He did not tell her much about himself during that dance or the brief conversation that followed over coffee.

He asked her questions instead, careful questions about what Missouri had been like and what she thought of Cimarron, and whether the schoolhouse stove was drawing properly because he happened to know it had a bad flue joint.

She answered honestly and found that his questions were genuine, that he was actually listening to the answers rather than simply waiting for his turn to speak.

But when she turned the questions toward him, when she asked what the ranch was like or what he thought of the county or whether he had family nearby, his answers became brief and complete, the kind of answers that technically satisfy a question while giving away nothing of the person behind them.

He was, she thought on the ride back to her rented room above the milliner’s shop, the most contained person she had ever met.

She did not see him again for 6 weeks after that because the ranch kept him occupied, and she had her own rhythms of teaching and grading and keeping herself fed and tidy in a new But June brought a stretch of dry weather that dried the creek beds and made the ranchers anxious, and in June, Frederick Morgan started coming into town more regularly to check on the water situation and to confer with other ranchers about the communal wells.

He began stopping by the schoolhouse, not for any particularly announced reason.

The first time, he brought a load of split firewood and stacked it beside the schoolhouse door, saying that winter came early in this country and she should have a good supply laid in before September.

She thanked him sincerely.

The second time, he brought her a copy of a Cimarron newspaper from 1875 that had a long article about the history of the Ute people and the land grants in the territory.

Because she had mentioned to Clara Elkins that she wanted to teach her older students some regional history and didn’t have good materials.

The third time he stopped with no particular errand and asked whether the flue joint had been fixed and she said it had not and he fixed it himself in 40 minutes with a tin snip and some solder he kept in his saddlebag.

She made him coffee from what she kept in the schoolhouse for her own use and he sat at one of the children’s desks which made him look enormous and a little absurd and they talked for an hour.

That was the beginning.

Through June and into July, these visits became a quiet rhythm between them, irregular but consistent like rainfall in that country.

He might come twice in one week and not appear for 10 days after.

He never announced when he was coming and she never asked him to.

She simply found herself aware on certain afternoons that she was listening for a particular horse’s hooves on the packed earth outside.

He was teaching her things without making it a lesson.

He taught her which way the wind needed to be blowing to mean rain was coming and which clouds to watch for and why the cattle moved a certain way when the barometric pressure dropped.

She taught him things without meaning to in the way that a person who loves words tends to make the people around them more attentive to language.

He started noticing when she used a phrase he hadn’t heard before and once she caught him looking at the primer she kept on her desk with the kind of focused attention she recognized from her most determined students.

“Can I ask you something?” She said one afternoon in July when the heat was layered and golden through the schoolhouse windows.

“You can ask.

” He said which was not quite the same as saying yes but she understood his permission was in it.

“Did you go to school?” she asked.

He was quiet for a moment.

“Some.

” he said.

“My mother taught me to read when I was small.

She was a good reader.

After she died I didn’t have much schooling.

My father needed me on the ranch.

” “How old were you?” she asked.

“When your mother died?” “Eight.

” he said.

She did not say she was sorry.

She said “That must have made reading feel lonely sometimes.

” He looked at her with an expression she had not seen on him before.

Not quite surprised but something adjacent to it.

Something that said she had put her finger on something he had never quite put words to himself.

“Yes.

” he said.

“That is exactly what it was.

” He asked her that same afternoon if she would come and see the ranch.

She said yes before she had time to wonder if she should be more circumspect about it and the following Sunday she rode out with him on a borrowed horse from the livery, a sensible gray mare who was reliably unbothered by everything.

The 8 miles to the ranch took them through country that gradually opened up from the tight draws near town into a wide valley where the light fell at a different angle where the sky seemed to have more room to be itself.

The ranch headquarters sat against a rise of red-orange rock that turned vivid in the late afternoon and the house was a long adobe structure with a deep covered porch along its front and there were cottonwood trees along the creek that caught and spun whatever air was moving.

She fell in love with the place before she had time to register that she was doing it.

He showed her the house which was clean and spare and austere in the way of a place where no woman had lived in a long time.

There were good tools, good saddles, good working equipment everywhere she looked but the domestic side of things had been managed at the level of functional rather than comfortable.

There were no curtains.

There was one quilt on the iron framed bed in the main room and it was worn thin.

The kitchen had what it needed and not much more.

“Dale’s wife sends over a pot of something on Sundays.

” he said almost as if he was explaining to himself why he didn’t look starved.

“And Hector cooks most evenings if he’s here.

” “Who does the house?” she asked.

“I do.

” he said.

“When it needs it.

” She looked at him.

He did not look embarrassed by this.

