"I found a place," she said. She showed him the details she'd written down. Location, price, what it needed. He looked at the paper, then at her. This is what you've been saving for, he said.
Since the beginning, Clara said. I always knew I wanted something of my own. Not because, she paused. Not because here wasn't good. But because I needed to know I could.
I know. He said, "You're not. " She looked at him carefully. "You're not upset. " "No. " He handed the paper back. "I'm proud of you. " Which is not the same thing as wanting you to go, "But it's what's true. " Clara looked at him for a moment and something moved through her face that she didn't try to hide. You know I'll be here all the time anyway.
She said, "I'm counting on it. " She was. She came to the ranch for Sunday dinners for the rest of Calder's life, and she brought food more often than she came empty-handed. And the distance of 2 mi between her kitchen and the ranch house apparently meant nothing to her in practical terms. Eddie's work with December changed what he did with his life, though it took a few years for the shape of it to become clear. What he discovered through December and then through the other horses that followed, was that he had an ability to read animal behavior that was specific and rare, and that this ability had value people were willing to pay for.
He began working with difficult horses brought to him by ranchers in the territory, horses that had been given up on or were considered dangerous. And he developed a reputation for patience and results that spread by word of mouth the way reputations do in territories where good help is hard to find. He was 20 when a rancher brought him a horse that three other men had refused to work with and Eddie spent 6 weeks with that horse and returned it manageable and the rancher paid him more than he'd asked and told 10 people about it. Eddie came back to the ranch that evening and told Calder about it with the direct unadorned delivery of someone reporting facts, not seeking praise. But his eyes were doing something that his voice wasn't.
That's a living, Calder said. I know, Eddie said. That's what I'm saying. Jonah did become a teacher. He was 22 when he took the position at the Red Hollow School, replacing Miss Daly, who had finally returned east to be near her family.
He taught there for 30 years. He was not a warm teacher in the way that word usually implies. He was not affusive or demonstrative, but he was precise and patient. And he had a gift for finding the specific angle from which a difficult thing became understandable to a specific child, which was a gift that not many teachers had, and that made him irreplaceable in the way that quiet things often are. He still went to see Pearl's grave on the anniversary of the horse's death every year.
Pearl had lived to 17, which the veterinarian said was good for a horse who'd been as lame as she was when Jonah found her. Jonah had been with her at the end. He did not talk about it, but he went to that corner of the field every year, and called her left him to it without comment. Nellie's chicken operation, which had started as an 11-year-old's fascination with a backyard flock, became a genuine enterprise by the time she was 20. She supplied eggs to half of Red Hollow, and had a system for the flock that was more organized than most operations, three times its size.