And when she was done, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, "Thank you." He said, "You are welcome." She said, "The others will be all right. Edmund is strong, and Ada can cook, and Joseph does not need much, and Pearl can charm anybody. Thomas is the one I worry about."
Caleb looked at her. She was 5 years old and she was sitting at his table talking about the children she had left behind like a woman running through a list of concerns before she can allow herself to rest. He said, "Did you take care of them at the home?" She said, "Somebody had to." He said, "And Bess."
Lucille said, "Bess is mine." She said it the way Caleb's mother used to say, "This is my land." Not as a claim of ownership, but as a statement of responsibility. And Caleb Dunn sat across from a 5-year-old girl in a cold kitchen on a failing wheat claim in western Kansas, and understood for the first time why he had chosen the two children no practical man would have chosen. He said, "Go to bed, Lucille."
She said, "Good night, Mr. Dunn." He said, "Caleb." She said, "Good night, Caleb." And she went into the back room and climbed into the bed next to Bess and pulled the quilt up to her chin. And the house was quiet.
Caleb sat by the stove and did not sleep. He did the math again. $10 after the placement fees and the debts. Spring planting would cost seed he did not have money for. The girls would need shoes before summer and coats before winter and food every day between now and then.
He had taken two children he could not afford because something in the way Lucille had held Bess's hand on that platform had broken through every practical calculation he had made on the ride into town. And now the calculation was broken, and there was nothing to do but plant the wheat and work the cattle and figure it out. Three days passed. Lucille learned the kitchen. She could not cook, but she could carry water from the well, and she could stir what was in the pot, and she could set two places at the table for herself and Bess and one for Caleb without being told.
She learned where the flower was and where the lard was, and where the matches sat on the shelf above the stove. Bess followed her everywhere and said nothing. On the fourth day, Caleb came in from the field at noon and found Lucille standing on a stool at the counter with a bowl in her hands and flour on her face and on the floor and on the window and on the cat that had come in through the open door. She was trying to make biscuits. The dough looked like wet plaster.