He simply stated it as a fact the same way he stated everything as though the temperature of a thing was separate from whether it needed to be reported.

She met Hector Ray that afternoon and she liked him immediately.

He was a man of about 30 with a calm steadiness to him and a dry sense of humor that emerged in small flashes.

He had been with the Morgan ranch for 4 years and it was clear he understood Frederick Morgan well, perhaps better than most people managed to because he had simply watched long enough to learn the man’s grammar.

Dale Purvis was away that Sunday but she met young Rufus who turned bright red when introduced to her and knocked over a water bucket that had been sitting perfectly still minding its own business.

She rode home that evening in the long amber light of a July dusk and she thought about a lot of things and one of the things she thought was that Frederick Morgan was the most interesting person she had encountered in a very long time and that this was inconvenient because he was as closed as a locked trunk and she did not know yet whether he had lost the key or was simply very careful about who he handed it to.

August came with its full force of heat and the summer settled into itself and Susanna found that her life in Cimarron had arranged itself into something that felt like it belonged to her.

She had her school children who were a daily delight in the way that only children who genuinely want to learn can be.

She had a small circle of women acquaintances, Clara Elkins foremost among them, who met on Wednesdays to sew and talk.

She had her room above the milliner’s which she had made comfortable with a few deliberate touches, a folded shawl across the chair, a small vase she kept fresh flowers in when they were available, her books lined up along the windowsill where the light would fall on their spines.

And she had Frederick Morgan’s visits which had become the punctuation marks of her week the moment she found herself orienting toward without fully admitting why.

He was not courting her.

Or if he was, he was doing it by the most indirect method available which was simply to be in her presence as much as could be reasonably justified, to talk with her, to bring her things that were useful, to ask questions about her thoughts on things that ranged from Abraham Lincoln’s legacy to whether the new preacher in Springer was actually as bad as people said.

He never touched her.

He never said anything that could be classified as a declaration of any kind.

He was simply there consistently, reliably like a good fence post.

She understood something important about him in late August during a conversation that happened on her small rented porch in the evening when he had ridden in to bring her a book she had mentioned once weeks ago wanting to read.

He had tracked down a copy somewhere which in Cimarron required real effort and he handed it to her without ceremony and sat down in the other chair.

“You remembered.

” she said turning it over in her hands.

“I usually do.

” he said.

“Why don’t you talk more about yourself?” she asked directly because she had learned that indirect approaches with this man produced minimal returns.

He was quiet for longer than usual.

A moth circled the oil lamp on the railing.

Somewhere a night bird called twice and went silent.

“Not much to be gained from it.

” he finally said.

“For whom?” she asked.

“Either one of us.

” he said.

“I disagree.

” she said.

“I think when people say that they usually mean it feels risky.

” He looked at her in the lamplight and she held his gaze and something moved in his expression that she had come to associate with the moments when she got close enough to something true in him that he felt it.

“My father was not a man who spoke about what was inside him.

” he said slowly picking each word like he was selecting stones for a particular purpose.

“He worked.

He provided.

He was present.

” “But he never said aloud what he thought or felt about anything that mattered and I was raised thinking that was what it was to be a man of substance.

” She waited.

“I’m aware now that it wasn’t the complete picture.

” he said.

“But habits of that kind are not simply abandoned.

” “No.

” she said gently.

“They’re not but they can be worked on.

” He looked at her with that expression again.

The one that was adjacent to surprise.

And she thought that perhaps this man had not had many people in his life who thought his interior world was worth working on.

Worth the trouble of excavating carefully rather than leaving sealed.

She thought about that for a long time after he rode back toward the ranch in the dark.

September came and school resumed its full schedule after the summer break and the mornings turned cool while the afternoons stayed warm and the whole territory had that feeling of bracing itself for what was coming.

The aspens on the higher slopes turned gold and there was an early frost that left silver patterns on the schoolhouse windows in the morning.

Susanna wore her wool coat walking to school and felt for the first time since coming west a particular contentment that she recognized as something close to belonging.

The trouble started in September and it came from a direction she hadn’t anticipated.

A man named Harland Briggs arrived in Cimarron.

He was from Santa Fe, representing a land company that was making claims throughout the territory based on old Spanish land grant interpretations that were, depending on who was reading them, either perfectly legal or deeply corrupt.

The Colfax County War had been, in part, about exactly this kind of land manipulation, and everyone in the county knew it.

And most people still had raw feelings about it.

Harland Briggs was 38 years old and had the kind of assured good looks that came with money and the confidence of a man who had rarely been told no.

He was educated and charming in the way of men who used those qualities as instruments rather than genuine expressions.

He wore clean suits and good boots, and he set up in the hotel and began conducting business.

