A boy near eight peered past his mother's skirt toward the barn, toward the horses, forgetting for one blessed second whatever trouble had walked them all the way here. And the smallest, a little girl of maybe six, simply looked up at Orson with the open, unguarded curiosity of a child who has not yet learned that adults sometimes lie. Afternoon, Orson said, and stopped a respectful distance from the gate. The woman didn't waste his time or her own. I have four children and nowhere to go, she said.
Her voice didn't shake. I don't want charity. I need work. Orson looked at her, then at the children one at a time, the way a man looks at something he intends to remember. Then past them at the road they'd walked in on, red dust still clinging to the hems of their clothes.
Then finally back at the house behind him. The house with the eight chairs and the one plate he set out every evening out of habit more than hope. Before you knocked, Orson said slowly like the words surprised him as much as her. I asked God for a family. The woman went very still.
Mister quit lock. She started careful like she was correcting a man who'd misunderstood a business proposal. I asked for work. Then work is where we'll begin. Orson said God can explain the rest in his own time.
Her name was Miriam Bellamy. And the story of how she'd come to be standing at a stranger's gate with four children and a dead husband's Bible was not a dramatic one, and that was in its own way the saddest part of it. There was no villain in it. No banker circling her land with foreclosure papers. No cruel man scheming to take what little she had.
Just her husband, Ephrame, gone 11 months now, carried off by a fever that started small and did not stay small, and a widow left behind with four children and a debt to living that never once cared whether she could pay it. She had done everything a decent, capable woman could do. She sewed until her fingers cramped. She took in washing until her knuckles cracked from the lie. She kept books for two merchants in town who paid her half what they'd have paid a man and thanked God she didn't argue.
She cooked. She cleaned other people's houses. She watched other people's children so she could scrape together enough to feed her own. And still month by month the money ran out faster than her hands could replace it. So she had packed what remained of her life into three worn bags, gathered her children, tucked Ephraim's Bible against her chest like it was the last solid thing in the world, and started walking down a red dirt road in search of one single thing, work.