He made agreements with them about water access and fence lines that were fair to everyone.

And he helped Cornelius Drew, who was alone and older and had come west probably past the age at which coming West was a sound decision.

Get his small house weather proofed before the first frost.

Susanna, when she learned about Cornelius Drew’s situation, organized several of the Cimarron women to provide the man with a supply of preserved goods for winter, which was entirely consistent with her practice of paying attention to who needed something and then doing what could be done about it.

The Okafor family, whose name was Samuel and B.

Okafor, had four children and a clear intelligence and dignity that Susanna admired immediately.

They faced, in that territory and in that era, the particular injustice of being regarded with suspicion and sometimes hostility by people who judged them by their race rather than their character.

And Susanna was not patient with injustice of this kind.

She enrolled all four Okafor children in the school without ceremony or drama, exactly as she had enrolled every other child.

And when one parent made a pointed remark to her about it, she looked at that parent with the calm, firm authority of a woman who has been managing a classroom for years and knows exactly how to establish where the line is.

And she said, simply and completely, that every child in this valley had a right to learn.

And that was the end of that conversation.

Frederick backed her on this without needing to be asked because he was not a man who needed prompting to stand behind the things that were right.

And because he had seen Samuel Okafor fence his land and manage his small herd with the competence and dedication of someone who had come to this country knowing it would be hard and had prepared accordingly.

And Frederick respected this categorically.

The Okafor children became students Susanna particularly loved, sharp-minded and eager.

And the eldest, a girl of 12 named Josephine, had a gift for arithmetic that Susanna recognized as genuinely exceptional.

She wrote a letter to the territorial education authority recommending that Josephine Okafor be given the opportunity for advanced schooling, a letter that she suspected might not travel far given the era and the territory, but which she wrote anyway because it was the right thing to do.

And she did not believe in leaving the right things undone because the outcome was uncertain.

In the summer of 1886, young Rufus, who was by then 27 and had been falling off things for 8 years at the Morgan ranch and had somehow become, through the accumulation of all that practice, an actually competent cowhand, fell in love.

The object of his affection was Agnes Park, the second schoolteacher, who was 24 and considerably better organized than Rufus, and who seemed to find his particular combination of earnestness and chaos genuinely charming.

They courted through the summer and married in September, and the wedding was in the same church where Frederick and Susanna had married 8 years earlier.

And Frederick stood up for Rufus because Rufus had no family nearby and because the Morgan ranch had become, through the years, a kind of family in itself.

Susanna looked across the church at Frederick during the ceremony, and she caught him looking at her, and she thought about how different he was from the man she had met in the spring of 1878, not in his essential nature, not in the deep core of who he was, but in his expression of it.

He was still contained in the way that was genuinely his, the way that was not performance but character, but the containment was no longer sealed against her.

It was open at the top like a good well, accessible to those who came to it honestly.

He raised an eyebrow at her, a small, private communication, and she smiled at him across the church.

In the autumn of 1887, Elias was 8 years old and Clara Ruth was 5, and the Morgan ranch had grown into something solid and established that Elias Morgan the elder would have recognized and been proud of, though he would probably have said so through actions rather than words, which was the family tendency on the paternal side.

The herd was healthy, the range was managed well, and Frederick had been approached twice about taking on a leadership role in the county’s ranching cooperative, which he had accepted after the second approach because he could see it was genuinely needed and that his experience was relevant.

This meant he was away from the ranch more often than he had been.

And Susanna managed things at home with the capable efficiency of a woman who had spent 9 years learning every dimension of ranch life.

She was not a cowhand, not exactly, but she knew the operation well enough to make sound decisions in Frederick’s absence.

And she and Hector Reyes, who was now firmly established as the senior hand and a person of genuine importance to the Morgan operation, worked together with the ease of people who had long since established a mutual respect.

She had stopped teaching full-time by 1887, though she continued helping at the school when she was needed and remained committed to the lending library, which had grown to nearly 200 volumes and was now a source of considerable local pride.

Her days had a different shape than they had when she first came to Cimarron, a different shape than she had ever imagined her days might have back in Missouri.

And she found this shape to be exactly right in the way that the right things often feel, not like something you chose from a list of options, but like something you recognized when you found it.

Frederick came home from a cooperative meeting in Cimarron one evening in October of 1887, later than he had expected, and he found Susanna on the porch with Clara Ruth asleep across her lap and Elias inside reading by lamplight.

