He left before dawn without saying a word to any of them. Orson Hensley set down his coffee cup, folded a single sheet of paper in half, and placed it on the kitchen table where Miriam would find it. Then he walked to the barn, hitched the horse to the wagon, loaded the winter flour, the preserved meat, the savings tin from behind the loose board above the fireplace, and drove away into the dark without once looking back at the house where six children were sleeping. He didn't wake them to say goodbye. He didn't wake Miriam either.
He just left. The sky outside the bedroom window was still the color of ash when Miriam Hensley opened her eyes. She had slept badly, the way she always did when she was hungry, and trying not to think about it. For three nights running, she had given her portion of the cornmeal to the younger ones, and told herself she wasn't hungry. And for three nights running her body had called her a liar through every hour of restless half-sleep.
She lay there a moment listening. The house was quiet in a way that didn't feel right. Not the ordinary quiet of early morning when Orson's breathing filled the bedroom and the children were still tangled in their blankets. This was a different kind of quiet, thinner, like something had been removed from the air without her noticing. She turned over.
His side of the bed was empty and cold. That alone wasn't unusual. Orson sometimes rose early to check the animals or gather wood before the cold settled in deep. She lay still another moment, waiting to hear the sound of him moving around in the next room, or the creek of the back door, or the particular heavy footfall he made when he crossed the kitchen floor in his boots. Nothing.
She sat up. The bedroom door was open, and through it she could see the kitchen, gray and dim in the early light, and the table in the center of the room, and the folded piece of paper sitting in the middle of it, where nobody had left anything the night before. Miriam was out of bed before she was fully awake. She crossed the cold floor in her bare feet, snatched up the paper, and unfolded it. Her eyes moved across Orson's handwriting, cramped and careless, the same as always, and she read it twice before the words became something she could actually understand, rather than just a collection of letters arranged in rows.
Six children are too many mouths. I cannot build anything here. I am going to California to make something of myself. Do not follow me. That was all he wrote.
No explanation beyond that single bare sentence. No apology, no instruction about what she was supposed to do with the six children. He had decided were too many mouths to feed. No acknowledgement that winter was already breathing down the neck of the Montana Territory and that the nearest town was nearly 2 days travel and that the savings tin was gone because she didn't need to check behind that loose board to know it was gone. Miriam set the note back down on the table.
She stood there in the silent kitchen in her bare feet and her nightgown and she did not cry. She wanted to somewhere behind her sternum where the fear had already begun to curl and harden into something called sisle solid. But crying would take energy she didn't have and it wouldn't bring the horse back and it wouldn't fill the savings tin and it wouldn't make six children any fewer. So she didn't cry. She went to check the barn.