Pearl's forleg required the veterinarian's attention after all. And Benny had an incident with the creek that was not dangerous, but required a full change of clothes and a conversation about the difference between testing a hypothesis and being reckless. A distinction Benny found philosophically interesting and practically difficult to apply to himself. By the time Calder bought the fencing wire, it was January and Red Hollow had snow on the ground and the bunk house frame was already standing on the east side of the the main house with the lumber merchants donation and the labor of six neighbors who had come on a Saturday and worked until dark without being asked twice. Wesley had worked alongside those men all day, not as a child being tolerated, but as someone who knew what he was doing and did it.
And by midafternoon, the lumber merchant's son, a grown man of 25, had started directing questions about the east corner framing to Wesley instead of to the adults because Wesley's answers were better. Calder noticed this and said nothing about it. Because saying something would have made Wesley self-conscious, and Wesley did his best work when nobody was making observations about it. The years that followed did not pass smoothly. Nothing about the ranch at Red Hollow was ever smooth for very long, and Calder eventually stopped expecting it to be, which was its own kind of progress.
There were hard winters and a drought summer that cost them a third of the hay, and required careful decisions about which stock to sell and which to keep. There was a year when the roof on the main house finally gave up the long argument it had been having with the weather and needed to be replaced almost entirely, which absorbed the household savings and required 2 months of careful accounting from the twins to rebuild the margin. There was the spring that Wesley's leg became seriously worse, not suddenly, but in the gradual way that chronic things worsen until one morning he could not put weight on it at all. And the doctor in Red Hollow sent them to a specialist two territories over. That trip took three weeks and cost more than Calder wanted to think about, and it resulted in a surgery that helped but did not fix the leg completely, which was the honest answer, and which Wesley received with the particular flatness he used for information he had already prepared himself for.
"It'll always be like this," Wesley said in the doctor's office with Calder beside him. "Some improvement, yes," the doctor said. Full resolution. No, you'll manage it better with the right exercises and the right work, but it'll be a factor. Wesley was quiet for a moment.
All right, he said on the way home, 3 days in a wagon, Wesley did not talk much, which was not unusual, but on the second night, camped outside a small town neither of them knew, he said, out of nowhere, I used to think the leg was why nobody wanted me. Calder looked at the fire. I know, he said. It wasn't, though, Wesley said. Or it was.
But that's about them, not about the leg. He poked at the fire with a stick, not looking up. I figured that out a while ago. I just hadn't said it out loud yet. Does saying it out loud help?
Wesley thought about it honestly. A little, he said. Yeah. They drove home the next day and Wesley went back to the north pasture as soon as they arrived, which was his way of saying he was fine without saying he was fine. Clara's kitchen business outlasted everyone's expectations, including Clara's own.
By the time she was 17, she was supplying four establishments in Red Hollow, and had begun teaching the twins what she knew. Partly because she needed help, and partly because Rose had shown an instinctive talent for pastry that Clara recognized as genuinely better than her own and had the integrity to acknowledge. At 19, Clara found a property near the edge of town, a small house with a larger kitchen than the house warranted, which had been built by someone with ambitions that the rest of the structure didn't quite support. She bought it with money she had been savings since the day she'd put the first bread earnings on the kitchen table at the ranch and kept half. She came to Calder about it, not for permission, but to tell him.