I made it. Sarah, she whispered to the picture. I am here. I am a wife. She ran her thumb over the glass face.
He thinks I am dirt. Sarah, just like the others. But he gave me a roof. And I will work until my fingers bleed before I let him send me back. I will never go back.
She snapped the locket shut and blew out the lamp. Darkness swallowed the room instantly. Outside, a coyote howled close and sharp, and Maggie Orr lay back on the strange bed, fully clothed, staring up into the blackness, listening to the wind try to tear the house down. She did not know yet that the wind was the least of her enemies. She did not know that the man sleeping in the bunk house was lying awake, staring at the ceiling, haunted not by her past, but by the ghost of a woman he had killed with his own stubbornness.
All she knew was that the bed was cold. The room was vast, and she was more alone now than she had ever been in the crowded streets of New York. The first week on the Mercer Ranch was not a life. It was a war of attrition waged between Maggie Orr and the Wyoming territory. The enemy was not the wind or the coyotes, though they were constant companions.
The enemy was the water. The well was located 300 yd from the back porch, a distance that seemed trivial until one had to traverse it six times a morning with two oak buckets sloshing against one's shins. The handle of the pump was rusted and stiff, requiring a full body heave to draw the water up from the dark earth. Maggie learned quickly that the romance of the West was a lie told by people who had never scrubbed a man's heavy canvas trousers in a galvanized tub with lye soap that ate the skin off her knuckles. It was Tuesday under a sun that felt like a hot iron pressing against the back of her neck when the reality fully settled in.
She was scrubbing Eli's work shirts, the water in the basin turning a murky gray. Her hands, once nimble enough to stitch lace on a silk bodice in the dim light of a New York tenement, were now red, swollen, and cracking. The dry air sucked the moisture right out of her flesh. A deep fissure had opened on her right thumb, stinging sharply every time the soapy water touched it. She paused, wiping sweat from her forehead with her forearm, leaving a streak of suds across her brow.
She looked out at the horizon. It was endless. It was indifferent. It did not care that her back ached or that her skin felt two sizes too tight for her body. Eli was near the corral, repairing a section of fence where a spooked steer had broken the top rail.
He paused in his work, leaning on the post driver and watched her. He was too far away for her to see his eyes, but she felt the weight of his gaze. She straightened her spine. She would not let him see her slump. She would not let him think he had made a mistake in bringing her here.
Eli watched the woman at the washboard. He had expected her to complain by now. He had expected tears or a demand for a servant, or at least a plea for him to haul the water. But morning after morning, she marched to the well, her small boots kicking up dust, her jaw set in a line as rigid as the horizon. He felt a strange twisting in his chest.
It was a mixture of admiration and guilt. He had brought her here to this hard place, to a house that was falling down, and a husband who was hollowed out. He watched her wring out a heavy flannel shirt, her arms shaking with the effort. He dropped the post driver and walked toward her. His limp was more pronounced today.
The dampness in the air from the coming weather made the old break ache. "Leave that," he said as he approached. Maggie jumped, nearly dropping the shirt into the dust. She had not heard him over the scrubbing sound. She looked up, her eyes wide and guarded.