The Oklahoma Territory spring of 1887 had been dry enough to leave powder in every wagon rut and on every boot heel from the Kansas border south to the river breaks. Benjamin had noticed it the way a man who works land alone notices everything, because there was no one to say it to. The color of the dust.
The way it coated the underside of every fence rail and sifted through the cracks of the barn siding and came up through the floorboards of the house in the mornings until a fine grit settled on every surface overnight. The air smelled of dry grass, split cedar, and the particular mineral smell of ground that had not seen real rain in six weeks. The sky was blue in a way that was almost aggressive, offering nothing.
He had been setting fence posts along the east pasture for most of the afternoon, working in the methodical way he worked everything, one post at a time, the ground tamped firm around each one before moving to the next. The physical work was not a burden. It was the opposite of a burden.
It kept the hours from going shapeless, and shapeless hours were what Benjamin Quincy feared most about a solitary life on the plains. He was thirty-two years old, though on certain evenings he felt older in ways that had nothing to do with the calendar, as if grief added years that appeared not in a mirror but somewhere deeper, in the joints and the particular quality of silence in an empty house after dark. Three years earlier, consumption had taken his wife Sarah before the children they used to talk about in the quiet half hour after supper had been anything more than a shared hope.
They had planned names the way poor people plan gardens, not with certainty but with the forward-leaning happiness of people who believe the future is generally on their side. A boy, maybe. A girl, certainly.
More than one, if God inclined toward generosity. They had argued pleasantly about what to name a boy, Sarah preferring her father’s name, Benjamin preferring something from his own family, and the argument had never been settled because there was time, they believed, to settle it later. Then Sarah’s coughing worsened through November into something that could no longer be called a cold or a chest complaint, and the doctor from Guthrie came out twice and said what he had to say in the careful, measured voice of a man delivering news he wished he did not have to give, and by February she was gone.
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