Ruth Ames said, "I am telling you this because Lucille asked me and I told her I would find out and come back with the answer and I keep my word to children." She left. Caleb stood in the doorway and watched her walk to the hired buggy tied at the fence and the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through the clouds in the west and the light caught the side of her face as she climbed up to the seat. And he noticed that she was not just young and efficient. She was beautiful in the way that a person who carries a hard job without bending under it is beautiful.
And he stood there thinking that for about 4 seconds before Lucille said, "She is nice." And he turned away from the door and went to change out of his muddy clothes. The weeks passed. The wheat came up. The cattle held.
Caleb found that two children on a claim that could barely carry one was not the disaster he had calculated on that first night by the stove, but something stranger and harder to explain, which was that the work was the same, but the silence was gone. There was sound in the house now. Lucille's voice carrying from the kitchen to the yard. The scrape of the chairs when the girls sat down for supper, the creek of the bed in the back room when Bess rolled over in the dark. And Bess began to talk.
Not much, not to him, but he would come in from the field and hear her voice through the wall, small and steady, telling Lucille something about a bird she had seen or a rock she had found. And he would stand on the porch and listen until the voice stopped and then he would open the door as though he had just arrived. In June, Ruth Ames came back. She said the visit was routine. She sat at the table and wrote in her ledger and asked Lucille questions and asked Bess one question, which was whether she liked living here.
And Bess looked at her tin cup and then at Caleb and then at Ruth Ames and said yes. It was the first word she had spoken to anyone besides Lucille and Ada in more than a year and Ruth Ames wrote it down without comment, but her hand paused on the page for a moment before she moved on. After the questions were finished, Caleb walked her to the buggy. The evening was warm and the wheat was high in the fields and the light was long and Ruth Ames stopped by the fence and said Edmund was placed in hayes with a family named Don. He is working their quarter section.
Joseph was placed with a blacksmith. Thomas was not placed. He is still at the home in New York. Caleb said, "Is he all right?" Ruth Ames said, "He is fed and he has a bed.
He is not all right in the way that you mean." They stood by the fence for a while and did not speak. And then she said, "You chose the two children who could give you the least and who needed the most, and you did it inside of 60 Minutes on a train platform." I have been placing children in homes for 3 years, and I have never seen anyone do that. Caleb said, "I did not do anything unusual."