“Sir, This Boy Lived With Me in the Orphanage…” Widow’s Daughter Said — Millionaire Cowboy Went Pale
Chapter 11
Spring came late that year, the way it always did at this altitude, and when it finally came it came all at once, as if it had been waiting for permission. The ice went out of the Silver with a sound like a long-held breath released, and the cottonwoods pushed a green haze up from their branches, and one fine morning Garrett Traven told his son to fetch the rods from the shed.
They walked the well-worn path down to the river camp together, the boy with the poles over his shoulder and the man with a coil of line in his hand, and the wooden eagle on the porch peak turned in the clean spring wind, its peeling paint a map of all the seasons it had stood watch. Garrett had patched the roof over the winter. The boards were new again along the porch, and the door swung on oiled hinges, and inside the little house by the river the iron stove stood cold and clean and waiting, like a friend who had greeted them on the way out and would greet them on the way home.
“You know,” Elias said, sitting down on the bank and threading his line with a concentration he had learned from nobody, “I used to think about this place the way other boys think about heaven. All that time hiding in it, I used to imagine it as it must have been when I was little — the way I couldn’t quite remember, the way I wished it had been.”
“Then let me show you,” Garrett said, sitting down beside him in the grass, “how it was.” And he told him. He told him about the summer his son was three, and the hound Bruno, and the day they had chased a jackrabbit until all three of them — man, boy, and dog — had run clear to the bend in the river, and stood thigh-deep in it laughing, and about Maggie standing on the bank with the light in her eyes, holding the little carved wooden horse she had painted herself.
The boy listened. He did not interrupt. When his father was done, he said, softly, “And the horse. Where is the horse now?”
“It’s in the painting, son. Over the hearth. She painted it for your birthday, and she made me promise that if she went before you came home, the horse would be waiting for you. It’s been waiting ten years. It can wait a little longer until you’re ready to have it down, real, in your hands.”
Elias stared at the river. “Then I guess I’d like to take it down,” he said. “When we get back. I’d like to hold the thing my mother’s hands touched.”
Garrett had to clear his throat twice before he could say, “Then you shall.”
They fished the morning away. They caught nothing worth boasting about, which was perfect, because boys and their fathers have a great deal to say to each other when the fish are not biting, and they said it. By noon the sun had climbed high and the light lay warm on the water, and they walked back through the greening timber in amiable quiet, the way men do when they know the company is good and the talking can wait.
At the top of the rise, before the lane bent down to the gates, Elias stopped and looked back at the little house one more time — at the porch and the eagle and the river, all of it waking, all of it green.
“What will happen to it now?” he asked.
“What do you want to happen to it?” Garrett asked.
Elias thought about it. “I want it to stay,” he said. “I want it to be the place where we can have a whole summer and not be in a hurry. I did my hiding there. I’d like to do some living there now.”
Garrett laid a hand on his shoulder. “Son,” he said, “I’ve spent ten years learning that almost everything I thought I knew about this world was wrong. So let me go ahead and give you a piece of what the world taught me in return: a house is just wood and nails until somebody decides what to do with it. You’ve decided. That’s enough for me.”
They went through the gate together, and on the long white porch of the great house, Sadie Baird was leaning on the railing with a book in her hands — a book on tracking and sign, the first of a shelf of them, and her grandfather’s watch was back on her wrist, ticking. Beside her, Kate sat with a ledger in her lap and a cup of coffee, estate manager of a ranch she had walked into as a maid with a broken wagon, and all four of them, and Jonas leaning in the stable door, watched the spring come down on the Traven land like a held breath finally let go.
Above the hearth, the portrait of the four-year-old with his mother’s light in his eyes looked out over them all, and below it, under glass, two stick-figure children stood holding hands beside a great lopsided hound, safe at last.
And somewhere down the river, in the green, the wooden eagle turned in the wind — turning, turning, keeping watch over the summers that were finally allowed to happen again.
The End