And the evening was cool and the creek was audible in the dark.

And he unsaddled his horse and came up to the porch and looked at the picture of them there for a moment before Susanna saw him.

She looked up and smiled at him, the full smile that was her particular expression of complete comfort, and he sat in his chair and leaned across and kissed her temple and looked at Clara Ruth sleeping with her dark hair spread across her mother’s knee.

“How was the meeting?” she asked quietly.

“Long,” he said, “and necessary.

Collins made a reasonable argument about the winter grazing rotation.

We came to an agreement.

” “Good,” she said.

He looked out at the dark valley.

“I was thinking on the ride back,” he said, “about the first time I asked you to come see this place.

” “The summer of ’78,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I remember thinking on the ride out that I did not know exactly what I was doing, that I was not entirely sure what I was hoping for.

” “That was unusual for me.

” “You usually know what you’re hoping for,” she said.

“Usually,” he said, “with land things, with cattle, with practical matters.

” “But not with me,” she said.

“Not with you,” he said.

“But I knew something.

I knew that whatever this was, I did not want it to be over.

I knew that when you rode back to town that first evening, I watched until I couldn’t see you anymore.

” She looked at him.

“You never told me that.

” “I’m telling you now,” he said.

He looked at her steadily.

“I’m going to keep telling you things.

I made a promise about that.

” “You did,” she said, “and you’ve been keeping it.

” He reached over and took her hand, the hand that was not holding Clara Ruth in place on her lap.

And she turned her fingers through his, and they sat together on the porch in the cool October evening while the valley settled into the deep, ancient quiet of a frontier night, the kind of quiet that is not empty but full, full of the sound of water and wind and the slow breath of cattle in the dark pasture, and the particular silence of two people who have found the rare and necessary thing, which is a life and a person to share it with honestly.

Elias appeared in the doorway behind them with his book, a thing about the history of the American West that Susanna had obtained for him, and he leaned against the doorframe and said, “Pa, is it true that Kit Carson was in this county?” “He was,” Frederick said, “several times, and he was more complicated than what most people say about him.

” Elias considered this in the way he considered things with his father’s focused stillness.

“How so?” “Come sit down,” Frederick said, “and I’ll tell you.

” And so Elias came and sat on the porch steps, and Clara Ruth stirred and resettled without waking.

And Frederick told his son about Kit Carson and the territory, about the Navajo Long Walk and the moral complexities of the men who had made and shaped this land, about the Ute and Jicarilla Apache peoples whose country this had been before any of them.

And Susanna listened to her husband’s voice in the dark, the voice that had once been so carefully contained, so measured and cautious with anything that mattered, now opening easily into story, into history, into the honest sharing of what he knew and thought.

And she felt the full depth of what she had, of what they had built together from that November night when he had finally, at last, said the word that opened everything.

She had come to Cimarron looking for air that did not smell like grief, and she had found something considerably more than that.

She had found a valley in the high desert with red rock and cottonwood trees and a river that ran cold and clean, and she had found a man whose depth of feeling was enormous and whose capacity to express it had needed not creation but unlocking.

And she had found that she was the person who held that key and that this was not a burden but a privilege, one of the truest she had ever been given.

Their life on the Morgan ranch was not without difficulty.

No life on the frontier in the 1880s was without difficulty.

There were hard winters and sick cattle and legal complexities about the land grant questions that never fully went away and required Frederick’s patient, persistent attention.

There were years when the rains were not enough and years when they were too much.

There were losses, the death of Dale Purvis in 1889 from a stroke that took him fast and too soon, which hit Frederick harder than he showed because Dale had been part of his life since before he could properly remember.

There were illnesses in the children that put knots in both their chests until the fever broke.

There was a fire in the smaller barn in 1890 that destroyed the structure and cost them a hand savings in hay and tack, and the rebuilding of it was a long summer’s work.

But there was also this.

There was the particular quality of morning on the Morgan ranch when the light came over the eastern ridge and fell golden through the cream-colored curtains into the kitchen where coffee was already on and the smell of it reached everywhere.

There were the evenings on the porch in every season, in summer heat and autumn coolness and the sharp cold of winter and the unreliable sweetness of spring.

Always the evenings with the valley opening up in front of them and the stars eventually establishing themselves above.

There were the children growing into themselves, Elias becoming more and more a combination of both of them, thoughtful and articulate with a love of books that came from Susanna and a love of the land that came from Frederick.

