All 9 Children Nobody Wanted Found a Father When a Cowboy Said: They’re Mine Now Forever!
Chapter 5
They talked shyly at first, then all at once, the way a creek breaks up in spring. Ben wanted to know if there were horses. There were. Dolly wanted to know if she could have a job, a real one, because she was very good at jobs, and she could. The twins wanted to know everything at the same time and at top volume, and between them they asked more questions in one mile than Elias had been asked in ten years. He answered every one he could, and for the ones he couldn’t, he made up reasonable answers that were true enough for the road.
He did not talk about the graves. He did not talk about Clara or Ada. He drove the wagon with his eyes on the mud and let the sound of nine voices wash over him, and by the time they came over the last rise and his land spread out below them — gray and green and rain-washed and beautiful — even Jesse was smiling.
The house was small. That was the plain fact of it. Elias’s cabin had been built for one man who did not expect company, and it had two rooms and a loft and nowhere near enough of anything. The children did not see a small house. They saw a fire, which Elias built up high. They saw a roof that did not leak. They saw a man moving around the kitchen with the awkward determination of someone who has decided to learn how to feed nine children and intends to begin immediately.
His first attempt at supper was, by his own cheerful admission, not fit for the hogs.
They ate it anyway. All of it.
And they laughed. Elias suspected they had not done that in some while, and the sound of it filled the small house all the way up to the rafters and came back down on him from all directions. He stood in the middle of it, a dishtowel over his shoulder, and let it happen.
That night he gave the children his bed and the loft and every blanket he owned. He built the fire high and sat down with his back to the hearth and the baby asleep against his chest, her small fists curled around his shirt like she meant to hold on to him.
He did not sleep at all. And he was not tired.
He watched the rain finally ease off past the window, watched the last of the gray go out of the sky. He listened to the breathing of nine children in a house that had been silent for ten years — the little flutters and sighs and the occasional murmur of a sleeping dream. And Elias Hart, who had told himself for a decade that he wanted nothing and needed no one, discovered that he had been lying the whole time.
The truth came up on him quiet as the dawn, and it frightened him more than any fever or flood he had ever faced. He looked down at the sleeping child and understood, with a terror that had nothing to do with the cold, that he would rather die than fail these children.
He spent the dark hours after that not planning, not counting, but simply sitting with the weight of it, the way a man sits with a newborn foal in the hay and waits to see whether it will stand. Outside, the first wind of autumn rattled the shutters. Inside, the baby breathed, and the fire ticked, and nine small hearts beat under his roof.
In the town he had left behind, word was already spreading like water through dry ground. And by the time the first snow came, half of Juniper Falls would have an opinion about the cattleman who had taken in nine orphans.
Not all the opinions would be kind.