He did his best. A man will. He rose in the dark and saw to the stock and came in and did his clumsy best with the cooking and the washing and the braiding of small hair. And he was gentle with them, gentler than his own hard father had ever been with him. But a man cannot be in the barn and at the stove at the same time, and the ranch would not run itself, and slowly through that cold December, the household began to come apart at the seams.
Not all at once. In small ways. Meals grew simple and then grew thin. The wash piled up. The children's clothes went unmended.
And the money, which had never been much, grew tight in a way that frightened him because the note at the bank came due in the spring and the winter was eating the little he had set by. By the third week of December, there was not a great deal of food in the heart house. There was flour and there was salt pork and there were beans and some potatoes going soft in the cellar and that was very nearly the whole of it. Caleb had sold four head he had meant to keep just to have coin against the note and there was no money now for the kind of Christmas the children had always known. The orange in the toe of the stocking, the sugar, the ham.
He had not told them this yet. He was trying to think how to tell them. It was the kind of thing that kept a man awake at night with his jaws set hard in the dark. And then, four days before Christmas, the woman came up the road. She came on foot, which was the first thing he noticed because no one came on foot up that road in December unless something had gone very wrong for them.
She was perhaps 30 years of age and she wore a good coat gone thin at the cuffs and she carried a carpet bag that did not look heavy enough to hold a whole life. And she stopped at his gate and did not come through it, waiting to be acknowledged, which is the mark of a person who has learned to ask permission for the very air. Caleb came down off the porch. Samuel came to the door behind him and watched. The woman said her name was Adeline Rue and that she had been housekeeper to a family in Kettle Creek 40 miles east until the man of that house had lost his position and the whole family had gone back to the wife's people in the states and there had been no place in the wagon and no wage owed past the month and so she was walking.
She was walking to a cousin in Bishop's Ford, which was another two days on, and she had misjudged the cold and the distance both, and she was asking if it was no trouble, only whether she might sit an hour by a fire and fill her canteen before she went on. She asked for an hour by the fire. She did not ask for food. Caleb noticed that, too, the way he had noticed the walking. A hungry person who is proud will ask for warmth and water, which a body can offer without shame on either side, and will not ask for food, which costs something and puts the giver on the spot.