There was Clara Ruth, who by the time she was 10 had opinions about everything and the vocabulary to express them at considerable length, which delighted Susanna and bewildered Frederick in the fond way that one is bewildered by something extraordinary.

And there was always at the center of it the thing that had been so hard to say and that once said had become the foundation everything else was built on.

Frederick Morgan said the word easily now, not cheaply, not carelessly, but with the full weight of a man who had learned that words of that kind do not cost you anything but rather open something up, create a channel between what is inside and what is shared.

He said it in the morning and in the evening and in the particular way a person says it when they mean not just the feeling but all of it, the daily accumulation of the feeling over years of shared life.

By 1892, the Morgan ranch was a prosperous, well-managed operation that was known in Colfax County as one of the solid, reputable places in the region.

Elias was 12 and Clara Ruth was 10 and the house had been added to a second time and the bunkhouse had good permanent hands in it and there was a small, genuinely good vegetable garden behind the house that Susanna kept with the same systematic care she gave to everything.

And there were chickens and a milk cow and a pair of dogs that had earned their positions through genuine usefulness and charm.

Hector Reyes, by this point, had bought a small piece of land adjoining the Morgan property and built himself a modest house on it and he remained the most reliable person in Frederick’s professional orbit, the person whose judgment Frederick trusted absolutely on land and cattle questions and whose steady, quiet presence had been part of the Morgan ranch for going on 18 years.

He was a man the community respected deeply, a fact that had not always been guaranteed given the era and the territory’s complicated relationship with Mexican-born residents, but that had been established through consistent demonstration of character and competence.

And Frederick had been openly vocal in his support of Hector’s standing in the county ranching cooperative, which was the kind of advocacy that mattered.

On a September evening in 1892, Susanna and Frederick sat on the porch in the early darkness with their coffee, the children having gone inside an hour earlier.

The valley was settling into fall, the aspens on the upper slopes visible from the ranch in their gold turning and there was wood smoke on the air from someone’s chimney and the smell of the dry grass and the river, which was their particular mixture, the smell that Susanna had come to know as the smell of home.

“I was thinking today,” she said, “about that moment on the porch in Cimarron, the November night.

” “I think about it regularly,” he said.

This was not surprising, she knew he did.

“What do you think about when you think about it?” she asked.

He was quiet for a moment, but the quiet was not the closed, uncertain quiet of the early days.

It was a thinking quiet, a composing quiet.

“I think about what it cost to wait so long,” he said, “and what it cost to finally say it and how those costs were completely different.

The waiting cost more.

” “Yes,” she said.

“And I think about how I said it twice,” he said, “and there was something in the way he said this, something that had in it both memory and a kind of irreversible gratitude.

I said it twice and both times it was true and both times saying it added to the truth of it rather than diminishing it.

I had believed for a long time that saying it would be the smaller version of feeling it.

I was wrong.

” “You were wrong,” she agreed warmly.

“It happens occasionally,” he said, which made her smile.

He reached over and took her hand and she leaned her head briefly against his shoulder before straightening to look at the valley, which was theirs and yet larger than theirs, this wide piece of the American West in the last decade of a century that had been the most dramatic and complicated and consequential century this land had ever known.

There was still so much that was unresolved in the territory and in the country, still injustices being done and questions being fought over and the hard, slow work of building something just and lasting still very much in progress.

But here in this valley on this evening, there was the irreducible fact of two people who had found each other and stayed, who had built something real together out of the materials available, out of courage eventually applied and honesty maintained and a feeling that had grown from something tentative and uncertain into something as substantial and durable as the red rock that rimmed their valley.

Susanna Fletcher Morgan held her husband’s hand in the autumn dark and felt the full, certain weight of her life, which was good, not simple, not without cost, not easy in all its parts, but good, deeply and genuinely good in the way that things are good when they are built rather than inherited, when they are chosen fully and lived in honestly, and when the word that makes everything possible, the word that had once been locked away behind 32 years of cautious silence, had finally, at the best necessary moment, been said out loud, twice, and many thousands of times after that in every season of the years that followed, in every quiet morning and long evening and difficult passage and moment of uncomplicated joy that made up the whole of the life they built together in that valley in the territory of New Mexico in the last vivid decades of the American West that was becoming something else, something that would remember what it had been even as it changed, the way people do, the way everything worth loving does.

He said it.

He had said it twice on that first night and he said it every day after and she said it back and between them it was the truest currency they had, the thing that bought everything worth having.

« Prev