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Isaac put our baby back in the cradle and pulled the cheesecloth over it. Without looking at me, he said, “The burial will be tomorrow. I’ll get started on the coffin.”

The burial. Then, “Isaac?”

He turned back.

The birthing, I wanted to say. It could’ve killed me. Tell me you were wrong to be gone. Tell me how this scared you bad. Tell me how it made you see just what I meant to you. Tell me how grateful you were to the woman what helped me. Instead, I said, “Why? Why do you hate Mrs. Fills the Pipe?”

He gave me an odd look, one that I didn’t know the meaning of. He said, “Because they bowed and scraped. Because they gave up.” And then he was gone.

19

RACHEL

I never said another word about leaving. Isaac didn’t believe me, I knew that, but I was all out of ways that would make him see it. I had nothing left but a scrap of hope that he’d change his mind about going to the gold mine. Holding on to that hope, I got up from our bed and did my best to make like that September was no different than any other. As Isaac expected, me and the girls sorted seeds for the fall garden. Heavy with sadness for my baby and all that I might lose, I planted those seeds, thinking it might not matter that I was doing this so late in the season. I patted them into place anyway, my mouth set, not having much to say to anybody.

In late September, Isaac got two hands in—neither of them much older than sixteen—to help drive the cattle to market in Scenic. When they got back, he wore a downhearted look and that told me the cattle were worth even less than he’d hoped. The winter supplies that he brought home then, short as they were, likely took most of the money. Without Isaac saying so, I saw how those cattle prices made him all the more determined to work the mine. All the same, I hoped.

By the end of September, me and Isaac had become like strangers, polite and saying only what was needed. We stepped around each other, our eyes not meeting, our hands not touching. The days turned shorter as nights came earlier and stayed longer, carrying a chill. That chill scared me bad; it made my blood cold; I couldn’t get myself warm; my teeth chattered even when I was working at the cookstove. It was only October, but for me it was January. Nights, I couldn’t sleep for thinking about stories of people snowed in, going hungry, running out of cow chips, freezing in their sleep. Fixed on those stories, my heart would seize up with fear and before I could stop myself, I’d get up and hurry to the children in their beds. I’d bend over them, close, needing to hear them breathe. If Isaac noticed any of this, he didn’t say anything. Likely he thought I was grieving for the baby.

I believed Isaac was worrying about the coming winter; the lines that crossed his forehead were deep. I didn’t ask, though. I didn’t want to say anything that might make him all the more determined to leave. So, like every fall, at night I covered the garden against the cold and uncovered it every morning for Mary and Liz to do the weeding. I worked at making food supplies stretch. Isaac, John, and the hired hands shored up the roof of the house so it’d hold against the coming snowfalls. They did the same for the barn and dugout. I picked apart the bottom hems of Mary’s and John’s coats and let them out. I put the porch rockers in the barn; I patched up the holes in our gloves. The girls stacked cow chips on the porch. For a week, Isaac, John, and the hands rode off each morning to check the fence lines. While they were gone, me and the girls covered the root cellar floor with straw, our way of being ready when it came time to store cabbage and pumpkins. After the fences were repaired and stood firm, Isaac let one of the hands go, keeping the yellow-haired boy called Manny Franks.

All too soon, it was the first day of the new school year. In the early morning light, me and the two little girls waved good-bye to Mary, John, and Liz. Tears came to me when the three