May we sleep in your barn, mister? Just till the rain stops. No, ma'am. You'll sleep in the house. Does he bite, mama?
Only on Sundays. $500 for the boy. And the woman? The woman doesn't matter. Wade Harlon had not opened his door to anyone in 3 years. That night he opened it to a stranger, a little girl, and a baby, and to the three men already on her trail.
Ellie Price had left Leadville 4 days earlier in the back of a freight wagon under a tarp that smelled of coal oil and wet canvas. She had 61 cents, a Bible, a small pocket pistol that had belonged to her husband, and two children who had never once asked her where they were going. On the fourth day, the teamster turned south and put them down at the crossroads. After that, they walked. The house had been quiet for 3 years.
Quiet enough that Wade could hear the clock in the hall and every board that creaked under a woman's weight and the small wet breathing of a baby who had cried himself to sleep. There's a bed upstairs, clean sheets. We'll be gone before light, Mister Harlon. And you'll be gone when the rain's gone. Not before.
Is this your house all by herself? It is now. She slept sitting up between her children and the door. Wade knew that kind of sleep. He had slept like that himself a long time ago in a country where the next knock on the door could be the last.
In Cedar Bluff, they said Wade Harlon had buried his heart on the hill behind his house. He came to town once a month for flour and coffee and nails, paid in cash, tipped his hat to the ladies, and said nothing at all. The ladies said he was rude. The men said he was dangerous. The children said he was a ghost.
None of them had ever been inside his gate. You didn't have to do that. I don't take charity, Mr. Harlon. I pay with what I have. Then you're a rich woman.
Nobody's cooked in that kitchen in 3 years. Mister, there's a baby bed up here. Whose is it? Leave it be, Molly. Please.
Her name had been Anna. The boy had been called Daniel after Wade's father. The fever came in the spring of 78 and took them both in a single week. Wade carved the cradle himself the winter before the boy was born. After the funeral, he carried it up to the loft, covered it with a feed sack, and never climbed that ladder again.