He came to the schoolhouse 3 days after arriving in Cimarron.

He said he was interested in supporting education in the territory, which turned out to mean he was interested in Suzanna Fletcher.

He asked if he could bring supplies for the schoolhouse, which she allowed, and then he began calling, at first under the pretense of checking on the donated supplies, and later with no pretense at all.

He brought her flowers twice.

He was conversational and attentive and told good stories about Santa Fe, and he was, objectively, a man any woman in 1878 might have been expected to consider a good prospect.

Suzanna was not entirely unaffected by the attention.

She was honest with herself about that.

A man who showed up consistently and said things directly and brought flowers and made his intentions clear was not an unwelcome thing after months of Frederick Morgan, who showed up consistently and never said anything directly and had never, in the history of their acquaintance, brought her flowers, and whose intentions remained as encrypted as a safe without a combination.

She mentioned Harland Briggs to Frederick on his next visit in the mild, informational way one mentions things that are simply true and present.

She watched Frederick’s face go absolutely still in a way that was different from his usual contained stillness, the way water goes still before it freezes.

“I know of Briggs,” he said.

“His company has made claims on two ranches west of here.

One of those families left.

The other is still fighting it.

” “Is that the entirety of your opinion of him?” she asked.

“Professionally,” he said, “yes.

” “And personally?” she asked.

He looked at the grain of the wood on her porch railing with the intensity he might have given a complex problem in calf management.

“He is the kind of man who is accustomed to getting what he wants,” he said.

“As opposed to the kind of man who isn’t,” she said.

“As opposed to the kind of man who is accustomed to earning what he has,” he said and looked up at her.

She held his gaze for a long moment.

“Frederick,” she said carefully.

“I am going to say something plainly, and I would like you to receive it plainly.

” He nodded.

“I am not certain what this is between us,” she said, “and I think that is because you are not certain, or if you are certain, you haven’t said it.

And I cannot continue to wait for something that may never come.

” The silence that followed was long and weighted, and she could see him working through it, could see the effort of it on his face, the way a man looks when he is lifting something genuinely heavy.

“I know,” he said finally, and that was all he said.

She waited 3 more seconds.

He said nothing else.

“All right,” she said quietly, and that was where that conversation ended.

October arrived and the leaves finished their turning, and the Cimarron River ran lower and colder, and the sky took on that particular depth of blue that comes only in the high country in autumn.

Suzanna continued seeing Frederick on his visits, which continued with their reliable irregularity, and she also continued to allow Harland Briggs to call, though she kept those interactions properly bounded.

She was not in love with Harland Briggs, and she was not going to pretend to be.

But she was a practical woman, and she understood the arithmetic of her situation.

She was 26 years old, a schoolteacher in a frontier town with no family nearby and no particular safety net.

She had been offered, in all but the most explicit terms, the prospect of a comfortable life by a man who was capable of directly expressing what he wanted.

Against that she had the most confusing, most richly complicated, most frustrating and inexplicably dear person she had met in her life, who sat at her porch on autumn evenings and talked to her about the sky and the cattle and the history of the land and the books she read, and who looked at her sometimes with an expression that she was fairly certain could only be called one thing, but who had never, in 6 months of consistent presence, said a single word that constituted a claim.

Clara Elkins, who was perceptive in the way that deeply kind women often are, stopped Suzanna after church in late October and said, “You know that Frederick Morgan has never, once in this entire county, been seen calling regularly on a woman.

Not since I have known him, which has been 11 years.

” “I am aware that our visits have been somewhat noted,” Suzanna said carefully.

“I don’t say it to be a gossip,” Clara said.

“I say it because I know that man, and I know he doesn’t do anything by accident.

He is not an accidental person.

Whatever he is doing, he is doing it on purpose.

” “The trouble with that,” Suzanna said, “is that doing something on purpose and doing something with courage are not always the same.

” Clara looked at her with warm, frank sympathy.

“No,” she agreed.

“They are certainly not.

” Frederick Morgan, for his part, was fighting a war inside himself that he would not have known how to describe to another person, even if he had been the kind of man who described things.

He had grown up with the model of his father, who had loved his mother, Frederick believed, genuinely and deeply, and who had expressed that love almost exclusively through labor.

Elias Morgan had built things and fixed things and provided things, and when his wife died, he had simply continued doing all of those things with a grimmer dedication, as though the work itself was the only remaining form of connection available to him.

Frederick had learned from this example, had absorbed it at the cellular level, had internalized the belief that love was a thing one showed through action rather than said in words, and that saying it was somehow a reduction of it, a cheapening of something that deserved better than words.

He had also, though he could not have told you exactly when this happened, fallen in love with Suzanna Fletcher.

