I know you will, Elias said.
They started with the fences. Pete laid out the work the way he always had, with a grunt and a gesture, and Wiley strung wire until his hands bled and then kept stringing it, and the two new hands Elias hired in town — Jeb Tully, a quiet man with a scar through his eyebrow who had worked cattle in Wyoming, and Sam Rourke, young and eager and strong as an ox — learned the ranch's ways and the ranch learned theirs. The fence line went up straight and true along the north pasture, post by post, and when the creek came back through it, full and clear since the county had ordered Hollis's dam removed, the water sang against the stones in a way Elias had not heard in years. Pete worked the crew the way he always had, with few words and a sharp eye, and he took to Jeb Tully at once, because Jeb set a post plumb the first time and did not need to be told twice, and he took to Sam Rourke more slowly, because Sam was young and tried to outwork everyone and had to learn that a fence built fast and crooked was a fence built twice. By the second week Sam had learned it, and Pete clapped him on the shoulder and said, "You'll do," which from Pete was a speech.
The barn roof took a week. They stripped the old shingles down to the rafters, and the sun came into the barn for the first time in Elias's memory, falling in bright bars across the stalls, and Clara stood in the middle of it with her hands on her hips and said it looked like a church, and Pete said it looked like a barn with no roof, which was also true, and they all laughed, and then they laid the new shingles row by row until the roof was whole and tight and the rain, when it came that Friday, ran off it in clean sheets and left the hay dry beneath.
The well house was Clara's favorite, though she would not say so outright. She drew it on a piece of butcher paper: stone walls, a pitched roof, a door that latched, a bucket that ran true on its rope. Elias built it with his own hands, stone by stone, and when he set the last stone he stood back and looked at it, and it was a small thing, a well house, but it was the first thing he had built on the ranch that was not a repair. It was an addition. It was a declaration that they intended to stay.
And Clara's garden plan went in beside the house, where the ground caught the morning sun and held it. She marked the rows with twine and stakes, the way her father had taught her in Missouri: herbs near the kitchen door, beans and squash farther out, a bed for flowers she would not name yet, because the rose cutting had its own place by the south wall, and that was a separate matter, and a private one. She worked the soil with her sleeves rolled up and dirt under her nails, and Elias watched her from the porch one evening and thought about the letters she had written before she came, three polite letters, and how little they had told him, and how glad he was that paper could not hold a person.
By midsummer the ranch looked different, and not only because it was repaired. The fences stood straight. The roof held. The well house gleamed whitewashed in the sun. The cattle in the north pasture were fat on creek water and new grass, and Caleb rode among them with the air of a man who owned his work, and Jeb and Sam had become part of the place, the way good hands do, by showing up and staying. In the evenings they ate together at the long table, all of them, and the talk was of weather and cattle and the garden, and the house was full of lamplight and voices, and Elias sat at the head of it and listened and thought: this is what a ranch is supposed to sound like.
One night, after the others had gone to bed, Clara brought the account books to the table and opened them, and the columns ran clean and black and balanced, and she pointed to the bottom line with the tip of her pencil and said, "We are not rich, Elias. But we are not afraid. And that is a kind of wealth I did not have in Missouri, even when the farm was standing."
He took her hand across the books. "Then we're rich enough," he said.
Outside, the summer night pressed against the windows, full of crickets and the smell of cut hay, and the ranch lay quiet around them, fences mended, roof whole, water running, and it was theirs, free and clear, and it would hold.