All 9 Children Nobody Wanted Found a Father When a Cowboy Said: They’re Mine Now Forever!

Chapter 4

For a long moment, nobody moved. The rain filled the silence the way it filled the gutters, steadily and without mercy.

“I’ve got room,” Elias said again, slower this time, as if saying it twice would make it real. “I’ll take all nine.”

Nell, the eleven-year-old, made a small sound and pressed her hand against her mouth. Jesse stood frozen with the baby on his hip, and his careful, grown-up face cracked straight down the middle, and underneath it was just a boy of twelve who had been carrying far too much for far too long.

“Mr. Hart.” Greeley’s voice had gone thin. “Mr. Hart, you can’t simply — a man can’t simply — do you understand what you’re saying? Nine children. Have you a wife?”

“No.”

“A house big enough?”

“Not yet.” Elias’s voice did not rise. “I’ll build it.”

“And you’ll feed them. Clothe them. All nine, through every winter, with no woman in the house and no kin to help you?”

“I’ll learn what I don’t know,” Elias said. “I’ve got land and cattle and two hands that work. And these children have got each other, which is more than most folks ever manage. I’m not going to be the man who takes that away from them.”

He paused. The rain had found its way inside his collar and was running cold down his spine, but he did not feel it. What came next, he did not say for Mr. Greeley at all. He said it for the nine of them, and maybe for himself, and maybe for the two graves he had left at home under the cottonwood.

“I had a family once. A wife and a little girl. I lost them both, ten years back, to the fever. Peaceful at the end, but gone all the same.” His voice dropped until it was barely more than the rain. “And I told myself I was done. That a man only gets the one chance at it, and I’d spent mine.”

He looked down the row of faces, and none of them looked away.

“I don’t believe that’s true anymore. I think a man gets as many chances as he’s brave enough to take. And I’m done being a coward about it.”

It was the longest speech anyone in Juniper Falls had ever heard Elias Hart make, and it was very likely the longest he would ever make again. But it was enough.

Mr. Greeley was quiet a long time. The ledger stayed closed under his arm, and the ink stains on his fingers seemed darker in the gray light. Somewhere under the weariness and the paperwork and the years of thankless work, there was still a man who had taken this job because he could not stand to see children sorted like livestock. He looked at the nine of them, holding hands, watching this stranger with the first fragile light of hope any of them had allowed themselves in days.

“It’s irregular,” he said at last.

“Yes,” Elias agreed.

“It’s the most irregular thing I’ve ever done.” Greeley seemed to be trying to talk himself out of it, and failing. “There’ll be papers. There’ll be a judge who wants to know if you’re fit. I’ll have to come out to your land and see it for myself. And if it’s not what you say, Mr. Hart — if those children aren’t warm and fed and safe — I’ll take every one of them back. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you. Come whenever you like. Bring the judge.”

And here the county agent’s tired face did something it had not done in a long while. It softened.

“But I’ll not split them up today,” he said. “Not when there’s a man standing in front of me fool enough and good enough to want them all.”

He tucked the ledger under his arm and turned for the door.

“Take them home, Mr. Hart. We’ll sort the rest in the morning.”

What happened next none of them would ever be able to describe properly, because some things are too large for words. Nell began to cry, and then Tess, and then little Lottie, who did not entirely understand but knew the older ones were crying the good kind of tears. Jesse set the baby down and turned away so the others would not see his face.

And Elias Hart crossed the muddy steps and put one big hand on the boy’s shaking shoulder and said, low, so only Jesse could hear: “You can put it down now, son. Whatever you’ve been carrying, you can set it down. It’s my turn to carry it a while.”

And Jesse, who had been the man of nine children for three terrible days, finally let himself be twelve.

The ride out to Elias’s land took the better part of two hours, the whole crowd of them piled into a borrowed wagon with his horse tied on behind. The rain had finally thinned to a drizzle, and somewhere in that long, wet ride, a remarkable thing began to happen.

The children began to talk.