It had happened the way the seasons changed in that country, not in one dramatic moment, but in a long accumulation of moments, each one adding to the next until one morning he woke up and the whole landscape was simply different and had perhaps been different for some time without his having consciously registered the change.

He loved the way she asked questions that were shaped like keys rather than clubs.

He loved that she had wept quietly and without apology when one of her students, the 12-year-old daughter of a sheep herder, had to leave school to help with the family after the sheep herder broke his leg, and that she had then organized a schedule of home visits to keep the girl’s education going.

He loved that she read every newspaper she could get and formed opinions about things that were happening far away as well as close at hand.

He loved that she made coffee that was better than anyone else’s coffee, and that she seemed to understand this as a matter of personal pride.

He loved that she had learned the name of every child on the ranch who came from the families of his cowhands and remembered their ages and asked after them.

He loved her.

He had not said it to himself in those exact words, because those words felt large and irreversible in a way that made his chest constrict, but the thing was there in him like a lodged stone, present and undeniable.

November brought the cold in earnest, and Harland Briggs made a formal and direct proposal to Suzanna Fletcher.

He did it in the hotel dining room over what passed for a fine dinner in Cimarron, which is to say the food was good if not fancy, and he had arranged for wildflowers in a vase, which at that time of year must have cost him real effort.

He was gentlemanly about it and not without genuine warmth, and he said that he thought she was the most remarkable woman he had encountered in the territory, and that he hoped she would consent to return to Santa Fe with him as his wife.

She thanked him sincerely and asked for time to consider, which he granted graciously, though she could see he was not accustomed to the waiting.

She went home that night and sat in her small room with the lamp burning low and thought for a very long time.

She thought about Missouri, which felt like a different life.

She thought about her mother and her father and Thomas in Kansas City.

She thought about the schoolhouse and her students and the particular quality of winter light in the high desert morning.

She thought about a man with dark eyes who fixed flue joints and remembered things she mentioned once weeks ago and sat at her porch and talked about the sky.

She thought about the fact that Harland Briggs had said out loud directly in words what he wanted and what he felt and that Frederick Morgan had not done this and showed no clear inclination to do it and that she had been in Cimarron for 6 months and she was 26 years old and she could not wait forever for a man who might never be able to find the way out of himself.

She made a decision.

She did not like the decision.

She made it anyway.

She would give Frederick Morgan one more opportunity.

She would not manufacture it or arrange it artificially.

She would simply be honest with him, more honest than she had been in September when she had spoken plainly but not completely.

She would tell him about Briggs’s proposal and she would tell him that she needed to know what was between them in actual words, not in firewood deliveries and long conversations and looked for hoofbeats.

And if he could not or would not speak it, she would give Briggs her answer and she would go to Santa Fe and she would build a life there and make it a good one.

She planned to talk to Frederick on his next visit to town.

But the next several days passed and he did not come to town.

She heard through the reliable network of small town information that there was a problem at the ranch, a section of fence down along the eastern pasture where the cattle had been pressing and that he was working with his men to repair it before the next hard frost.

She waited through those days with a particular kind of patience that is different from contentment.

The kind of patience that is simply endurance wearing a polite face.

On the fifth day, she received a note from Harland Briggs asking if she had considered his proposal as he needed to return to Santa Fe within the week and hoped to know her answer before he left.

She wrote back saying she would give him her answer in 3 days.

Then she went to the livery, hired the gray mare who was reliably unbothered by everything and rode out toward the Morgan ranch.

It was a cold day, the kind of cold that has a quality in it like iron and the sky was the pale gray white of an overcast November in the high country and the red rocks along the trail had a bleached severe look to them that she found oddly beautiful.

She rode the 8 miles with her coat pulled tight and her thoughts arranged in the careful order she had given them like students lined up before entering the school room.

She found Frederick in the eastern pasture working alongside Dale and Hector on the down fence line.

He saw her coming from some distance away because in that country and that terrain you could see a rider from a long way off and he rode out to meet her on his copper colored horse before she reached the work site.

“Susanna,” he said and the way he said her name had something in it that it had not always had at the beginning, a particular note that she had stopped being able to categorize neutrally some weeks ago.

“Frederick,” she said, “I need to talk to you.

Not here.

Can you come in tomorrow?” He looked at the fence line and then back at her.

“I can come in today after sundown if that’s all right.

” “Yes,” she said, “that’s all right.

” She rode back to Cimarron and went about her afternoon with the deliberate normalcy of a person keeping themselves on a rail so they don’t veer into the ditch of feeling too much too soon.

He arrived at her porch just after sundown when the sky above the western mountains was still faintly orange at the edges and the stars were beginning to establish themselves in the darkening vault above.

