"Which is why it matters that I came." He didn't answer, but she felt the acknowledgement in the silence. The particular quality of a stubborn man accepting a point he couldn't argue with. They found the first homestead at midday. The Henderson family, two adults and three sea children, came out of their cabin before the wagon was fully stopped, and Martha saw immediately what the cold front had done to them. The youngest child, was bundled in so many layers she could barely move.
The oldest, a boy of about 14, had the particular, carefully neutral expression of someone working very hard not to show how worried he'd been. The mother had her arms around both younger children, and her eyes went straight to the wagon bed with an expression of relief so naked and immediate that it hit Martha somewhere directly behind the sternum. Silas jumped down and had the tailgate open before Martha had finished descending from the bench, which took her a moment because the step was steep, and she'd made this dismount before, and she knew the graceful way to do it wasn't available to her, and she'd stopped pretending years ago that it was. She came down solidly and steadily and moved to the wagon bed to start sorting the goods. The Henderson mother was beside her almost immediately.
"Mrs. Boon," the woman said tentatively. "Whitaker, Martha said." Martha Whitaker, I work for Mr. Boon. She handed the woman a 20 lb sack of flour.
"Can you manage that or should your son take it?" "I've got it," the woman said. And there was something almost fierce in the way she took the sack. The way a woman took something she'd been waiting for and needed. We were down to our last 8b. I've been stretching the biscuits.
You won't need to stretch them for a while. Martha said, "There's 50 lb on this wagon for you." The woman's face did something complicated and private, and Martha looked away to give her room for it. They spent the better part of an hour at the Henderson place. Martha helped carry supplies in, and while she was inside the cabin, she assessed the stove and found that the latch pin was loose, not dangerous yet, but it would be within a few weeks of hard use, and she fixed it with a pin from her apron pocket in the time it took Silas to come back from seeing the horses watered. Mrs.
Henderson watched her do it and didn't say anything. But when Martha turned around, the woman was looking at her with the expression of someone recalibrating what they'd assumed. Where did you learn to do that? She said, "My husband was a freight mechanic." Martha said, "I worked by him for 9 years. She dried her hands on her apron.
Stove's fine now. You'll want to check that pin again in spring." Mrs. Henderson nodded slowly. Then she said, "Does Mr. Boon know what you can do?" Martha considered that for a moment.
"He's learning," she said. The second and third homesteads were smaller. A young couple who'd come out from Pennsylvania 2 years earlier and still had the slightly startled look of people who hadn't entirely reconciled themselves to what Montana in November actually felt. Like and an older Norwegian man named Ericson, who lived alone and received his supplies with the quiet dignity of someone who had never in his life asked for help and had found a way to accept it that preserved that fact in his own mind. Ericson shook Silas's hand and then unexpectedly turned and shook Martha's too.