"The one that's pulling loose. I saw it when we came up the road. The posts looked like they weren't set deep enough originally and the frost keeps moving them. My dad used to reset ours with gravel pack at the base. Stays better."
Caleb looked at him for a moment. "How old are you?" "12." "Your father was a rancher?" "Until he wasn't," Evan said flatly in a tone that made it clear the subject was closed.
The second one was Lucy, eight, who emerged from the back of the wagon with a serious expression and a dead mouse in her handkerchief, which she held up to show Caleb. "I found him in the wagon," she said. "He's been dead for a while. Do you have a place to bury things? I believe everything deserves a proper burial."
"There's a spot by the fence," Caleb said, because it was the only response that made any sense. "That'll do," she said gravely, and walked off to find the spot. Then the littlest one came. Owen was five and he came around the corner of the wagon at a dead run and crashed into Caleb's leg and grabbed onto his trousers with both hands and looked up at him with the sort of unconditional trust that is specific to very small children and large dogs.
He had a gap where his two front teeth had been and he smelled like hay and the road and something sweet that Caleb could not identify. "Are you the man?" Owen said. "I'm—yes," Caleb said.
"I'm the man." "Mama said we might get to stay somewhere for a while." She might have been right about that. Owen looked at the barn.
Then he looked at the horses in the paddock. Then he looked back up at Caleb with an expression of pure uncomplicated joy. "Can I see the horses?" "Owen," Mara said from the kitchen doorway.
"Let him come," Caleb said and was mildly surprised to hear himself say it. He lay awake that night and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds that his house was making. For 8 years the sounds of this house had been his own sounds, his footsteps, his breathing, the particular way the kitchen floor creaked when he got up in the night, the wind through the gap in the northwest window that he kept meaning to fix. He knew every sound the way you know the sounds of your own body by the absence of surprise.
Now there were other sounds, the creak of unfamiliar weight on the floorboards down the hall, a cough, the little one, Owen, who had gone to bed clutching the edge of his blanket with both fists like it might try to escape, a murmured voice that was probably Mara talking to one of the older children, too low to make out words. The mule shifting in the barn. A new sound among the familiar sounds of his horses. He should have felt invaded.
He'd expected to feel invaded. He didn't quite. What he felt was something he couldn't name easily. Something between discomfort and an awareness he hadn't had in a long time.