She folded the list carefully. Tomorrow, she decided, she would give him fewer reasons to. By six the next morning, Rachel had already decided where everything in the cookhouse belonged. Not because the place needed to look pretty.
It needed to stop wasting time. The salt pork moved farther from the stove. The dried apples went into sealed tins instead of open crocks. She carried the sprouting onions into the cold pantry.
She sorted the good from the soft and set the worst aside for immediate use. She scrubbed two shelves with hot water and lye soap, then marked storage jars with scraps of brown paper and charcoal because finding pepper inside a jar labeled cloves had offended her more than she cared to admit. When Eli walked in for coffee, he stopped beneath the doorway.
"What happened?"
Rachel was standing on a flour barrel trying to reach the upper shelf. "What do you mean?"
"I knew where everything was yesterday."
"No. You knew where you remembered everything being."
Eli looked around. "That sounds like the same thing."
"It isn't."
He scratched his jaw. "Coffee still where it was?"
She pointed. He poured himself a tin mug. "All right. Change anything you want."
At seven, the men came in. Breakfast was oatmeal thickened with milk, fried salt pork, apples cooked down with a little sorghum, and the last of the previous day's cornbread toasted near the stove. Nobody complained about the oatmeal because Rachel put bacon drippings and a little salt into it instead of serving it gray and tasteless. Charlie Dunn held up his bowl.
"Mrs. Foster."
"Rachel."
"Rachel, if you keep making oats taste like food, you're going to ruin my opinion of oats."
A few men laughed. Rachel pointed toward the wash basin. "Then ruin it while carrying your own bowl over there."
Charlie stood. "Yes, ma'am."
She gave him a look.
"Yes, Rachel."
"Better."
Matthew entered last. He had snow across the shoulders of his coat and cold reddening the tops of his ears. He removed his hat before stepping fully inside.
Rachel noticed that. She also noticed that he took the same chair at the end of the second table every morning. No one sat beside him unless there was no other seat. She poured coffee into a heavy white mug with a blue rim and set it near his hand.
"Black."
He looked at the cup. "Yes."
"I guessed."
"You guessed right."
He wrapped both hands around it. Rachel turned away before she could wonder why remembering that pleased her. The one-week trial became eight days. Then ten.
Matthew never formally announced an extension. On the seventh evening, he simply placed two dollars beside Rachel's supply list and said, "Same terms next week if you're willing."
Rachel looked at the money, then at him. "I'm willing."
That was the whole conversation. By the middle of the second week, Holloway Basin began changing in small ways. The changes were easiest to hear.
The cookhouse no longer emptied the moment plates were clean. Men stayed for a second cup of coffee. Someone found a deck of cards. Eli started sitting near the stove after supper instead of carrying his meal to the barn office.
Charlie sang badly while drying tin plates until another hand threatened to throw a towel at him. Rachel allowed the noise because it was different from waste. Noise meant people were lingering. She also changed the meals.
Cheap beef cuts went into heavy pots before dawn and cooked slowly until tender. Dried beans were soaked properly instead of boiled until the skins split. She made sourdough from a starter she built near the warm corner of the range and used cornmeal whenever she could stretch wheat without making the men feel cheated. She found winter squash stacked in an unused shed.
Twenty-three of them. "Why are these out here?" she asked Eli.
He shrugged. "Wallace didn't like squash."
"Wallace isn't eating 23 of them."
That night, she roasted six with bacon fat and salt. The men ate all six. Rachel wrote it down. Matthew began appearing in the cookhouse before sunrise.
At first, he had reasons. "Need to know whether the beef order gets cut."