The letter was dated in the last summer of her health, in the small, steady hand she used for anything she meant to keep.
My dearest Amos, it began, and at the first line his vision blurred so completely that he had to set the page down, breathe, and begin again.
If you are reading this, then one of two things is true. Either I have grown forgetful and left drawers unlocked, which you may mock me for at supper, or I am gone, and you have finally come back into this house. I know how long that will have taken you, my love. Do not apologize for it while you read. I married a man who feels things all the way down to the root. It is why I married him.
Amos made a sound that was not quite laughter, and read on.
There is a thing I never told you whole, because the people it belongs to asked for quiet. I will tell it now, on paper, where I cannot be interrupted by your face doing what it does when you are worried.
Four winters ago my horse threw me at Redbank Wash. The truth is that the fall was bad. I could not stand. The light was going and the cold coming down out of the rocks, and I understood I might be found in the morning by you instead of coming home to you, and I was more angry about that than frightened, which will not surprise you.
Three women found me. They owed a strange white woman on the ground precisely nothing, and they gave me everything they had anyway. They built the fire up. They splinted my leg with care that would shame half the doctors in the Territory. They lay their own blankets over me and took the cold side of the fire themselves, and in the morning they walked beside my horse five miles, five miles, Amos, before they would turn back. A person is not the same, after someone walks that far beside her for nothing.
The next summer, when trouble came on their families, they came to me, and I did the smallest thing. I gave them water from our well and food from our table and the barn for two nights while men rode the creek road. Before they left I made them a promise, and I am now making it yours, because promises, like wells, do not belong to one person, however the papers read.
I told them: if trouble ever comes, come to this ranch. And I have not left it at words. Beneath this letter is a paper from the land office — I rode to Fortuna twice and stood in that office until they registered our well as a protected water station, open to any traveler, with shelter for seventy-two hours guaranteed by law. No company man and no marshal on a company’s errand can lawfully move people on from our gate inside that time. Keep that document safe.
And now the part I need you to hear with your whole heart, she wrote, so sit down if you are standing, and I know you, so you are standing.
He laughed then, alone at her desk, and sat down properly, as instructed, in her chair.
If one day they arrive in great numbers — not one family, Amos, but many, more than seems reasonable, more than our yard can hold — do not count it as misfortune and do not send them to be someone else’s problem down the road. Trust that they come for a reason larger than themselves, larger than hunger or thirst, though they may be hungry and thirsty too. Women do not walk away from their homes in a body unless the thing behind them is worse than the road. If they come to our gate, it is because my miles at Redbank Wash have come around at last to yours. Receive them as you would have had those three receive me: entirely, and without keeping accounts.
You are the best man I have ever known, and the most stubborn, which in my experience is the same quality wearing two coats. I am not afraid for them, leaving them to you. I have never once been afraid of anything I left to you.
Keep the well sound. Keep the gate unbarred in your heart, whatever you do with the latch. And when you have read this, eat something, because you will have forgotten.
Your Ruth.
Amos read it twice more, slowly, the way a man crosses a river feeling for each stone. Then he folded it along its original fold and put it in his breast pocket, over his heart, and carried the federal document out into the lamplit house full of sleeping women, to keep it somewhere safer than a drawer no one opened.
Chapter 11
Beneath the Letter