Amos looked at the child for a long moment. He nodded slowly, deliberately, as if he was committing it. "Henry," he said. "Go home," she said. "You've been here 4 hours.
I know how long I've been here. Then you know you need sleep. So do I. He looked at her, then at the child, and something moved across his face that she was not yet in a condition to name, and he looked like he was going to say something and then did not. He stood.
He picked up his hat from the floor where it had ended up at some point during the previous 4 hours. He moved toward the door. At the threshold, he stopped. You did well, he said, which was an insufficient thing to say, and they both knew he meant something larger than the words could carry. Go home, Amos, she said.
He went. She lay back on the cot with young Henry against her chest and listened to the horse leave, and the silence return. The silence was different now. It had weight in it and breath. It was no longer only her silence.
She looked at the walls she had built. She looked at the glass window with the afternoon light coming through it, and through the glass she could see the clearing she had chosen, and the creek line she had followed, and the timber she had felled, and the 40 acres of Colorado mountain ground that bore her husband's name, and was in her hands now, fully and finally, and without condition. This is where you live, she told the child. Henry made a sound that could have been anything. Your father would have been very pleased with the location, she said.
He would have found something wrong with the chair joints. He would have been right about that, too. She fell asleep before she finished the sentence, and the cabin held around them, and the window glass was clean, and the door she had hung stood true in its frame. The first weeks with a newborn were harder than the building had been, and Clara had known they would be, which did not make them easier. It was not the physical recovery which was real but manageable, the soreness and the slowness and the way her body demanded renegotiation from the ground up.
What she had not fully anticipated was the particular texture of caring for an infant alone. The way time stopped being organized into days and became instead a formless cycle of feeding and sleep and the small interval between them in which she had to accomplish everything else required to keep a person alive. She did it, but it cost her. Tommy came every other day with food from the Caldwell Ranch kitchen, and she accepted it without the argument she would have made two months ago, because she understood now that survival required the temporary suspension of pride, and that the pride could come back when she had more resources to spend on it. He was cheerful company, undemanding, genuinely helpful, and had developed an attachment to young Henry that manifested as a kind of helpless besottedness that Clara found disproportionately humanizing for a 20-year-old who was supposed to be a working ranch hand.
"He's looking at me," Tommy said one morning, crouched beside the cradle. "He looks at everything," Clara said, but specifically at me. He's making eye contact. He is 2 weeks old and cannot distinguish you from a fence post. Give him a month.