The scream came from upstairs, high and furious, followed by the thunder of boots on the staircase and the slam of the front door hard enough to rattle the windows. And Cal Witmore didn't even look up from his coffee. That'll be five, he said to no one in particular. Through the kitchen window, he watched Miss Perdu, housekeeper number five, march across the yard toward the road with her carpet bag banging against her knee and her bonnet a skew. Shouting something about snakes and unnatural children that he couldn't quite make out and didn't especially want to.
She didn't look back once. None of them ever did. Out at the barn, hidden behind the hay wagon where they thought he couldn't see them. His three sons were slapping each other's palms in wild silent triumph. Luke grinning wide enough to split his face.
Mark hopping from foot to foot. Even little Johnny clapping along, though he was probably too young to fully understand what victory he was celebrating. Cal set down his cup and rubbed his face with both hands. 11-year-old Luke was clearly the ring leader, the way he always was, and Cal ought to march out there and tan all three of their hides. He ought to at least raise his voice the way a proper father would, the way he might have once before the house went quiet and gray around him.
Instead, he just sat there tired down to his bones and thought about how he hadn't apologized to a single one of the five housekeepers who'd fled his house since Sarah died. Because apologizing would have meant admitting there was something in this house that needed apologizing for, and he wasn't sure he had the strength left to look at that straight on. The boys didn't need a mother replaced. That was what he told himself over and over like a man reciting a psalm he no longer entirely believed. They needed time.
They needed their father to stop being a ghost at his own table. He knew both of those things were true and he did neither. And every letter from the agency in town felt like one more accusation he couldn't quite answer. He watched Miss Perdu's shrinking shape at the end of the road, and wondered, not for the first time, whether he ought to just give up on the notion of a housekeeper altogether, and let the boys run wild until they were grown, since it seemed a considerably cheaper and less humiliating way to fail them. Then he thought of the letter still sitting unopened on the mantle, the one from the agency, promising him one more candidate, a widow this time, Abess Hartley, said to have grown up on a ranch with seven brothers, and to be, in the AY's careful words, unlikely to be easily discouraged.
Cal almost laughed. He was fairly sure nothing short of a mountain lion would discourage his sons at this point, and he wasn't entirely convinced a mountain lion would win. Bessartly arrived on a Tuesday with a single trunk, a nononsense hat, and the settled calm of a woman who had grown up wrestling seven brothers for the last biscuit, and had by her own account, seen every trick a boy could dream up at least twice already. She shook Cal's hand firmly, looked over his three sons with an assessing eye that made even Luke shift on his feet, and declared the house lived in, which is better than empty, before setting to work unpacking without waiting to be shown where anything belonged. That first night, she found the snake curled neat as a coiled rope beneath her quilt.
Bess did not scream. She lit the lamp, looked at the thick modeled brown length of it, noted with a practitioner's eye that it had no triangular head and no rattle, and picked it up firmly behind the neck the way her brothers had taught her on a dozen worse specimens back in Texas, when a snake in the bed roll had been considered a fairly ordinary Tuesday. "Well," she said to the snake, holding it up to the lamplight for a better look, "you're a bold one, aren't you? Somebody went to considerable trouble for you tonight. She wrapped it loosely in a spare pillowcase, set it on the wash stand, and went to sleep without another thought about it, sleeping straight through until the rooster, the way she always had.