I had not known that before, not for 43 years. I'll tell you about the winter. I'll tell you because the winter is where I found out what we were. A ranch in winter is not the same creature it is in summer. The daylight goes short and the cold comes on with weight to it, serious weight, and there's a kind of grinding sameness to the feeding and the checking and the keeping that either makes two people or breaks them.
I'd spent winters alone or alone enough. Denton was there in body, but Denton was not much company in the cold months. He went inward and sullen and spent time in town more than was useful. I'd gotten used to the sound of my own thinking. She cooked, she kept the accounts, kept them better than I had, which was easy, and she put order into the pantry and the cellar, and the place ran smoother than it ever had.
But, that's not what I mean. What I mean is, on the bad nights, the nights when the temperature dropped so far you'd get up twice to check on the animals and come back in with your beard frosted and your hands senseless, she'd be awake when I got back. She'd be at the table with her mending or a book, and she'd look up without making anything of it, and she'd say, "Bad out there." Not a question. And I'd say, "Cold enough."
And I'd get warm again by the stove. That was it. That simple thing over and over through December and January and the long back end of February. Someone awake when you came back in. Someone who said a real thing instead of a reassuring thing.
I started telling her about the ranch. Not the books, she knew those better than I did now, but the history of it. Where my father had come from, what he'd built, where I'd put in fencing that wasn't on any survey because I just knew it needed to be there. The horse we'd had for 12 years, the one that died the winter before she came that I still looked for in the paddock out of habit. She listened.
She asked questions that showed she'd been listening the time before. She never said, "That must have been hard." She'd say, "So, then what did you do?" And I'd tell her, and the telling of it was different with someone who wanted the true answer. She told me about Illinois.
About a family I gathered was not unkind, but was not paying much attention to her, either. She was the middle one, she said, which in her house seemed to mean you learned to manage yourself. About Kansas City and the job there, which ended when the man she worked for decided her salary was a luxury he could reduce to zero. About answering Denton's advertisement, she'd answered four, she said, and I was surprised for a second, and she saw me be surprised, and she said, "I was practical about it. Four letters, see which one answered in a way that told me anything true."
I asked what Denton's letter had said that seemed true. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "Nothing, really, but the ranch in your county had a good reputation. I thought the place was probably better than the advertisement. I thought about that. She said I was right.