Something careful and almost frightened. The expression of someone who has just made a very large decision and is only now beginning to understand what it means. Maisie considered him for a moment. Then she held out her arms. Not to Wesley, not to Clara.
To this stranger with the torn jacket who had slammed his fist on the counter and said every last one. Wesley went absolutely rigid. Calder looked at the four-year-old with her arms extended toward him. And for a moment, he just stood there. And if you had been watching his face, you might have seen something move through it that had been frozen for a long time.
He stepped forward and picked her up. Maisie put her head on his shoulder. "Okay," she said, in the direct, complete way that four-year-olds say things. Eddie made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been something else. Benny was already halfway to the train to get the bags.
Wesley stared at Calderbon holding Maisie and thought about the two times before when he'd watched a man or a woman make a decision like this and then watched them change their mind when the reality of it settled in. He thought about how he had learned specifically and deliberately not to believe in this kind of moment. He believed in it anyway. He hated that he believed in it. He picked up the pencil he'd been using and tucked it in his pocket because it was still a good pencil.
And then he went after Benny to help with the bags. The wagon ride to Calder's ranch took just over an hour. Agnes Hollowell sat in the front beside Calder with her clipboard on her knees. And in the back of the wagon, nine children were crammed in among their three combined bags. And whatever Agnes had thought to bring, and it should have been uncomfortable, and probably was, but what it mainly was was loud.
Not the loud of children misbehaving. The loud of children who had been very, very quiet for a very, very long time, finally having something they needed to say. Benny had questions. Benny always had questions. How many horses did the ranch have?
What were their names? Was there a river or a creek nearby? What kind of fence was the north fence? Why was the canvas on the wagon different from the canvas on the train? Calder answered every single one, not with the slightly exhausted tolerance of an adult who has been answering questions for too long.
M like someone who hadn't had anyone to talk to in a while and found the questions more interesting than he'd expected. The north fence is cedar posts and wire, he said. And it needs work on the east corner. The posts are getting soft. Can I help fix it?
Benny asked. Probably not yet, but you can watch. Why can't I help? Because you're six and the wire's sharp. I'm almost seven.
That doesn't make the wire less sharp. Benny thought about this. What if I wore gloves? We'll talk about it when you're seven. This answer somehow satisfied Benny completely.
He turned and told Eddie that he was going to help fix the fence when he was seven. And Eddie told him that was a long time to wait. And Benny said that was okay. He had other things to do in the meantime. In the front of the wagon, Agnes watched the road and said nothing.
Clara sat in the back between Nelly and Jonah and watched the landscape go by and tried to make herself believe in what was happening. This was the difficult thing about Clara. The thing nobody quite saw. She was 12 and she had spent three years protecting the other children and managing the practicalities of their shared life. And that meant she had very little room left over for the thing children were actually supposed to do, which was believe that things would be okay.
She watched Calder answer Benny's questions and she thought he doesn't know what he's taken on. She wasn't thinking it as a criticism. She was thinking it as a fact that needed to be dealt with because she had watched adults not know what they'd taken on before. And she had watched what happened when the realization hit them. And she was not going to let that happen to the little ones again.
She was going to be useful. She was going to be so useful that he couldn't afford to send them back. She didn't realize yet that this was exactly the wrong way to think about it. The ranch came into view as the wagon rounded a long bend, and even through all of it, the uncertainty, the careful not hoping, several of the children went quiet. It was bigger than they had imagined, not grand, not rich, nothing like that, but it was a real working ranch with a main house and a barn and a long fence line disappearing over a rise.
And there was smoke from a chimney that meant a fire had been left burning, and there were horses visible in the south field. "That's a lot of horses," Jonah said. It was the first thing Jonah had said in 3 hours. He was nine and quiet, and when he spoke, it usually meant something. Seven, Calder said.
Eight if you count the lame one in the barn. But I don't count her because she makes me feel guilty. Why does she make you feel guilty? Because I bought her from a man who told me she was sound, and she wasn't, and I should have caught that. He paused.
She's all right, though. Just can't work anymore. What's her name? I call her Penelope. She doesn't respond to it, but she doesn't respond to anything else either.