by Rose, Amelia
Mr. Longren tipped his hat back on his head. "Heard about you from Matt for a lot of years, missy. What made you decide to marry him finally?"
As though it had been up to me all that time! I wasn't sure I wanted to take responsibility for that.
"He finally asked," I said and that made him laugh.
"She's got spirit, son."
"She'd have to," Matthew said and put an arm around me, bringing me with him to the wagon. We had a few bags, a few gifts and not much else. "How's Mother?"
"Cleaning," said his father. He addressed me with a smile. "I told her you probably weren't coming to investigate her housekeeping, but you know women."
Sometimes, I wondered about that. But I liked the smile and I returned it and we climbed in the wagon and headed for the ranch.
Matthew's brothers met us on the road, riding sorrel horses with dark manes. They were wind-tossed boys, who looked carved from the landscape itself, already work-toughened, in their mid-teens, with goofy Longren grins. They rode around the wagon, staying out of reach of their father, who told them to stop but never with sufficient annoyance.
"You see where he gets it," Mr. Longren said, as if traits could have been passed from brother to brother and from younger to older, but I didn't question it.
Instead, impertinent, I said, "From you?" and watched him smile a private, quiet smile, the way Hutch sometimes did.
With the Longrens, one had to stay on her toes and look closely for emotions. What they announced to the world in broad gestures was only a fraction of what went on in the Longren men.
There were far more outbuildings than house—barns, grain bins, milking sheds and the like. The house itself was two stories, compact and whitewashed, peeling gently under the strong sunlight. The yard was clean and cheerful and bird song sounded clear on the air.
Mrs. Longren came out when she heard the wagon pulling into the dooryard. At my first glimpse of her, I thought for an instant that Annie was coming to greet us, impossible though that was, and after that, realizing this was Annie's mother, I was set to like her, and the rest of the fear, nestling in my mind since we had left Reno and exploding during the delays in the snow, melted away.
"Anyone can learn to cook," Cecilia Longren said. "I can teach you. It's really very simple. Start with what you like, or what Matthew likes, or—"
"—Matthew would eat sagebrush if I put it on a plate," I said. "And I like apples."
Cecilia laughed Her big, sunny kitchen was built so she could employ girls from town to help during cattle drives when there were extra men to cook for and during branding season, calving, harvesting alfalfa, other times of year when the kitchen was in high use. She looked capable of running it solely on her own and, during the few days we'd been staying with her, everything she'd made there was wonderful.
Our first morning, I'd offered to make biscuits, my one specialty. I'd made them the next two mornings, too, until she offered to teach me something else and I panicked.
"It's trial and error," she said now, guiding me to a seat at the shining wood table. Everything in her kitchen gleamed, clean and ready for use. "Here, this is the cookbook I used when I got married."
It was falling apart, had been mended several times and now was tied with a piece of string when not in use. She flipped gently through the pages, where line drawings strove to convince the reader such kitchen alchemy was possible.
"That's a roast," I said, pointing. "It has instructions on how to make a roast?"
Cecilia blinked. "Yes. Why?"
"But that's simple," I said. "I mean, salt, pepper, root vegetables, big kettle, lots of hours, maybe some water and spices if you have them." I looked away from the pictures that were making roasts more complicated than necessary and caught her smiling. "What?"
She raised her brows, shook her head. "Nothing. Here, what about this?"
"Roast chicken," I said. "Same kind of thing. Sage is nice with it," thinking that Matthew actually did eat sage and that was handy, though not an entire brush, just a sprig or two.
"And stew?"
I started to answer, then stopped and stared at her.
"Where do you buy your bread?" she asked, delicately realigning the pages in her cookbook and retying it closed.
"There's a nice bakery in Reno, but most of the time—" I broke off. "I've started to make it. If I can get sour milk, I can make a rye Matthew likes and, other times, I want to leave it overnight because I have heavy flour and it needs a long rise." She looked so much like Annie. "Why are you smiling?"
"You can't learn to cook because you already know," she said. "If you have a cookbook, put it aside. Listen to yourself. You already know what you're doing and, from the look of things, Matthew's not starving." She patted me and stood but she was no longer smiling. As she put the book back on the baker's rack, she said, "He's worrying, though."
"The train," I said and stood, restless, tucking my hands into the pockets of the apron I wore.
"You said he did everything he could," she said, as if it were a statement she was making as she tidied an already tidy kitchen.
"He did. There wasn't much. He braked the way he should; Roy stopped feeding the boiler. The train should have slowed. But we had a head of steam, we were on a descent and the flood waters hit us."
Cecilia Longren leaned against her kitchen counter and studied me. "What do you think?"
