Maybe. Calder looked at him sideways. You're a hard boy to reassure. I've been reassured before, Wesley said. It didn't stick.
Calder nodded slowly like he was absorbing that. All right, he said. All right, what? I'm not going to try to convince you. I mean it.
I'll show you instead. He lifted them all again. You can make up your mind when you've seen enough to decide. Wesley looked at him. Then he looked back at the wood and kept splitting.
They got through the whole pile before supper, and neither of them mentioned it again. When the stew was ready, Clara's stew, which was surprisingly decent, given what she'd had to work with. She was quietly and fiercely proud of 11 people sat down at and around a table built for four, with three chairs borrowed from the storage room, and two wooden boxes covered with a folded blanket for the smallest children to sit on. It was crowded, elbows touched. Maisie knocked over a cup of water and froze with the specific terror of a child who has learned that spilled things are consequences.
Calder was on his feet before anyone else moved, getting a rag. Here," he said, mopping it up without comment, without even looking at Maisy's face. Just dealing with the spilled water the way you deal with spilled water. Maisie stared at the top of his bent head. Then she picked up her cup and held it more carefully and went back to eating.
Agnes Hollowill sat at the end of the table and watched all of this and wrote in very small letters at the bottom of her notes. "Subject appears unexpectedly capable. " Then she crossed out the word unexpectedly and wrote it again without it. Outside, the sun was going down over the ranch at Red Hollow. Inside, for the first time in a long time, there was a table with too many people around it, and not one of those people, not even Wesley, who had built himself a careful fortress out of not believing, could say that it felt entirely wrong. The first night at the ranch was not peaceful.
Nobody had pretended it would be, but the reality of it was still something different from what anyone had mentally prepared for. Agnes Hollowell had stayed through supper and through her individual assessments brief practical conversations with each child conducted at the kitchen table while the others were getting ready for bed and then she had climbed into her county buggy in the dark and driven back toward Red Hollow with her clipboard full of notes and an expression that Calder could not quite read. He stood on the porch and watched her lantern disappear down the road and then he went back inside to the noise. Benny had found something in the storage room that he thought might be a trap for small animals and was explaining his theory loudly to Eddie, who was ignoring him with great concentration. Rose and Ruth had decided that the two narrow beds in the third room were not satisfactory, and had dragged one mattress onto the floor so they could sleep side by side, which was apparently how they had always slept, and which they had done without asking anyone, because asking had not historically gone well for them.
Clara was in the kitchen washing the supper dishes without being told, moving quietly and efficiently. And when Calder told her to leave them, she said, "I'm almost done without stopping. " In the tone of someone who was not going to be redirected, Jonah was already asleep. This was the thing about Jonah that called her noticed first. The boy could fall asleep anywhere at any time. The way some animals can the deep unconscious saf survival sleep of a creature that has learned to take rest when rest is available because it might not be available later.
He had eaten his supper, listened to Agnes's questions with careful monoselabic answers, and then simply been asleep in the chair by the fireplace before anyone noticed. Calder had carried him to the loft. Now Wesley was up there with Jonah and Eddie and Benny. And from the sounds coming through the ceiling, it was clear that Benny had not stopped talking about the trap. Maisie was not asleep.