at the sound of his children's names spoken by a stranger's mouth with care. No one had said their names like that — unhurried, as if each one mattered — since Anna died. In the rail camps, names were shouted over noise. Here, in a damp kitchen with a pie between them, a neighbor had said "Ned" and "Alice" and "Hope" as if she were setting places at a table. Martin had not known, until that moment, how hungry he was for that sound.
He did not sleep well that night. The house made noises he did not know yet — a shutter tapping, a board settling, water dripping somewhere in the back room — and every time Hope stirred in her small bed, he woke with his heart hammering, sure for an instant that something was wrong. Twice he got up to check on her, and twice he found her asleep with her thumb in her mouth and pie still, impossibly, on her cheek where Sylvia's cloth had missed a spot. He wiped it away with his own thumb, gently, and sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, thinking about how he had come to be here.
He had been a surveyor for the railroad for eleven years, and he had been good at it. He could walk a piece of ground and see the line the rails wanted, the way other men could see a seam of coal or a vein of water. He had met his wife, Anna, in a rail camp in Wyoming, where she kept the camp's accounts and sang while she worked, and they had married in a spring when the prairie was green all the way to the horizon. Ned had been born in a company house with a tin roof that drummed in the rain. Alice had been born in a tent during a summer survey, and Martin had always joked that she came into the world already traveling. Hope had been born in a small rented room in Helena, and her birth had taken Anna from them — a hemorrhage the doctor could not stop, a night of blood and praying and then, terribly, quiet. Martin had held his newborn daughter in one arm and his wife's cold hand in the other, and he had understood, in a way that rearranged the furniture of his mind permanently, that competence was a narrow country. He could survey a continent and he could not keep his wife alive. He could read a grade to the inch and he could not read his own children's grief.
After Anna died, he had kept surveying for a year, dragging the children from camp to camp, until the day Ned, then nine, had asked him — quietly, while they ate beans from a tin pot by a campfire — whether they were ever going to live anywhere. Martin had heard the question for what it was: not a complaint, but a plea. He had quit the railroad, bought this house with the last of his savings on the strength of a map and an agent's letter, and brought his children to Copperton to farm. He knew something about land. He knew less about houses, and nothing at all about cooking for three children on a damp stove. Samuel Ortiz, the blacksmith in town, was an old friend from the railroad days and had written to say there was work and welcome here, but Samuel was a bachelor with a forge, not a housekeeper, and Martin had not wanted to arrive in a new town already begging favors. Pride, he was learning, was an expensive luxury for a widower with three mouths to feed.
Morning came gray and cold, and Martin woke to find Ned already up, dressed, and trying to light the stove himself. The boy had watched his father struggle the night before and had decided, with the grim determination of a ten-year-old who has appointed himself second-in-command, to solve the problem before his father woke. He had failed — the kindling was damp, the flue still clogged — but he had tried, and Martin felt a rush of love and guilt so sharp it nearly doubled him over. He put his hand on his son's shoulder and said, "Good try. We'll learn it together," and Ned nodded, relieved not to be scolded, and went to wake Alice.
The morning's attempt at breakfast was a humiliation in stages. Martin boiled water for porridge and burned the bottom of the pot before the oats were half cooked. He tried to fry bread in a pan that had not been seasoned since the last family left, and it stuck and tore. Alice, solemn, ate the torn pieces without complaint. Ned ate his standing up, already pulling on his coat to explore the yard. Hope ate porridge