He shook his head. "You are asking me to sell my cattle and tear at my barn on the word of a woman who has been here a week."
I am asking you to look at your own books, she said, and her voice stayed level, but there was steel under it now, the steel he had heard when she spoke of Missouri. "The hay will not last to January. You know it. The roof will not hold. You know that too. I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to trust your own numbers."
They stood there in the kitchen, the fire crackling, the frost still on his coat, and Elias felt the old stubbornness rise in him, the Ward stubbornness that had kept this ranch in Ward hands for three generations and had also, he was beginning to suspect, kept it from getting the help it needed.
He wanted to refuse all of it. He wanted to tell her that he had run this ranch before she arrived and would run it after, and that a wife did not sell a man's cattle on her first week in the house.
But he thought about the well. He thought about the water running bright into the trough. He thought about the spring casing, collapsed and choking, that he had walked past for months and called October.
Not the cattle, he said at last. "Not yet. But the hay — we will buy the hay. I will ride to the next county myself and speak to the supplier."
Clara studied him for a moment, and then she nodded, as though she had expected exactly that much and no more. "The hay, then. And the roof?"
The roof after the hay, he said. "If there is time."
There will be time, she said, "if we make it."
He went out to saddle his horse, and Caleb fell in beside him, grinning, and said, "She's got you buying hay, brother. A week ago you'd have sworn we'd make do."
Elias did not answer. He rode out with the wind in his face and the smell of snow coming down off the mountains, and the valley opened before him, gold grass and black pines and the river valley where the cattle would have to winter. He rode past the north pasture, and he looked at it the way Clara had looked at it from the wagon, and he saw what she had seen: grass gone thin and pale, a creek bed that should have run and did not, fences sagging where no one had walked them in weeks. He had told himself all autumn that the pasture was merely dry. He had not asked why it was dry. He had not walked the creek to its head to see where the water went. He had been busy, and he had been proud, and the two together had made a fine excuse for not looking.
The ride to the next county was a long one, over a pass and down into a valley much like his own, and he had hours in the saddle to think, which was a dangerous thing for a man in his mood. He thought about his father, who had ridden this same road for hay in hard years, and about his mother, who had promised him a gentle wife, and about Clara at his kitchen table with a pencil in her hand, telling him the truth about his own numbers without raising her voice. He thought about the well, and the water running bright, and about the way she had hauled the bucket without being asked. And he thought, with a discomfort he could not shake, that the ranch had been failing in small ways for longer than he had admitted, and that he had called those failures October, and dry years, and bad luck, because it was easier than calling them his own.
By the time he reached the supplier's yard, with its barns and its stacked hay and its dogs barking at his horse, he had made up his mind about one thing: he would buy the hay, and he would buy enough of it, and he would not haggle over the price the way a man haggles when he is trying to prove he does not need what he is buying. He needed it. The ranch needed it. And needing a thing, he was beginning to understand, was not the same as being weak for needing it.
The supplier, a broad man with hay dust in his beard, named a price that made Elias wince, and Elias paid it without the long argument he would once have made, because the sky was darkening and the road home was long, and because every hour he spent haggling was an hour the hay was not on his ranch. He arranged the wagons for the day after tomorrow, and he shook the man's hand, and he rode out with the deal done, feeling lighter than he had in weeks and heavier at the same time, because the money was spent and there was no unspending it.
He rode home in the late light with the wind in his face and the smell of snow coming down off the mountains, and he thought about the storm three days away, and about the hay that was not enough, and about the roof that would not hold, and about the cattle that were thin, and about the bank note due in spring, and about the woman in his kitchen who had already found his water and read his books and told him the truth without flinching.