and the valley enormous and quiet around the house. that was now and  without qualification theirs.

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