They Mocked Her 37 Giant Chickens—Then Their Eggs Saved an Entire Frontier Town

Chapter 2

Highwater looked exactly the way Maren remembered it, which was to say it looked like a town that had once intended to be somewhere and had quietly reconsidered. A half-mile of packed dirt ran between wooden buildings that leaned the way tired people lean after a long day of being upright. There was a mercantile, a saloon, a blacksmith’s, a church with a bell nobody rang twice, and a barber shop with a law office squeezed above it. At the far end, like a period on a disappointing sentence, sat the bank.

People watched her climb down from the stage. A woman traveling alone with one trunk was not remarkable in Fairbrook; in Highwater, it was a parade. She recognized the mercantile keeper, Mrs. Farrow, thinner and grayer than seven years’ memory allowed. Old Emmett Hale had let her ride his mule when she was nine, and he touched his hat now without quite meeting her eyes. Men outside the saloon looked at her the way small-town men look at anything that bends the routine. No one offered to carry her trunk. She hadn’t expected them to. She had hoped, though, which was worse.

The walk to the farm took forty minutes, and by the time she crested the last rise, the sun had gone low and amber, giving the place a grace note it didn’t deserve. The house was still standing. That was more than she’d feared and less than she’d hoped. The porch sagged on one corner where a post had rotted through. Two windows had cracked from weather and neglect. The front door hung three inches open, as if the house had been expecting her and had grown tired of waiting and dozed off.

The barn was worse — one wall bowed inward, and a hole in the roof showed sky. The henhouse stood emptier than she could bear to look at. The garden fence had collapsed. When she worked the well pump, it made the sound a dying animal makes, and nothing came.