Elias went out to the barn to think, and the wind smelled of snow, and he wondered, for the first time since his mother's death, whether his mother had known exactly what she was doing.
The wedding was small, as weddings go in a valley where winter is coming and work does not stop for sentiment.
That morning Elias rose before dawn and dressed in his best shirt, the one his mother had mended so often that the mends had become part of the cloth, and he stood in front of the small mirror in his room and tried to make himself look like a man about to be married rather than a man about to face the bank. Caleb came in with a comb and a joke, as he always did, and he straightened Elias's collar and told him he looked respectable enough to fool a banker, and Elias told him to get out, and then thanked him, because Caleb was the only family he had left and the only man who could make him laugh on a morning like that one.
Pete had swept the front room and set out the chairs, and Wiley had brought in wood and built up the fire until the house was warm for the first time in days, and the kitchen smelled of stew and fresh bread, and for a little while, standing in his own house with his brother beside him and the fire going, Elias could almost believe that the ranch was the place his mother had promised it would be, and not the place it had become.
They held it in the house, in the front room, because the church in town was a half day's ride and because Elias's mother had always said that a marriage made under your own roof had a better chance of holding. Caleb stood as witness. Pete, the foreman, stood by the door with his hat in his hands, and Wiley, the young hand, hovered behind him, scrubbed and awkward in a clean shirt. There was no minister. There was a man from the county office who had ridden out with the papers, a thin fellow with ink on his fingers, and he read the marriage agreement aloud in a flat voice, and Elias and Clara signed it at the kitchen table, one after the other, while the stew simmered and the wind moved around the corners of the house.
It was not romantic. Elias had not expected it to be. He had expected it to be an arrangement, and an arrangement was what it was: two names on a page, witnessed and sealed, binding a woman from Missouri to a ranch in a valley she had seen for less than a day.
The county man asked Elias if he took this woman as his wife, and Elias said "I do" in a voice that sounded steadier than he felt, and he asked Clara the same, and she said "I do" quietly and clearly, and she looked at him when she said it, not at the floor, and for a moment Elias forgot about the bank and the hay and the roof and saw only that she was standing in his front room, in a plain dress she had made herself, with dust from the wagon road still on her shoes, marrying a man she had never met before that afternoon.
Pete cleared his throat and said the house had needed a woman's hand again, and Wiley nodded hard enough to make his clean collar slip, and Caleb poured the bottle into tin cups, and they drank to the marriage and to the ranch and to the winter ahead, and the stew was served, and for a little while the house felt full in a way it had not felt since Elias's mother had died.
When the meal was done, Pete said something gruff and kind about the house having a woman in it again, and Clara thanked him with a composure that made Elias wonder whether she was nervous at all. She did not look nervous. She looked like a woman who had decided something and was prepared to live with it.
Later, when the county man had gone and the house had quieted, she came and stood beside Elias at the window, and she said, very quietly, "Thank you for marrying me." It was a strange thing to say, and it caught him off guard, because he had thought of the marriage as a thing done for him, for the ranch, for the bank. He had not thought of it as a thing done for her, a woman with nowhere else to go, who had ridden nine days to a strange valley and married a stranger. He did not know what to answer, so he nodded, and she nodded back, and they stood there a moment, two strangers bound by a signature, looking out at a ranch that belonged, now, to them both.
That evening, after the county man had ridden away and the house had gone quiet, Clara moved into the house as his wife. She did not make a ceremony of it. She put her clothes in the chest at the foot of the bed, she set her mother's small clock on the mantel, and she asked, in the same pleasant tone she had used about the barn roof, whether she might look at the account books.
Elias stiffened. "The books are my business."
Of course, she said. "But a house runs on its books the way a ranch runs on its fences. I only wish to know where we stand."