Wade already knows more about horses than father ever did. She paused. That probably took 3 days. She went out. Miriam stood at the stove and let the quiet settle around her for a moment.
Then she went back to work. The crisis with Henry came on a Thursday, 3 weeks into the deep winter, and it happened the crisis with children usually happened without warning, in the middle of something ordinary, when Miriam had already used up most of her reserves on other things. She had gone to call the children in for the midday meal, and found five of them in or near the house, but not Henry. She checked his usual places. The corner of the barn where he liked to sit in the hay.
The porch where he sometimes stood watching the cattle pasture. The room he shared with Wade and Samuel. Nothing. She was working hard to keep her voice level when she told Bramwell, who was coming in from the barn. He was with me about an hour ago, he said immediately by the east fence.
He wanted to watch me check the line. He was already moving back toward the barn. He was right there when I came in. You left him. He said he was coming in, Bramwell said, and his voice had something in it she hadn't heard before, not defensiveness, but the sharp edge of a person who was already blaming himself.
I should have waited. He saddled his horse in under 3 minutes. She went around the east side of the house on foot, calling Henry's name into the white cold, and the cold threw the sound back at her in a way that told her nothing. The wind was low, but the snow was deep enough that a six-year-old could sit down in it and not be visible from 20 ft away. She found him herself, which she would be both grateful for and slightly furious about for years afterward.
He was sitting at the base of the east fence post, not crying. Not frightened exactly, he'd gotten distracted, watching a hawk circle over the south field, and then walked farther along the fence than he'd intended, and hadn't been able to see the house through the trees. He wasn't cold yet, not seriously. He had his heavy coat and his boots, and he'd had the sense to stay put instead of wandering farther. But she scooped him up anyway, both arms, his full weight, and held him against her chest while her heart knocked against her ribs.
"I saw a hawk," he said, slightly muffled against her coat. "I know," she said. "We'll talk about the hawk inside." Bramwell came around the fence line on horseback and pulled up when he saw them. He looked at Henry and the expression on his face.
First the relief, then the complicated aftermath of relief that always looked a little like anger, but wasn't quite anger, made Miriam understand something she hadn't fully understood before, about what it cost a person to care about children that weren't their own. She looked at him. He looked at her. He's fine, she said. Bramwell nodded once.