"Tomorrow morning, " Miriam said. We don't have much to pack. He nodded and stood and picked up his hat from the table. I'll send the wagon at first light. There'll be room for everything you need to bring.
After he left, Miriam went and sat on the edge of her bed in the empty bedroom and looked at the cold side where Orson used to sleep and tried to figure out what she was feeling. It wasn't relief exactly. It was something more provisional than that. It was the feeling of a person who has been holding on to the edge of something with both hands and has just been told there might be solid ground close enough to reach but who can't yet see the solid ground themselves and isn't fully prepared to believe in it. Tessa appeared in the doorway.
Are we going? She said. Yes, Miriam said. Good, said Tessa. And then because she was 12 and because she already understood some things about pride and survival that most adults spent years trying to avoid understanding, it doesn't mean he won.
Orson, it just means we're smarter than staying here. Miriam looked at her daughter. When did you get so old? She said, I've always been old, Tessa said. I just got tall enough for people to notice.
They arrived at Red Spur Ranch the following afternoon. Miriam had packed everything they owned into two bags and a flack, which gave her children something to carry and gave herself something to hold on to. The wagon Bramwell sent was driven by the young ranch hand from the day before who told them his name was Denny and then apparently exhausted his conversational capacity for the entire 2-hour journey because he didn't say much of anything else until they reached the gate. The ranch was larger than she'd expected. The main house was two stories, built from timber that had been cut and set with genuine care, not the rough and ready construction of a homestead made in a hurry, but the work of someone who'd intended it to last.
There was a barn that could hold 20 horses, a bunk house set back at a respectful distance, a root cellar, a smokehouse, fences that were in good repair, a kitchen garden that had been properly put to bed for winter. It was a well-built place. It was also, she noticed immediately, almost entirely empty of anything personal. No curtains, no pictures on the walls, no indication that anyone lived there who had any interest in making it feel like they lived there. It was a house that someone owned and maintained and inhabited without ever quite moving into.
Bramwell was waiting in the yard. He showed them the house himself, the kitchen, which was large and well stocked, the two rooms on the second floor that had been prepared for the children, with enough beds and blankets for all six, the room beside it that would be hers, with a solid door and the lock she'd specified. The younger children were overwhelmed into silence for the first 5 minutes. Then 7-year-old Wade saw the barn. "Can I see the horses?
" he said. Wade Miriam started. After you're settled, Bramwell said to the boy, not harshly, but firmly, with the particular tone of someone who had opinions about when things happened and didn't consider it negotiable, "Help your mother first. " Wade looked at him for a moment, then said, "Yes, sir. " in a voice that suggested he was trying it out and found it acceptable and went to carry in a bag.