Mail-Order Bride Arrived in Rags — The Rancher’s Daughter Whispered, “Please Be Our Mama”

Chapter 5

The letter arrived on a Thursday, a full week after the marriage, and it came from Ohio.

The marriage had taken place eight days after Eleanor’s arrival, at the church in Morrow Creek, with the minister and four witnesses, which was the standard arrangement for situations of this kind in the territory, and it was treated by everyone present with a practical seriousness that did not require romance to be present in order to be valid. William had asked her, two days in, whether she wanted to wait. She had said she did not see what waiting would change, and he had said neither did he, and so it was done.

What Eleanor had not expected — what no one had warned her about — was the way the wedding itself had gone. The minister had said the words, and the four witnesses had witnessed, and William Barrett had taken her hand at the moment the ceremony called for it, and he had held it a moment longer than the ceremony strictly required.

She had not noticed at the time. She had noticed later, turning it over in her mind the way you turn over a coin you have found, trying to decide if it is worth anything.

But that was before the letter.

The letter was from her brother, James. It had been written in March and had followed her across the territory, from town to town, catching up with her the way bad news always does. The handwriting was his — cramped, impatient, the writing of a man who has decided something and expects everyone else to fall in line.

He had heard, through the school board, that she had gone west. He wrote that he could get her position back at the schoolhouse in Findley, that the seat was still open, that Mr. Hathaway had said she was welcome to it anytime. He wrote that the town was talking, that people said she had made a mistake, a widow of two years running off to marry a stranger in a territory, a man she had never laid eyes on, for nothing but paper and promises. He wrote that he feared for her. He wrote that she had always been headstrong, and that grief did strange things to a woman, and that if she wanted to come home, no one would hold the trip west against her.

Eleanor read it twice at the kitchen table, in the middle of the afternoon, while the house was empty and the wind pushed at the windows.

She did not answer it. She folded it carefully, the way you fold something you intend to keep or intend to hide, and she tucked it into the inside pocket of the blue dress, which hung in the wardrobe in her room. The dress had been mended and worn and mended again; the pocket was deep and hidden, and the letter stayed there, and no one knew.

That night, she could not sleep. She lay awake listening to the wind, and to the house settling, and to her own thoughts, which would not be quiet. She had chosen this. She had answered an advertisement in a Cincinnati paper in January — “Rancher, two children, seeking capable woman for marriage and household management. Character references required” — and she had written back, and she had come, and she had married a man she had known only through careful handwriting and practical sentences. And it had been, against all expectation, a good arrangement. A good house. Good children. A good man.

But the letter had opened a door in her that she had nailed shut, and through it she could see the schoolhouse in Findley, and the small town that had known her as a wife and then as a widow, and the particular gentle distance with which small towns treat a woman whose situation has changed in a way nobody quite knows how to discuss.

She did not know how long she lay there. The house was dark. The wind had dropped.

And then she heard it — the small sound of the door to her room opening, barely a whisper, and the even smaller sound of bare feet on the floorboards.

“Mama?” a voice whispered. Then, quickly, corrected: “Eleanor. Are you awake?”

Eleanor sat up. In the dark she could make out the shape of Abby in her nightgown, small and serious, standing at the foot of the bed.

“I’m awake,” Eleanor said. “What is it, love?”

Abby did not come closer. She stood very straight, the way children stand when they are delivering a message they have been holding for a while.

“You’re not going away, are you?” Abby said.

Eleanor’s heart turned over. “Going away?”

“The letter,” Abby said. “The man brought it, and you didn’t talk at supper, and Papa looked at you all night. And I thought, well — the last mama went away. Papa said she didn’t choose to, but I was little, and I didn’t understand, and I thought maybe she didn’t want to stay. And now there’s a letter, and you look like a person who’s deciding something, and I wanted to ask you before you decided, so you’d know —” she stopped, swallowed, and finished in a rush — “so you’d know I’d be sad. And Elias would too, even though he wouldn’t say it.”

Eleanor got out of bed, and she crossed the dark room, and she knelt down in front of the child, and she took both of Abby’s small hands in hers.

“I am not going anywhere,” she said. “There was a letter, yes. From my brother, in Ohio. He thinks I made a mistake, coming here. But he is not the one who lives here now. I am.”

“You’re staying?” Abby said.

“I’m staying,” Eleanor said. “And not because I have nowhere else to go. Because I want to be here. Do you understand the difference?”

Abby considered this for a long moment, with the complete seriousness of a six-year-old who has been asked a question worth answering.

“I think so,” she said. “You’re like the flowers.”

“The flowers?”

“You didn’t pick them because you had to,” Abby said. “You picked them because you wanted them there.”

Eleanor pulled her close, and Abby’s arms went around her neck, and neither of them spoke for a while. And over the child’s shoulder, Eleanor looked at the wardrobe, where the blue dress hung in the dark, and the letter in its pocket, and she thought: James can have the schoolhouse. I have a family.