He tied his horse to the post and came up the steps and sat in the chair that had become without any official ceremony his chair.

She brought out coffee because she always brought out coffee and she sat in her own chair and for a moment they simply sat with the evening around them the way they had a hundred times before.

“Harland Briggs has asked me to marry him,” she said.

“He is leaving for Santa Fe this week and he wants my answer.

” Frederick Morgan went very still.

The kind of still that has nothing to do with tranquility.

“I see,” he said.

“I wanted to speak with you before I gave it,” she said.

“Because I think you know that what happens between us or what does not happen is going to inform my answer.

” He looked at the darkness past the porch railing.

His coffee cup was in both his hands and he held it like a man who needs something to hold.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” he said, which was perhaps the most honest thing he had ever said to her.

“I’m not asking for a great speech,” she said and she meant it kindly but firmly.

“I’m asking for honesty.

That’s what I’ve always asked of you.

Do you have feelings for me beyond friendship? And if you do, do you have any intention of doing anything about them?” He was quiet for so long that she could hear the cold creek behind the buildings two streets over could hear a dog barking somewhere and going quiet.

The lamp on the railing made its small steady circle of light against the enormous dark of a November night in New Mexico territory.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said finally.

“The honest answer is that I don’t know how to say these things.

I was not raised to say them.

I have spent my whole life demonstrating rather than speaking and I am aware that this has been a failure of a particular kind with you and I’m sorry for it.

” “Frederick,” she said gently.

“But I also cannot,” he said and there was something rough in his voice now, something that had finally gotten past the careful containment.

I cannot stand here and tell you to go to Santa Fe.

I cannot tell you to marry Briggs.

” “The thought of it,” he stopped.

“The thought of it what?” she said and leaned forward.

He looked at her then directly and in the lamplight his dark eyes had a look in them that she recognized and that made her breath come differently.

“It feels like losing the most important thing,” he said.

“Then say that,” she said softly.

“Say what it is.

Say the actual words.

” And she could see him working to do it, could see the effort of 32 years of practiced silence trying to hold its position against something that had become bigger than it could contain and she waited.

She was patient and still and present because she understood that for a man like this, this moment was the equivalent of standing on the edge of something very high with no certainty about the landing.

He set his coffee cup down on the railing.

“I can’t watch you leave,” he said.

“I can’t,” he exhaled.

“Susanna, I love you.

That is the truth of it and I should have said it sooner and I was afraid.

Though I don’t usually admit to being afraid.

And I’m saying it now because if you walk out of this territory, I will spend the rest of my life knowing that I lost you to my own cowardice and I cannot accept that.

” The silence after this was a different kind of silence from all the silences that had come before it.

She looked at Frederick Morgan, at this contained, careful, deeply feeling man who had just said out loud the thing he had most feared to say and she felt something settle inside her that had been held in suspension for months like a stone that finally finds the bottom.

“Frederick,” she said.

“I love you,” he said again as though now that he had found the door he intended to make sure it was fully open.

I want you to stay.

I want I want to ask you if you’re willing to marry me, not Briggs.

I want to marry you.

I want you in the house.

I want you on the ranch.

I want to wake up and hear your voice in the morning and I want to listen to you talk about your students and I want to ride out with you in the summer evenings and I want.

” He stopped himself because he was saying more words at once than he had probably said in a week and some part of him was startled by the fact of it.

She stood up.

He stood up.

She closed the distance between them in two steps and she put her hand against his jaw, the jaw that had been set by someone who wanted it to be absolutely certain and permanent and she looked up at him.

“I love you, too,” she said.

“I have been in love with you since approximately the moment you sat at a child’s desk in my schoolhouse and looked at a primer like it was something precious.

” Something broke open in his face in the best possible way like a window being thrown up on the first warm morning of spring and he put his hands, both of them, one on each side of her face and he kissed her.

It was, she would think later, the most uncomplicated thing that had ever happened between them, which was saying a great deal given that nothing else about them had ever been particularly uncomplicated.

She wrote to Harland Briggs the following morning and declined his proposal with as much grace and directness as the situation deserved.

She thanked him for his attention and wished him well.

She meant both things genuinely.

He left Cimarron at the end of that week and she did not see him again.

The weeks that followed were the kind of weeks that a person remembers for the rest of their life with a particular quality of warmth.

November gave way to December and the first real snow came to the Cimarron Valley a deep, quiet snow that changed the whole character of the land turning the red rock country white and silver blue in the shadows.

And Susanna rode out to the Morgan ranch on a Sunday when the snow had settled and the sky was the clean pale blue that follows a storm and Frederick met her at the gate and smiled at her which was something he did more easily than he had before.

