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

Chapter 9

It was Nathan who asked her, one evening in the autumn of that first year, with the kitchen warm and the children asleep and the fire burning down to its red heart.

“Why didn’t you leave?”

It was a fair question. He asked it the way he asked all his questions now — carefully, without assuming the shape of the answer. Pearl considered it the way she considered everything, honestly and at length.

She could have said I had nowhere else to go. It would have been true, in the way the surface of a thing is true. She could have said I needed the work. Also true, and also not the whole of it. But she had come west, she understood now, to be a wife, and she had turned out to be something else entirely, and the something else was the answer.

“I looked at Hughie on my foot,” she said, “and Jonah in the doorway, and Ruth counting the children before bed. And I understood that these were not seven problems.”

“What were they?”

“Seven people,” Pearl said, “who needed someone to treat them like people.”

“That’s a very specific thing to say.”

“I try to be specific.”

He looked at her the way he had looked at her over Hughie’s head on the day he came home, and Pearl had learned, by then, what that look meant.

What she had arrived to find and what she had found were two different things. She had arrived expecting Nathan at the door, and a house, and a future that looked the way the letters had drawn it. She had found seven children and a homestead in April and a sixteen-year-old holding it all together, and a man who had been too afraid of the number to tell her the truth about it. And she had stayed anyway.

And in the staying, she had found what Nathan’s letter had promised without quite saying it.

A real one. Not easy. Not what the letters had described. Real. With Hughie on her foot and Ruth in the doorway and Jonah making coffee without being asked and a man who came home to find everything changed and was grateful for it.

Nathan had come home in May to a house that was running, a garden that was planted, children who were fed and calm, and a woman standing in it who had a name for his children that was not the name on the agreement. He had come home to find that the woman he had been afraid to tell about all seven had looked at all seven, and stayed anyway.

He had been afraid the number would be too much.

What he had not understood, when he was afraid, was that seven was not a number to Pearl. It was seven people. Each one specific. Each one hers to tend.

Some women came west as mail-order brides and found the frontier hard and went back east. Some came and stayed, but never stopped measuring the distance between what they had been promised and what they found. Pearl Avery — Pearl Vance now, a name that had taken her three months to stop tripping over — had arrived in the valley on the fourteenth of April, 1876, and found seven children and no husband, and made biscuits that first afternoon, and planted a garden in straight rows, and called the oldest boy by his name, and waited for a mountain man who came home three weeks late.

She was still there.

She intended to stay.

And she intended to stay because she had found, in seven children and two hundred acres and one careful man who read his letters three times, the thing she had crossed nine days of country to find.