All 9 Children Nobody Wanted Found a Father When a Cowboy Said: They’re Mine Now Forever!
Chapter 6
Word got around the way word does, in a town that small — not carried so much as it drifted, from the general store to the livery to the church steps, and every telling picked up a little mud on the way.
By week’s end, half of Juniper Falls had a firm opinion about the cattleman who’d taken in nine orphans. There were those who said he’d done it for the labor, that he meant to work the older ones like ranch hands. There were those who said it couldn’t last, that he’d give them back by Christmas, that no single man could manage nine children. There were even a few who said worse — the way small minds will, when they have nothing else to sharpen themselves on.
They said those things right up until Mr. Greeley stood up in the middle of the general store, laid his ledger on the counter like a challenge, and told them plainly that he had been out to the Hart place twice, and the judge once, and that he had never in his career seen children better cared for. The next person to say otherwise, he said, could take it up with him directly.
That quieted the store, if not the minds.
Elias paid the gossip no mind at all, because he was busy. He was busy in a way he had not been busy in ten years, and it turned out to be exactly what his hands had been missing.
He hired two men with the last of his cattle money and put up a proper house before the first snow. Four rooms. A great long table. A loft with windows, so the little ones could see the moon from their beds. And the children helped with every board of it — carried timber, held nails, painted everything they could reach, argued about which window was whose, and fell asleep in the straw where the floors would be, wrapped in the same blanket together because that was how they slept now, like a litter of something warm.
He learned them, one by one, the way a man learns a new piece of land. He learned to braid Lottie’s hair — badly at first, then less badly, until the small daily ritual became the anchor of his morning. He learned which of Tess’s stomach aches were real and which meant she was worried about something she did not have words for yet. He learned that Nell had a gift for figures that made grown men look dull, and he rode to town to buy her a slate and came home with the good kind of dust in his eyes. He learned that Ben could gentle a skittish horse better than men twice his size, by some gift of quiet that could not be taught. And he learned that the twins, troublesome as they were, would do anything in the world for each other, and could be trusted with anything at all if you trusted them together.
There was one hard afternoon when a boy from town — a big, loud boy whose father had an opinion — caught Jesse alone at the fence line and said what some of them had been saying about the man who had taken them in. Jesse had stood very still, the way a rope does just before it snaps.
Elias had seen it from the barn. He had walked over slow, not hurrying, and he had not raised his voice. He had simply stood beside the boy until the town boy ran out of words and then out of nerve, and gone. And when it was over, he had said, low, the only thing that needed saying.
“Your fists can win a hundred fights and lose the only one that matters. Know which fights are worth keeping.”
Jesse had nodded. And he had believed him, the way a boy believes a man who has stopped a horse for nine strangers in the rain.
The first snow came in November, and it was not a kind one. It came down for two days without a letup, and the new house stood up to it, and Elias stood at the window with the fire at his back and watched it bury the world in white.
In town, he knew, they were still wagering on him. Give him back by Christmas, they said. No man can do it alone.
He let himself wonder, standing there with the snow falling, if his hands were big enough.
Then the door banged open and Lottie came flying in with a snowball the size of a pumpkin, and Elias caught her up in his arms, snowball and all, and the wondering had to wait.