At 19, Her Stepmother Sent Her to a Mountain Man — But He Became the Family She Never Had

Chapter 6

Something changed in Barlow’s face. It was fast — a flicker, gone almost before it came — but I saw it, and so did Asher. And I understood I’d just watched a bluff land on something real.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Barlow said.

Too quick.

“Sure you don’t.” Asher almost smiled. “You tell him anyway, word for word. Blake knows what’s under the land. And then you watch his face when you say it, Barlow, and you’ll know whether I’m bluffing a lot better than you know right now.”

Barlow sat his horse a long moment. Then he gathered the reins, jerking the animal’s head around.

“This ain’t done,” he said.

“Never is.” Asher didn’t move. “Ride safe.”

They rode. I stood beside Asher and watched the three of them go down the north track at a trot, no swagger left in it. I waited until the sound of them had faded into the pines before my legs gave out and I sat down hard in the garden dirt.

Asher was beside me in a moment, as fast as that leg would let him, lowering himself down with a grunt. He didn’t touch me. Just sat there.

“You did good,” he said. “You hear me? You did good. Better than good.”

“I’m shaking.”

“Of course you’re shaking. That’s your body telling you it just did something hard.” He looked at me, and there was something new in his face. Something that looked almost like wonder. “You said no right to his teeth. You know how many grown men in this county would say no to Seth Barlow? I could count them on this hand.”

He held up his hand, made a fist of it, then opened it.

“Just you?”

I laughed, wet, half a sob. It didn’t feel brave. It felt like falling.

“That’s what brave feels like, Carrie.” He said it gently. “Anybody tells you different is selling something.”

I wiped my face and steadied. Then I asked the question that had been building since the yard.

“What’s under the land?”

His expression closed. Not against me, I understood. Just close, the way a man closes a door on a room he doesn’t go into.

“Later,” he said. “I’ll tell you. You’ve earned the truth of it, and you’ll have it. But not sitting in the dirt with my heart still going. Let me get up off this ground first, would you, before my leg locks and you have to fetch the horse to haul me.”

I laughed again, real this time. I got to my feet, and before I’d thought about whether I was allowed, I reached down and offered him my hand.

He looked at it. For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake, crossed the careful line he’d drawn. I started to pull it back.

Then his big scarred hand closed around mine — warm and rough and gentle — and I braced and pulled. He came up off the ground with a grunt and a great deal of his own effort. For one second we were standing close, my hand still in his, both of us a little startled by it.

He let go first. Carefully.

“Thank you,” he said gruff.

“You’re welcome.”

Neither of us said anything about how it was the first time I’d touched him on purpose.

He told me that night. He told me at the fire after supper, and I listened with my coffee cup cold in my hands and the stars coming out thick overhead.

“This land was my father’s,” he said, “and his father’s before. The Blakes have been on this mountain sixty years. About four years back, a survey man came through — county work, mapping the creeks — and he took me aside quiet. He told me something he wasn’t supposed to.”

He stared into the coals.

“He told me there’s silver in the creek rock. Not a little. A vein running right under the north pasture, under this cabin, under the whole ridge. He said in five years, when the big money came looking, this land would be worth more than every acre in the valley put together.”

He turned his cup around and around in his hands.

“He told me one more thing. He said Everett Payne had already been asking around. Buying up quiet. Getting men to sign notes they couldn’t pay so he could take their land when they defaulted. Building himself an empire on the back of a secret only a handful of people knew.”

I went cold. “The debts,” I whispered. “That’s why he holds so much paper. He’s not a banker. He’s building a mine out of other people’s ruin.”

Asher nodded. “One farm at a time. One family at a time. ‘Sign here, ma’am. Sorry about your husband, ma’am. Oh dear, you’ve defaulted, ma’am. I’ll take the deed.’ And nobody in that valley knows why Payne’s bank is so eager to lend to folks who can’t pay it back. But I know.”

He looked up at me. “And now you know.”

“Your land,” I said, my mind racing. “You’re on top of the vein. The best of it. He needs you gone.”

Asher said it flat. “He’s needed me gone for four years. And I’ve held on because a man can hold on to a mountain a long time if he don’t owe anybody anything and don’t want anything from anybody. No debt for Payne to call. No family for him to lean on. Nothing he could take.”

A pause. “Till eight days ago.”

“Me?”

“You.” His jaw worked. “The second I stood up in that square and put myself between you and that woman, Payne had it. The first thing I’d wanted in four years. The first thing I’d protect. The first lever he could pull.”

He shook his head, and there was something raw in it. Something like guilt.

“I’m sorry, Carrie. Truth is, by helping you, I painted a mark on your back. Barlow coming up here today — that’s not about the debt. It’s about you being the one thing on this mountain that Payne can use to move me off it.”

“Don’t.” My voice came out fierce, surprising us both. “Don’t you dare apologize for the only decent thing anyone’s done for me in two years. Don’t.”

He went quiet.

“You want to know what would have happened if you’d left me in that square?” I leaned toward the fire, toward him. “I’d be back in Lavinia’s house tonight, or worse. And I’d be nothing. And no one would ever have said the word no on my account as long as I lived. So don’t you sit there and tell me you’re sorry you saved me. You can be sorry it’s hard. You can be sorry it’s dangerous. But don’t you be sorry you did it.”

My voice cracked.

“Because it’s the first time in my whole life somebody looked at me and decided I was worth the trouble. And I won’t have you take it back.”

The fire popped. Somewhere off in the dark, a night bird called. Asher looked at me across the coals for a long, long moment, and something moved in his weathered face that I’d never seen there before. Not the stillness. Not the guarded quiet. Something opening. Something that had been shut so long it had near forgotten how.

“All right,” he said low and rough. “All right, Carrie. I won’t take it back.”

Neither of us slept much that night.