Cowboy watched his brother reject a mail order bride, then took her home himself. The letter came on a Thursday. I know it was Thursday because I'd just finished re-hanging the barn door, the big one on the north side that our father had hung in 1887, and that had been dragging the ground for two seasons. And I had grease on both hands and chaff in my collar. And Denton came out of the house waving the envelope the way he always waved things, like they were flags and he was the whole parade.
"She's coming," he said. "Nora Voss, she's coming Tuesday." He handed me the letter. I read it with greasy fingers and left two prints on the corner. She wrote in a plain hand, not elaborate, no flourishes, just the facts set down straight.
She would arrive on the noon stage from Pueblo. She hoped the accommodations were comfortable. She looked forward to meeting Mr. Denton Hargrove. She signed it N. Voss.
I handed it back to my brother. "She sounds sensible," I said. Denton tucked it into his breast pocket, patted it once, and grinned. He had a grin that worked on most people, worked on women especially. He was the older one, the handsome one, the one my father had always called by name when he was pleased about something and called both of you boys when he wasn't.
I was used to this. I'm not saying it as a complaint. I'm just saying it as a fact, the way you'd say the north door dragged. What I hadn't told Denton, what I hadn't told anyone, was that I'd read the advertisement he'd placed in the Rocky Mountain News, and I'd thought about answering it myself. Not for me, for him, I kept telling myself, to see if there was something there worth knowing before he tied himself to a stranger.
But I read her response to his advertisement, the first response she sent before he'd even replied, and something in the plainness of how she expressed herself stuck in my chest like a seed that finds the right crack in the rock. I didn't write to her, I want to be clear about that. I didn't pursue another man's arrangement, but I thought about N. Voss, whoever she was, and the way she'd said she hoped the accommodations were comfortable, not extravagant, not beautiful, just comfortable. And I thought that was a woman who'd learned not to ask for too much.
I went back to the barn door. Tuesday came around like Tuesdays do when you work a ranch, head down and too fast. I had a mending job out at the east fence line, and I didn't make it back to the yard until the stage had already been and gone, so I didn't see her arrive. I came up to the house in the late afternoon with my horse's coat dark with sweat and my own not much better, and I heard voices through the kitchen window. Denton's voice running along smooth the way it did, and another voice, a woman's, quieter, saying something I couldn't make out.
Short sentences, a pause, then Denton again. I put up the horse and washed at the pump and came in through the back. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking. Denton was leaning on the counter with his arms crossed, and the look on his face was the one he got when he'd already made a decision and was looking for how to say it. I'd seen that look before.