Clara said behind him. I saw she didn't have to. No, Calder agreed. Clara went back into the kitchen. Calder stood on the porch for another minute and then went to look at the porch railing because he promised this week and he meant to keep it.
The railing took the rest of that afternoon. Jonah helped hold the post steady without being asked, which was how Jonah helped with most things, quietly, presently, without announcement. While they worked, Jonah said out of nowhere. December let me touch her neck today. Called her kept working.
Did she? She didn't move away. She moves away from most people. I know, Clara told me. A pause.
What happened to her? I don't know exactly. I bought her from a man last spring who said she'd been spooked by something. He didn't say what. She trusts me, Jonah said.
Not proudly. Just observationally the way he said most things. She does, Calder. Agreed. Jonah handed him a nail.
Can I name the lame one? He said the one in the barn you call Penelope. I already named her Penelope. You said she doesn't respond to it. She doesn't respond to anything.
She responded to me. Jonah said this morning when I went to feed her, she put her nose on my shoulder. Calder stopped hammering. He looked at Jonah, who was holding the post and looking back at him with quiet, absolute seriousness. You went in with the lame mayor by yourself, Calder said.
I was careful. She's unpredictable when she's in pain. I know, but she wasn't in pain this morning. She was just standing there. Jonah paused.
I think she's lonely. Calder looked at this 9-year-old boy who had diagnosed a lame horse's emotional state accurately on his fifth day at the ranch. What name were you thinking? Calder said, "Pearl. " Jonah said it simply because Maisy's name means Pearl and Maisie can't walk very fast either and they're kind of the same. Calder put the hammer down on the porch railing.
He was almost finished building and rubbed his face with his hand for a moment. Pearl it is, he said. He picked the hammer back up. "Jonah," he said after a moment. "What?
You're going to be fine here. " Jonah handed him another nail. I know," he said, as if it were a straightforward fact he'd already assessed and settled. The second week brought its own education. Red Hollow had opinions. Red Hollow had always had opinions about weather, about land prices, about the county's various inefficiencies.
But the news that Calder Boon had taken nine orphan children off a train and installed them on his ranch had given the town something new and vivid to form opinions about, and it was doing so with genuine commitment. The feed store opinion was that it wouldn't last a month. The opinion at the barbers was divided. Half thought it was a decent thing that would fall apart for practical reasons. The other half thought it was a foolish thing that would fall apart for different practical reasons.
The opinion among the wives who gathered at the dry good store on Thursday mornings was more complicated, harder to summarize, which was usually a sign that the situation was more complicated than the men were crediting. Calder heard all of this secondhand through Wesley, who had ears like a bat and a habit of not mentioning what he'd heard until it became operationally relevant. "People think you can't do it," Wesley said. One evening when they were fixing the East Water Barrel seal and the sky was going purple and cold behind the barn. "I know.
Does that bother you? " Calder thought about it. "Only if they're right," he said. Wesley picked up the mallet. "Are they? Ask me in a year.
I'm asking you now. " Calder looked at him. Wesley was holding the mallet and looking back with that flat, careful gaze that was his default setting for conversations that mattered to him. His face gave nothing away, but the question itself gave everything away because Wesley did not ask questions he didn't need the answer to. No, Calder said. They're not right.
Wesley said nothing. He brought the mallet down on the barrel ring and it seated properly and he checked the seal and it held. Okay, he said. He didn't say I believe you. He didn't say thank you.
He said it say and picked up the tools and headed back toward the barn and Calder watched him go and understood in the way you come to understand things about people when you live alongside them that for Wesley okay was not a small word. It was the biggest one he had. 4 days later the town sent its official opinion in the form of a delegation. Three men from the county welfare board arrived on a Tuesday morning. Not Agnes, but the men who supervised Agnes, and they came with the specific and purposeful energy of people who have decided that something needs to be corrected and are being very official about correcting it.
Their leader was a man named Prescott who wore a good coat and carried himself with a confidence of someone who has never been wrong about anything important enough to matter. Calder met them in the yard. Mr. Boon Prescott said the board has become aware of the placement situation here and has concerns about its long-term suitability. What concerns?
Calder said. Multiple concerns. Prescott had a list. Of course, he had a list. The absence of female guardianship.
The lack of formal schooling arrangements. The financial capacity of a single income ranch to support. We have female members of the household. Calder said. Clara is 12 and capable.
Nelly is 11. The twins are eight. They are not guardians. They are children. But the concern about female presence is not accurate.