Orphaned and Broke, She Claimed an Abandoned Ranch for FREE—What Was Sealed Inside Changed Everythin
Chapter 6
The question of the sealed door stayed with her through April, but the work came in like weather and carried her along. Glass went into the fourth window. The stovepipe straightened and held. The hen that came in a crate became six hens and a loud rooster, and the eggs came in like small daily wages. She planted the garden by the moon the way Mrs. Crenshaw had taught her, and the peas came up in even rows, and the town of Stonebridge began, slowly, to know her name. Della Grissom greeted her as Miss Ellis and set aside the newspaper for her on Wednesdays, because the paper came in on the Tuesday freight and Cora only came to town on Wednesday afternoons. At the recorder’s office, the clerk whose name she’d learned was Mr. Vale would lower his spectacles on his nose and ask after the north pasture, as though he had known the place all his life. The Hollises stopped by every second Sunday on their way back from church, and Ezra had taken to calling her Miss Cora, and Micah had taken to finding things on the barn that needed doing before he left, and never speaking of them after.
In May she butchered her first hog — a sow she had bought from Maren Oakley for three dollars and raised through the spring on table scraps and corn — and she salted the hams and hung them in the smokehouse from the same beam where Agnes Wakefield’s two blackened hams had hung. She had taken those two old hams down one Sunday, refusing to let them go to waste even in burial, and she had buried them under the tallest pine at the north end of the stand, beside Silas, because it seemed to her that a woman who had salted them with her own hands deserved to have them finish their work in the ground. She built her smoke fire from hickory chips Otis Blume had saved for her out of a broken barrel, and she tended it for three days and two nights, sleeping in the doorway of the smokehouse in her coat so no spark would die while she wasn’t watching. When she finally pulled the hams down and hung them in the cool room off the kitchen, they were the color of dark tea and smelled the way Mrs. Crenshaw’s smokehouse had smelled every October for eleven years.
She began to sell what she did not need. She took two of the hams into Stonebridge in June and sold them to Della Grissom for the mercantile counter, and Della paid her cash and asked her to bring four more in the fall. She took a crock of rendered lard to the boarding house on Elm Street, and the cook there, an old woman named Aunt Florry Cade, sixty-eight, tasted it off the tip of her finger and said it was the cleanest lard she’d bought in seven years, and she would take all Cora could bring her. Aunt Florry paid in silver, and over the boarding-house table, with a cup of coffee between them, she taught Cora how to render tallow for candles, the way somebody had taught her once, back when the world was younger.
By July the house had white curtains at all four front windows, sewn in the evenings from cotton bought with lard money. The porch had two straight-backed chairs set side by side under the front window and a small table between them, where a tin coffee pot sat in the afternoons. She read the newspaper on the porch on Wednesday evenings, and on Sunday mornings she rode Buster into town for the clapboard Methodist chapel at the corner of Second and Pine. The pastor there was a young man named Reverend Dunmore, and he called her sister Ellis and put her on the list to bring cornbread for the second Sunday of every month. She did. Hers went first, every time, and she would not let herself be seen smiling about it, though she was.
One Sunday in July, Micah Hollis lingered after the others had gone down into the yard. She was washing the coffee cups on the porch when he came up the steps holding something. A new wooden latch for the smokehouse door, carved in one piece out of oak, the peg worn smooth where a thumb would find it, the whole thing sanded and oiled until it shone. “Old one,” he said, “was getting to where it stuck,” and he set it in her hands and did not quite meet her eyes when he handed it over. That evening she sanded it a little more herself, although it needed no sanding, and she told herself it was the workmanship she admired, and she kept it in her hands a long time before she put it away. She had not been given a gift, she realized, that had cost somebody their hands, since the last time her father had come home with a sweet in his pocket for her. She hung the old latch on a nail by the door where she could see it, and she did not ask herself why she kept it.