I raised my brows. "I think he did everything right. I think he saved the lives of everyone there. I don't think there was anything else he could have done but that doesn't change the fact he did it. He was calm, he thought things through, he moved fast and he got us through."
She nodded. "You've told him that?"
That wasn't really her question to ask, I thought, but I shook my head anyway. "No. The railroad inspector told him. Now, Matthew needs to tell Matthew."
She considered that, nodded and stepped away from the counter. "It might not hurt to hear it from his wife as well."
I liked her advice about cooking.
But she was wrong about Matthew.
That afternoon, David and Henry found me standing on the porch looking out at the ranch. I wasn't really seeing it. Beautiful country but I couldn't imagine living here with no neighbors in visual distance, no place to shop or see a play. Restlessness was setting in, enough so that even my slight trepidation about trains wasn't sufficient to hold me back. I wanted to be moving again.
David approached first. His coloring was lighter than his brother, his Longren eyes almost green, his hair sandy. He was taller than Henry and a year older, at 15.
They shared the Longren male ability to find trouble anywhere.
"Matthew says he taught you to shoot," David said, a challenge in his expression that I recognized from every playground dare.
It met the restlessness inside me. "He did. I asked him to."
"He said you're pretty good," Henry put in.
I raised my eyebrows quite high. "Pretty good?"
Henry shrugged elaborately. "Not as good as him, of course. But good." He looked up from his elaborate nonchalance. "For a girl."
Oh, I was so being played. "Well, and are you any good at shooting? Can you shoot better than a girl? Or did you come to ask me for a lesson?"
He sputtered so hard, his brother nudged him and I almost broke out laughing. "I don't need no lessons."
"Any lessons," David corrected, trying hard not to grin.
"And maybe you do," I added, trying to get his goat. It wasn't a fair fight. I'd apparently gotten his goat before I even became involved in the conversation. When Matthew told him I could shoot and that I was pretty good, apparently I'd brought out the male in Henry.
"Come on," I said, holding out my hand as I would to a small child. "Let's go find Matthew and get his gun, and Matthew himself, if he's up to the challenge, and we'll go see which of us girls shoot the best."
"Was there a reason you were trying to make my brother explode?" Matthew asked as we trail
ed behind the younger Longrens in the sunny, but cold, afternoon. He carried the Colt on his hip. I carried a basket with a picnic lunch his mother had packed. His brothers carried guns their father had handed out warily and a sack of old cans and bottles.
"Entertainment purposes," I said lightly and was rewarded with only the smallest of smiles. Matthew was going with us, but he wasn't back yet. Still mired in his thoughts, in what he could have done and should have done when there wasn't anything else and everything had turned out for the best.
I was grateful, just then, for nothing more than that he was accompanying us.
They set up the cans and bottles along the bank of a stream that ran through the Longren property, far enough away from any of the herds not to startle or chance wounding one, no matter how poor a shot the girl was, I suppose the thinking went.
As the sun came and went from clouds and the day warmed slightly and cooled significantly in October glory, we ate our lunch and sat talking about nothing in particular, with long silences filled with bird song. At last, Matthew's brothers rose and set up the targets.
They went first. It was their idea and they were the ones with the most to prove. I had nothing in particular I wanted to prove. I'd learned to shoot, I did it well, better, I thought, than Matthew, unless he had been humoring me, and I didn't think so. I wasn't of a mind to let the boys out-shoot me, but watching Matthew as he brooded at the stream, I wondered if I should let him win.
Just as fast, I decided against it. He'd know. He already felt sorry enough for himself. He didn't need both of us doing it.
So after Henry and David each shot 12 rounds, splattering glass and making the cans jump and wobble and at least a third of the time shooting up the dirt around the targets, they grinned at me.
"Oh, not my turn yet," I said. "Age before beauty."
Matthew, at least, smiled at that. Targets were set. The boys had scrupulously unloaded before holstering their pistols and now lounged against cottonwoods, watching.
Matthew was good. He was very good. He shattered six bottles and caught five of the six cans and, briefly, he was himself again, insolently challenging me to do better.
I took the Colt from him, loaded, took a breath, checked where the boys were standing, narrowed my focus—and shattered all six bottles and hit all six cans.
David and Henry were young enough, and only just, to celebrate the strangeness of being bested by a girl. They circled us as we walked back, chattering, asking questions, had I ever fired any other gun? Did I want to try theirs? Had my father taught me or was that all from Matthew? And if so, could Matthew teach them?
"Why not ask Chloe?" Matthew asked. "She's the one who beat you."
"But she's a girl." But they were laughing. And Matthew was smiling. So it had been a good afternoon.
It lasted until evening. When Matthew came to supper, he was brooding and silent again.
