Wesley straightened slightly. Tell me what needs doing. Calder told him. Wesley went and got Jonah and Eddie. There were things in those days that Calder did wrong.
He lost his patience with Benny on a Thursday afternoon when Benny had for the third time let the feed room door swing open and two chickens had gotten in and one of them had gotten into the flower. He raised his voice, not cruy, not even very loudly, but sharply, and Benny went completely still in the way that told Calder that Benny's experience of raised voices was not comfortable. He stopped immediately. "I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it. And Benny heard that he meant it.
And 15 minutes later, Benny was talking again about the creek and the fish. But the incident sat in Calder's chest for 2 days because he had not wanted to be the kind of man who made a six-year-old freeze like that. And wanting not to be something and managing not to be something were, he was learning two entirely different problems. He got the porch railing done in a day and a half. He arranged with the school teacher, a young woman named Miss Daly, who was newer to Red Hollow than she'd perhaps intended to be, to come to the ranch three mornings a week while the formal arrangements were being finalized.
Miss Daly turned out to be efficient and slightly alarmed by Benny, but willing to try. The household log was started by the twins who turned out to be the natural recordkeepers of the group and who produced a document within 5 days that was more organized than anything Calder had managed in 9 years of ranching. He took it to the county office with one week to spare. Margaret Vale came back once without announcing herself. She came on a Wednesday morning and she didn't knock.
She simply came around the side of the house because she had heard voices in the back and found Clara and Nelly and Maisie in the yard. Maisie holding the cloth rabbit that had previously been Margaret's daughters and explaining to it with great seriousness that Pearl the horse was her friend and also Jonah's friend and also the rabbit's friend now too. Margaret stood at the corner of the house and watched this for a moment. She did not think she made a sound, but Maisie looked up anyway with the instinctive alertness of a child who has learned to track the movements of adults. And she looked at Margaret with those serious dark eyes, and she held up the rabbit.
She's sleeping, Maisie told Margaret. Her name is Button. That's a good name, Margaret said. I named her after you, Maisie said. Margaret blinked.
You don't know my name. Your name is the button lady, Maisie said with total confidence. Because you have all those buttons on your coat. " Clara made a sound that was definitely a suppressed laugh, and then looked at the ground. Margaret looked down at her coat, which did indeed have rather a lot of buttons. "I suppose that's fair," she said.
She did not stay long. She spoke briefly with Calder, asked a few practical questions, looked at the household log that the twins had produced, and turned one page of it twice as if she hadn't quite believed the first reading. "These two did this," she said. "Rose and Ruth. " Yes. Margaret turned the page back.