As though saying the word had loosened something in him that had been very tightly fastened.

He showed her the ranch in its winter configuration, the cattle in the lower pasture near the river where the grass came through better, the ice forming along the creek edges, the horses wearing their winter coats.

He showed her the house again, and she noticed that he had put up curtains.

They were not particularly well-hung curtains, and the fabric was clearly something he had acquired from the general store without much guidance, a blue-gray wool that was practical rather than pretty.

But the fact of them moved her in a way she did not try to explain and wouldn’t have wanted to.

“The house could use some attention,” he said in the way of a man making an observation rather than a complaint.

“It could,” she agreed.

“I thought perhaps,” he said carefully, “that you might have opinions about it.

” “I might,” she said.

“I might also be in a better position to act on those opinions if I were living here.

” He looked at her.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that I would like to be married before the new year, if that suits you.

” “That suits me very well,” he said.

They were married on the 19th of December, 1878, in the small church in Cimarron with Reverend Elkins officiating and Clara Elkins crying with unstated joy in the front pew.

Dale Purvis, who was a decent man with a decent heart, shook Frederick’s hand so vigorously that Frederick’s whole arm moved.

Hector Ray stood at the back of the church in his good hat and looked pleased in the quiet way that was his particular style.

Young Rufus, in a shirt that appeared to have been ironed by someone who did not fully understand the relationship between an iron and a shirt, managed not to knock anything over during the entire ceremony, which he later described to anyone who would listen as one of his personal finest achievements.

Susanna wore her best dress, which was a deep garnet red that she had brought from Missouri and never had occasion to wear in Cimarron.

Frederick wore his good dark coat and had, for this occasion, achieved a shave that was considerably closer than his usual standard.

He stood at the front of the church and watched her walk toward him, and she saw on his face the expression she had come to know as the one that meant he was feeling everything and containing none of it, which on him looked something like a man standing in a strong wind, entirely present and entirely certain.

He said his vows clearly and without stumbling, and when he said the word love in them, in front of the Reverend and Clara and Dale and Hector and Rufus and the dozen other Cimarron townspeople who had come, he said it without hesitation.

She thought, watching him say it, that he had been practicing that word since November and that he had decided it was one he intended to use freely from here forward.

She was right about that.

They settled into the Morgan ranch life in the way of two people who had already been talking to each other for months and understood the basic grammar of each other.

The house changed under Susanna’s careful attention, not dramatically, because she was not a dramatic person about interiors, but thoughtfully, in the way that a house changes when someone who genuinely lives in it rather than simply occupying it begins to make decisions.

The curtains Frederick had hung were replaced with better ones, a warm cream-colored muslin that let the morning light through in a soft way she loved.

There were rugs on the board floors and a tablecloth on the kitchen table and her books along the shelves in the main room.

She continued teaching school through the winter, riding in most mornings on the gray mare, which Frederick eventually negotiated to buy from the livery at a price that was favorable to the livery owner, but was made worthwhile by the fact that it meant Susanna had her own horse.

She named the mare Patience, which Frederick said was apt.

The school year ended in May of 1879, and by then Susanna was expecting their first child, a fact she had known since early April and which she told Frederick on a May evening on the porch while the blossoms were on the cottonwood trees along the creek and the air smelled like something possible.

He sat with this information for a long moment.

Then he said quietly, “You’re all right.

You feel well.

” “I feel very well,” she said.

He reached over and took her hand, which was something he did more easily than he once had, the physical language of affection having opened somewhat along with the verbal one, once the first word was out.

He held her hand and looked at the spring evening settling over his valley, and she could see him thinking through all the dimensions of the thing, the practical and the emotional and the large, wide, long-reaching considerations of a man who had just been given news that changes the shape of everything to come.

“Good,” he said finally, and she understood he meant all of it.

The child and her health and the future and the whole expanding fact of what they were building together.

Their son was born in November of 1879, almost exactly a year after the evening on the porch when Frederick had finally set out loud the words he had been holding inside him like a river holds water behind a dam.

They named him Elias James Morgan, Elias for Frederick’s father and James for no one in particular, except that the name felt right against the other one.

He was a healthy boy with dark hair and what would eventually become, as he grew, his father’s jaw and his mother’s gray eyes, which seemed to Susanna like an extremely good arrangement.

Frederick held his son for the first time in the way of a man who has never held something this small and this important, with a careful, absolute attention that recognized the weight of the thing in every sense.

He did not say anything for a long time.

Then he looked up at Susanna, who was propped against the pillows in the iron-framed bed that had a better quilt on it now, several better quilts, one of which Clara Elkins had made as a wedding gift, and he said, “He’s ours.

” “He is,” she said.

