"He's easy to help," she said. Nathan left the room. She stayed where she was for a while longer, just watching Caleb breathe. That was how it started.
Not with a handshake or a formal arrangement or any kind of ceremony. Just a woman who didn't leave when a man told her to, and a sick baby who needed someone to stay, and a house that had gotten very good at being empty. The first week was not graceful. Hank Briggs made his position clear on her second morning when he came to the kitchen door and found her making the kind of breakfast that required actual effort.
Not the burnt salt pork and stale bread that Nathan's kitchen had apparently been producing for weeks, but real food, eggs cooked properly, biscuits that had been mixed and cut and set to bake while the fire was still building. And Briggs looked at the table like he resented it personally. "You're wasting the man's stores," he said. I'm using what's in the larder before it goes bad.
She didn't look up from the pan. Half of what's in there is close to turning. You let things go in a kitchen and you end up spending more replacing them than you would have spent eating them. You've been through his larder.
Someone had to be. She did look up then. When's the last time someone ordered dry goods or checked the flour for weevils? Briggs's expression shifted in a way that told her that nobody had thought about those things in a while and that he didn't want to admit it.
You don't run this place, he said. I'm not trying to run it. I'm trying to feed it. She turned back to the pan.
Breakfast will be ready in 10 minutes if your men want to eat. He left without answering, but the men ate the breakfast, all six of them, without much comment, which he counted as a minor victory of the practical kind. Nathan ate too, standing at the counter rather than sitting. Caleb on his hip the way she'd noticed he always carried the baby.
Not like something fragile, but close, like a man who'd learned to do everything one-handed because the other hand had to hold his son. Caleb was better. The fever had broken properly by the second night, and by the third day he was back to the noisy, demanding existence of a baby who wanted to touch everything and eat approximately every 2 hours and be held the rest of the time. He was 8 months old, she'd established by then, born in February, which meant his mother had died.
Nathan hadn't said, but she'd pieced it together from things not said, from the quality of absence in the house sometime in the early spring. She learned not to ask direct questions about Margaret Cole. Not because Nathan shut her down when the subject arose, but because the way his face changed when it came up was a kind of answer that was harder to sit with than silence. She learned to work around the subject the way you'd work around a bruise.
Not ignoring it, just not pressing. The men remained cool for the better part of that first week. She heard things said low at the edge of the yard, the particular kind of things men said when they wanted to be heard just barely enough to sting. She learned their names without letting any of them know she'd noticed the comments.
There was Briggs, of course, and beside him Dolan, who was younger and followed Briggs's lead like a man who hadn't yet figured out his own. There was an older man named Calhoun, who didn't say much, but watched her with the patient measuring gaze of someone making up his own mind. The others were interchangeable for the first week, just a wall of skeptical male silence that she moved around and through and didn't react to because reaction was what they were waiting for. The livestock incident happened on the Thursday of the second week.