He asked. The yard went very quiet. Clara crouched down so she was level with him, which put her dress in the dust, and she didn't think about that at all. "My name is Clara," she said. "What's yours?"
He studied her for a moment with the grave seriousness of very small children. "Samuel," he said. "Samuel James Holloway. I have three names because pa said I needed room to grow into them." "That's a fine set of names," she said.
"It's very nice to meet you, Samuel James Holloway." Something shifted in his face, a loosening, a decision being made. "You can call me Sam," he said, as though granting her a significant privilege. "Most people do." "Thank you, Sam," she said.
"I will." She straightened up and found herself looking at a girl standing in the doorway of the house. Mabel Holloway was 16 years old and she looked, Clara thought, like someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had become so accustomed to the weight that she'd forgotten what it felt like to put it down. She stood straight, her dark hair pinned back neatly, an apron over her dress, her hands still at her sides. She had her brother's watchfulness in her eyes, but something else layered beneath it, a guardedness that went deeper than caution.
She looked at Clara the way a person looks at something they've decided in advance they don't want. Clara met her gaze directly and nodded once. Mabel did not nod back. Supper's at 6:00, she said, and went back inside. James cleared his throat quietly beside her.
"I'll take your bags up," he said. "Thank you," Clara said. She stood in the yard for a moment longer, letting the ranch settle around her. The younger boys had retreated back to wherever they'd come from. Sam was still standing nearby, watching her with those large brown eyes, not quite willing to leave, but not quite ready to approach again, either.
"Is there somewhere I can wash my hands?" She asked him. His face lit up with the particular delight of a child who has been given an important assignment. "I'll show you," he said, and walked ahead of her toward the house with great authority. She followed him.
She met Nathaniel Holloway an hour later. He came in from the fields at 5:00, which she knew because she had been watching the clock in the kitchen, a large plain-faced clock that ticked with the steadiness of something that had never once considered stopping and cataloging. Everything she could see without appearing to pry. The kitchen was clean, but spare. The pantry was organized, but low.
There were seven different sizes of boots lined up inside the back door, and an array of hats on hooks above them, and a dent in the wall beside the doorframe at about the height a fist might make if someone had been very angry, and then thought better of it. She heard him at the door, the particular sound of a man who is large moving with deliberate quietness, which is it's a a thing that large men sometimes learn when they have learned that their size frightens people. And then he was in the kitchen. He was 42 years old, built like someone who had spent 20 years working land that fought back. With dark hair that was going gray at the temples, and a face that was weathered and square-jawed, and currently set in an expression she could not quite read because it was too carefully neutral.
He had removed his hat at the door, which she registered. His hands were large and work-roughened, and he held his hat in both of them. He looked at her the way you look at something you have agreed to in a letter and are now encountering in actual fact. "Mrs. Whittaker," he said.