“All right then,” he said and looked back at the boy with the expression of a man who has just fully accepted a new largest fact.

Hector Ray, upon being introduced to young Elias the following week, looked at the baby with the same focused attention he gave to horses and fence lines and other things that required accurate assessment and said, “He’ll be a good hand someday,” which was perhaps the highest compliment available in that context.

The ranch grew in 1880 and into 1881.

Frederick negotiated a grazing lease on additional land to the north, which increased his range significantly, and he built a second bunkhouse for the additional hand he hired when the herd expanded.

He was, as he had always been, a man of considered action, of careful and deliberate stewardship, and Susanna watched him work and thought that this was perhaps why she had fallen in love with him as deeply as she had, because his attention, once given, was total, and he gave his attention to the ranch and his men, and most completely and most steadily to her.

She started a small lending library in the schoolhouse that year, collecting donated books from families around the county and corresponding with a book dealer in Santa Fe, who sent quarterly shipments of whatever he could obtain.

It was a small operation, but it mattered, because books in that country in that era were expensive and scarce, and their arrival in a community was an event.

She taught her students with the same love and rigor she had brought from the first day, and the parents of those students knew they were getting something real, a teacher who took each child’s mind seriously.

There was a period in the spring of 1881 that was difficult in the way that periods on frontier ranches sometimes were.

A fever moved through the cattle, the kind of bovine illness that spreads through a herd fast, and they lost 11 head before Dale Purvis identified the source as a contaminated water source from the north lease, and they managed to contain it.

It cost them in time and money, and the particular strain of watching something you have built and tended take damage.

Frederick managed this with the same calibrated steadiness with which he managed everything, working alongside his men from before dawn until after dark for a stretch of 2 weeks, and Susanna brought food out to the pasture on some of those days, riding out with saddlebags packed with what she could prepare, because she had decided early in their marriage that she was not a woman who stayed at the house when things were hard, and she didn’t intend to start being that now.

On one of those evenings, she and Frederick sat together on the tailgate of the wagon in the cooling dusk while the cattle moved and settled behind them, and she leaned against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her, and they were quiet together.

And it was the same kind of quiet they had shared on her porch in those early evenings, except that it was now inhabited differently.

Now had the weight of everything they had built together in it, the child sleeping in the house, the land around them, the years of mornings and evenings and conversations and silences that were now different silences, comfortable rather than uncertain.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said.

Not as reassurance, exactly, more as a statement of what he had assessed.

“I know,” she said.

The fever broke and the herd stabilized.

They recovered most of what they had expected to lose, and the year came out better than it had threatened to in April.

By 1882, Elias Morgan was 2 and 1/2 years old and in the active and alarming business of learning what he was capable of, which turned out to be a great deal.

He had his father’s tendency toward focus silence, but his mother’s tendency to occasionally ask questions that had no comfortable answer.

And this combination produced a small person of remarkable determination, who on one memorable occasion attempted to climb the fence of the cattle pen with the stated goal of patting one of the bulls, and had to be retrieved by Hector, who did this with the calm expertise of a man accustomed to moving animals much larger than himself.

Susanna found herself expecting again in the early spring of 1882, a fact she told Frederick with less of the ceremony of the first time and more of the simple warm directness of two people who were now fluent in their own language.

He smiled at her.

Not the brief, controlled expression that had been all he’d offered in the early days of their acquaintance, but the full, open smile that she had come to know was the one that meant he was not managing his response at all, was simply having it.

“Good,” he said again.

“You always say that,” she said, amused.

“It always is,” he said.

Their second child, born in October of 1882, was a daughter.

They named her Clara Ruth Morgan, Clara for Clara Elkins, who wept upon learning this in the specific way of a woman who has not expected to be honored and finds the honor has bypassed all her composed responses and gone directly to the unguarded place.

Ruth for Susanna’s mother, which had been Susanna’s private wish from the beginning.

Clara Ruth was darker than her brother, with her father’s deep brown hair, and she had from the first days of her life an air of tremendous opinion about everything around her, which Frederick greeted with a kind of delighted uncertainty, as though this small person was a terrain feature he had not encountered before and intended to study carefully.

“She knows what she wants,” Susanna observed, watching Frederick hold Clara Ruth in the lamplit bedroom while the baby regarded him with the intense focus of someone taking inventory.

“She does,” he agreed.

“I have no idea where she gets that,” he said, perfectly seriously, which made Susanna laugh the full, genuine laugh that he had from the beginning found to be one of the finest sounds available in the world.

The years of the early 1880s in the New Mexico Territory were years of ongoing change, the railroad coming closer, the land grant controversy still churning through courts, the old rhythms of the frontier giving way in some places and reasserting themselves in others.

