My father had wheat fields and a small dairy. I was milking cows and hauling water by the time I was 8. She flexed one large hand. These aren't needlework hands, whatever my letter suggested. But you can sew well enough to keep myself clothed.
Not well enough to make a living at it, or to impress anybody's mother-in-law. She said this last part with a bitter edge. Silas thought about his own hands. Small work roughened, scarred from barbed wire and rope burns and a hundred small ranch injuries. My mother died when I was 12, he said.
Never had a mother-in-law to impress. I'm sorry. Long time ago, he paused. My father died 3 years later. Left the ranch to me and my brother.
We worked it together until he stopped. Until the word hung there heavy with an invitation to truth. Silas gripped the reigns tighter until he died too 6 years ago. Since then, it's just been me. Norah didn't push for details.
Instead, she said, "I'm sorry. That's a lot of alone." "It is," he admitted. And suddenly, inexplicably, he wanted her to understand. That's why I wrote to the matrimonial column.
Not because I wanted a wife. Exactly. Because I was tired of talking to cattle and ghosts. Do the ghosts talk back? More than I'd like.
She nodded as if this made perfect sense. My ghosts are different. They tell me I should be smaller, quieter, less. They sound like every man who ever looked at me and saw something wrong instead of something right. Maybe we're haunted by different things, Silas said, but haunted all the same.
Maybe, Norah agreed. They crested a rise and suddenly there it was. Silas's ranch spread out in the valley below. It wasn't much. A small cabin, a barn in need of repair, a corral, a few outbuildings.
Cattle grazed on the hillside beyond, maybe 40 head, not enough to make a man rich, but sufficient to survive. A creek ran through the property, lined with willows that provided the only real shade for miles. Norah took it all in silently. Silas tried to see it through her eyes. The isolation, the rough simplicity, the utter lack of anything resembling civilization or comfort.