"We're looking for work," Iris said before he could speak, before her own courage could fail her. "Any kind. I can cook, clean, mend anything that puts a roof over my son's head tonight. We'll sleep in the barn if that's all there is. I've got no cash to pay anybody, Reuben said.
Not till the spring sale in May. I'm sorry. I wish I had better to offer you truly, but I can't in good conscience promise wages I haven't got. Iris looked past him into the house, where she could smell faintly, unmistakably, the particular staleness of a kitchen that hadn't cooked a real meal in months. She looked at the ranch hands bunk house beyond, dark and silent at an hour when men should have been eating supper, and understood exactly what kind of trouble this ranch was in.
"Feed my boy," she said, "and I'll feed your men." Reuben looked at Tom, hollow cheicked and swaying slightly on his feet with exhaustion, and found he couldn't say no to that. Whatever his pride told him about accepting help from a stranger, he couldn't pay in turn. Come in, he said, both of you, let's see what's in that kitchen, though I'll warn you it isn't much. What was in that kitchen was not much. A half sack of flour, some withered carrots, a hawk of salt pork gone hard at the edges, and six weeks of dust on every surface nobody had touched since the cook died.
Iris found it all anyway, the way a woman does who has spent two years stretching nothing into supper for a family that never had enough. By the time the men filed in, wary and hollowed, expecting jerky, they found instead a stew thick with carrots and salt pork and dumplings floating soft on top, and the smell of it hit the bunk house before the men did, pulling them through the door like a rope around the neck. Someone in back asked, disbelieving, whether that was real bread cooling on the sideboard, and someone else told him to hush and sit down before it vanished like a mirage. They ate in complete silence for a long while, the kind of silence that comes from men too hungry and too stunned to speak, spoon scraping bowls clean and reaching back for more before the first helping was rightly finished. Then Lucius, the gentle giant of the outfit, set down his spoon, put his big scarred hand over his eyes, and wept without shame at the table.
"Sorry," he said thickly when the others looked at him. "Just first hot meal since Christmas. Ain't had my mother's cooking since I left Missouri, and this here's the first thing that's tasted like somebody cared whether I ate it or not." Nobody laughed at him. Half the table had gone suspiciously quiet themselves, staring hard at their bowls, blinking more than the lamp smoke rightly called for. Reuben stood in the doorway watching it, watching Tom eat like he hadn't seen food in a week, which he nearly hadn't, and felt something shift loose in his chest that had been clenched tight since Christmas Eve.
"You'll stay the winter out," he said to Iris, when the men had gone quiet with full stomachs. I'll square the wage with you proper come May. You have my word on it. For whatever a rancher's word is worth to a woman he's known one evening. I didn't ask for a promise.