Susanna watched all of this with the close attention she gave to everything and discussed it with Frederick on their evenings, these long conversations that had never stopped being one of the things she loved most about their life together.

She wrote letters to Thomas in Kansas City and kept him updated on the shape of their lives.

And Thomas wrote back and reported on his own children’s progress.

And they maintained the warm, if occasional, correspondence of siblings who love each other and have found their separate good lives.

The schoolhouse gained an additional teacher in 1883, a young woman named Agnes Park, who came from Colorado, and who was enormously capable and immediately well-liked by the children.

And this meant Susanna could finally take two afternoons a week for herself, which she spent sometimes at the house with her books and sometimes at Clara Elkins’s kitchen table, which remained one of the most comfortable locations she had found in the territory.

One afternoon in the autumn of 1883, Susanna was at the kitchen table with her coffee and a letter she was composing to the book dealer in Santa Fe when Frederick came in from the yard, still in his working coat with the dust of the day on it.

And he stood in the kitchen doorway looking at her in the afternoon light with that expression that had been on his face at the church on their wedding day.

“What?” she said, looking up.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I was just looking.

” “You’re doing it in a very specific way,” she said.

“I was thinking,” he said, “about the night on your porch when I finally said it.

” She set down her letter.

“And what about it?” He came into the kitchen and sat across from her, his big hands on the table between them, the hands of a man who had built things and fixed things and worked this land for years, the hands that had held her and held their children and held the hard weight of everything that came with making a life in a country that didn’t make anything easy.

“I was thinking about how close I came to not saying it,” he said, “about how you were going to leave.

” “I was,” she said quietly.

“I know,” he said.

“And I keep coming back to that, to how close it was, and I think about how it would have been if I had let you go.

” “Frederick,” she said.

“I need you to know,” he said, “that I understand now what it costs to leave it unsaid.

I understand because for a long time I left it unsaid, and the whole time I was doing it, the thing I couldn’t say was growing and becoming more true, and the not saying of it was making a kind of damage, and I almost let that damage be permanent.

” He looked at her directly.

“I will not leave it unsaid again,” he said.

“I promise you that, whatever it is, however uncomfortable it is to say.

” Susanna reached across the table and put her hands over his.

“You’ve been getting much better at saying things,” she told him.

“I’m working on it,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“I see you working on it every day.

” He turned his hands over and held hers, and they sat in the autumn kitchen while the light came through the cream-colored curtains and the sound of Elias playing somewhere outside reached them at a comfortable distance.

And there was between them in that moment everything that two people can build when they are both willing, when one of them is willing to speak and the other is willing to wait, and both of them understand, finally, that the word is not a reduction of the feeling, but an extension of it.

A bridge between interior and exterior, between what is felt and what is shared, and what is therefore real in the fullest possible way.

Elias came inside with a piece of red rock he had found near the creek that he considered extraordinary, which it was, in fact, a striking piece of jasper with a vein of cream through it.

And he placed it on the table between his parents’ hands with the satisfied air of a boy who has brought back treasure, which he had.

Life at the Morgan ranch continued to be built the way Frederick had always built things, carefully and with good materials, and with full attention to whether it was true and solid.

In 1884, they built a new addition to the house, two more rooms off the back that made the structure longer and more comfortable.

And the construction of it was a matter of weeks of early mornings and long evenings, Frederick working with Dale and Hector and Susanna’s own capable participation in ways that did not require carpentry skill, but required organization and provision, and the management of three men and two children in a situation that was sometimes chaotic.

At the end of the last day of construction, when the addition was finished and the dust had settled and Dale and Hector had gone home and the children were asleep in their rooms, Susanna and Frederick stood on the porch in the summer dark and looked at the larger outline of the house against the night sky.

“Good house,” she said.

“Getting there,” he said.

She leaned against his arm and he put his arm around her.

And they stood there together for a long time in the warm July night while the stars did their enormous, indifferent work above the valley.

The events of 1885 brought something that they had not fully anticipated, which was the arrival in the territory of a group of homesteaders who settled in the northern portion of the valley on land that was adjacent to the Morgan grazing lease.

There were three families, the Bakers, the Okafor family who had come west from Virginia, and an older man named Cornelius Drew, who was farming alone.

They were entitled to be there, or at least the land question was complicated in the way of all New Mexico Territory land questions.

And Frederick approached the situation with the same careful assessment he gave all things.

He talked with the homesteaders.

He established where the actual boundaries were with Hector’s help, who knew the land probably better than anyone after years of riding every inch of it.

He found that the overlap was smaller than he had initially feared, and that the three families were legitimate homesteaders acting in good faith on properly filed claims.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »