Orphaned and Broke, She Claimed an Abandoned Ranch for FREE—What Was Sealed Inside Changed Everythin
Chapter 3
He nodded once, dipped his pen, and wrote her name in the ledger in a careful copperplate hand, and then he turned the book around so she could sign beside it. She signed Cora Anne Ellis in the same steady hand her mother had taught her. And just like that, one hundred and sixty acres of somebody else’s failure became hers.
The road out of town ran northwest along the creek for six miles before it climbed onto the bench, and the bench ran another three miles before it dropped into the shallow draw where the ranch buildings stood. The sky was the flat, thin blue of late winter. The wind came off the hills in slow, steady pushes that smelled of old snow and pine sap, and the grass on either side of the road was the color of wheat straw, laid flat by the weather. She walked with the bag balanced on her hip. After the first mile she stopped counting miles and counted fence posts instead — split cedar, gray with age, half of them leaning, the wire rusted the color of old blood. A hawk hunted the draw to her left. A jackrabbit burst from the sage ahead of her, ran a hundred yards, stopped, and looked back at her. She stopped when he stopped, and stood still until he moved on. Mrs. Crenshaw had taught her that most creatures will give you the courtesy of leaving if you give them the courtesy of not chasing.
Twice she set the bag down to shake out her arm and switch hands. Once she sat on a flat rock in the sun and ate the piece of cornbread Mrs. Crenshaw’s cook had pressed into her palm that last Sunday, wrapped in a handkerchief, and drank from a small tin flask, and went on. The road climbed slow and steady, and when she topped the bench the wind rose to meet her, and she pulled her scarf up over her mouth and squinted into it. Out ahead, still a mile off across flat brown grass, she could see the low, dark shapes of a barn, a house, and two smaller outbuildings clustered together in the lee of a stand of pines.
She stopped and looked at them, and she did not smile and she did not sigh, because looking was not the same as arriving and the sun was already tilting west. The last mile took the better part of an hour, the wagon tracks on the benchtop frozen and thawed for three decades without a grater, and she stayed on the shoulder where the grass gave better footing. She came up on the buildings slowly, the way a person comes up on a strange dog. At the sagging corral gate she set the bag down in the grass and looked.
The house was low log and frame, perhaps twenty-four by thirty, a story and a half, with a shingled roof gone silver-green with moss and a stovepipe leaning north where the flashing had failed. The front porch ran the width of the house, and one of its two posts had rotted at the base and been propped with a length of fence rail wedged against a stone. Three of the four front windows still held their glass; the fourth was boarded with a piece of packing crate stenciled with a merchant’s name she couldn’t read. The door was solid pine with iron strap hinges and a wooden latch, and it had not been forced. The barn stood forty yards behind, gambrel-roofed, larger than she had expected, one of its two big doors off its track and leaning inward. Past the barn, half hidden in the shadow of the pines, stood a small square building of stone and mortar with a heavy plank door and no windows at all.
She walked the house first. The latch lifted under her thumb. Inside, the air was cold and dry and smelled of dust and mice and old wood smoke. The front room held a cast-iron cook stove with all four lids in place, and a plank table pushed against the wall. The floorboards were wide pine, dark with years of wax and grime, but sound underfoot. A ladder stair climbed to a loft. At the back, a small bedroom held a rope bedstead stripped to its frame and a horsehair mattress rolled at the foot. She set the carpet bag on the plank table, laid the deed and the Bible beside it, and went back out to walk the rest before the light went. The barn was sound, its stalls good, its loft half full of hay gone gray as fluff. She walked the corral and the chicken house. And last, she came to the stone building behind the barn, and stood in front of it with her hands in her coat pockets, studying the door.
The door was oak four inches thick, banded with iron. Across the seam, where the door met the jamb, a strip of tin had been nailed and then tarred over. And across the tar, someone had driven a second set of nails through a leather strap, and the strap had been sealed a second time with pitch that had gone black and hard as coal. Whoever had closed this door had closed it to stay closed.
She stood there a long moment in the wind, listening to the pines. Then she went back into the house to build a fire and boil creek water, because dark was coming, and the smokehouse could wait one more night. It had waited thirty years already.
That first night she slept in her coat on the horsehair mattress, the carpet bag under her head and the folding knife open on the floor beside her. She woke before light, lit the stove with kindling split from a broken chair, and boiled creek water in the tin coffee can and drank it plain. At sunrise she lifted the hatchet she had found hanging on a peg by the back door, and she went out across the frozen yard through the steam of her own breath, and she stood before the sealed door with the wind pressing at her back and the black tar seam waiting in the flat morning light. One by one, patient as a woman picking stitches, she laid the blade flat against the seal and began.