After five days on the ranch, Matthew and I rode into the town of Alturas and stopped at the train station. The master there asked Matthew excited questions about the storm, as if sorry he'd missed the adventure, then sent telegraphs to Reno asking when Matthew should schedule his return. The answer came back that as soon as he returned, they'd be ready for him to go out again.
"Shall I send a reply?" the station master asked.
Matthew considered and finally nodded. "Tell them I'll let them know as soon as I'm ready to take a train back to Reno."
He said very little on the ride back to the ranch.
Later that same afternoon, I went out for some fresh air before preparations for evening meal could begin. I was avoiding Matthew's mother, afraid she'd ask me if I'd talked to him about the accident. Maybe she was right, maybe she wasn't, but it needed to be up to me and now I was confused. I was afraid if I addressed Matthew directly and told him I thought he'd been responsible for keeping everyone onboard safe and done everything right, he'd take it the other way around—that he'd think, if I said it, it was only because my own doubts about what he'd done preyed on my mind.
Walking out toward the barn where the horses were stabled, I heard voices and corrected my direction to avoid them. The ranch was constantly busy; there were always people around. I was looking forward to getting home, even if it meant taking a train, and better still to take a train than to let what we did together become something I feared.
The day was mild, cold but sunny with the sun still up. When I reached the stable, I stood leaning against the structure, letting a couple of the horses nose at me and the sun sink into my back, warming me. I stood in the lee of the barn, closer to the fenced pasture than to the outbuildings I had passed on my way in, hidden from the house and most angles of approach simply because I was standing farther away.
So, they didn't see me as they came close, Mr. Longren clicking for the horses to come into the stable and Matthew with him. They were already in the middle of a discussion, which sounded appropriate to me, as Mr. Longren said, "Always were damned stubborn."
"I appreciate your concern," Matthew said, dryly.
"Well, don't," his father said. "Why you feel a need to mull over every little detail I don't know. You know what happened. You told me what happened. The inspector told you there wasn't a damned thing you could have done differently."
'I didn't ask to talk about it," Matthew said.
"You didn't ask to talk about it?"
"You said I'm mulling it over. Seems to me you're doing the mulling."
"Are you naturally this way or did something happen to you on that train?" His father sounded half amused, half angry.
"You're making a joke about it?" Matthew's voice wavered uncertainly.
"Well, you're certainly not," his father said. Exasperation seemed to be winning. "Son, what is it you need to hear? You did everything right. What's keeping you here on the ranch, where you once said you'd die before you stayed?"
Matthew, unseen, kicked something. I jumped a little. I couldn't see him, but I was sure it was Matt doing the kicking.
"Well?" his father demanded.
I heard Matthew's steps on the gravel in the yard, circling as he must have turned to face his father from wherever he'd gone to kick things. "What if I don't next time? What then? What if it happens again? What if I freeze? What if I'm too scared to act?"
There was silence then for a beat of my heart. Answer him, I pleaded. Then Matthew's father said, "You didn't this time, did you?"
Matthew didn't answer.
"Matthew Longren, the one thing no one has ever accused you of is indecision or inaction."
Matthew made a sound of assent.
"People have accused you of a good many other things, though."
Matthew made a sound like a short laugh. "We don't really need to cover those, do we?"
"Pigheadedness," his father said. "Did that pretty little wife of yours tell you you'd done everything you could?"
Matthew sounded stubborn as ever. "She loves me," he said, as if it were some failing of mine that made me untrustworthy.
"Seems to," his father agreed. "Doesn't make her completely stupid."
"Much appreciated."
"Son, everyone but you has cleared you of any wrong action. You saved the lives of the people on the train. You say there wasn't anything else you could have done, and so what? You did it, didn't you? They're alive, you're alive, she's alive, and the chances of getting caught in something like that again?"
"Lousy?" Matthew asked, his voice softening.
"Not a bet I'd want to take at The Faro Queen." From the sound of it, he slapped Matthew on the back. "Speaking of which, seems t'me that Hutch's about to become a daddy. Don't you need to get back in that direction and complicate things for him?"
They were headed my way, ambling. I stayed where I was, enjoying the sunlight, waiting to let them find me.
"Maggie's Hutch's concern," Matthew said as they came around the stable. "This one's mine."
"Take her home, then, Matthew. All's well." He cla
pped his son on the back and nodded to me, his hat shading eyes that seemed to be smiling.
I waited until he was out of sight, then slid into the circle of Matthew's arms, looking up at him. "Ready to go home for a little while?" I asked. Reno sounded promising. We could make some runs to Virginia City, see Maggie, tease Annie, visit Sarah and Kitty, Isabel and my folks.
"Let's find a train," Matthew Longren said.
The End
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