The Mail Order Bride Arrived to Find Seven Children and No Mountain Man. She Stayed Anyway.

Chapter 3

That was the plain truth of it. At twenty-eight she was past the age where anyone was bringing her tea and asking about her prospects. The young men of Cincinnati had made their choices; she had made hers, which was to work, and to be useful, and to let the future arrive when it arrived. And then one Tuesday in July, sitting alone in the kitchen after the other boarders had gone to bed, with the smell of starch in her hair and the bones of a wedding dress spread across the table, she had taken a piece of paper and written the advertisement almost without deciding to.

Lonely spinster, 28, plain-spoken, seeks honest man of the West who requires a capable wife. Will cross the country. Reply to Box 74, Cincinnati.

She had not told anyone. She had mailed it the way you drop a stone into a deep well — because you want to know, finally, whether the bottom is water or dirt.

Four responses came back.

The first was from a man in Kansas who described his livestock in more detail than his character, and Pearl set it aside. The second was from a widower in Nebraska who wanted “a woman who does not complain,” and Pearl set that aside too, because a man who opens a letter with that sentence has already told you everything about the years to come. The third was from a miner in Colorado who was less interested in a wife than in someone to sign for his supplies, and she burned that one without finishing it.

The fourth was different.

It was from a man in the Wyoming territory named Nathan Vance, and what made his letter different was not what it said but the way it said it. He did not promise her a house with roses. He did not describe the sunset. He wrote about his homestead — two hundred acres on the west side of the Sweetwater River, timber on the upper slope, good pasture lower down — with the precise, unromantic attention of a man who had built the thing himself and knew, to the dollar and the frost line, exactly what it was. He described his three oldest children, and he did it with details that made Pearl set the letter down and read it twice.

The oldest, Jonah, runs the place better than most men run a bank, but he forgets to eat. Ruth keeps the kitchen the way a general keeps a fort. The twins — you will tell them apart faster than I did; they are not nearly as alike as they pretend.

He did not mention his dead wife.

Pearl noticed this the way you notice a missing tooth in a smile. The other letters had been full of dead wives — saintly, memorialized, compared. This man wrote about his children with more attention than most men wrote about their land, and about his wife not at all, and Pearl thought: A man who knows what not to say is worth writing back to.

So she wrote back.

Four letters in all, over three months, each one longer than the last, each one containing something she had not expected. He was funny in a dry way that did not announce itself — he told her the river flooded in April and the cabin had never once floated away, “though the cat has opinions on the matter.” He was honest about what the homestead could give and what it could not. It is not an easy life, he wrote once, but it is a real one.

Pearl read that sentence so many times the paper went soft at the fold. She had packed her trunks in the first week of April, bought her ticket, and spent nine days on a train heading west through states that grew flatter and bleaker and more enormous, watching the America she knew slide past the window and the America she had chosen rise up in its place.

His last letter had promised he would be at the cabin on the fourteenth of April to receive her.

Below his signature, in smaller letters, he had added: I believe you will find it worth the journey.

She had thought about that sentence for nine days. A man who says he believes a thing is either right about the thing or wrong about it, and the only way to find out which was to go.

She had gone.

And now she stood in his kitchen with flour up to her elbows, seven children around her like a question she had not yet learned to answer, and the man who had written I believe you will find it worth the journey was somewhere on the far side of a snowed-in pass, three weeks and a mountain away, having no idea that the woman he had invited west had already stopped being a stranger to his children.

Somewhere in the second week, Pearl would realize she had stopped being afraid. That was the thing about deciding — it burned the fear out of you. She had come west to marry a man she had never met. She had found seven children and an empty doorway and a sixteen-year-old running a household on grit and resentment, and she had looked at all of it and made biscuits.

She did not know, yet, that Nathan Vance was about to come home to a house that no longer needed him to save it. That it was already, in some quiet and irrevocable way, hers.