Marry Me

To Nate, on the occasion of his high school graduation

Keep safe

Go to class

Get some sleep

Have fun

Check in regularly (“Hi, Mom, I’m alive” will do)

I couldn’t be prouder, or love you more.

T
here’s a sucker born every minute…

The odd thing about that was that no one who truly knew Emily Bright would ever have applied that phrase to her. For no one who spent as much time as she did with people on the extremes of human existence, in pain and grief and joy, could remain ignorant of some of mankind’s essential flaws.

But she’d been born and remained a deeply optimistic person. And that cornerstone of her character, her insistence upon expecting the best in every person and situation, made her the perfect audience for the advertisement that a handsome young man thrust in her hand as she clipped down the street by the Broad Street train station. She’d sneaked off to visit Mrs. Sweeney, whom Dr. Goodale had decreed was recovering nicely from a bout with pleurisy, but Emily wished to examine her one more time just to make sure.

That, and the fact that she very much wanted the information on the flyer to be true.

Free land!

It can be yours! The vast central plains of this great nation abound with plentiful game and pure, sparkling waters, soil so rich that crops spring forth before one has barely scattered seeds upon the fertile ground! And it can be yours, your own home, on your own land, due to the foresight of our government, with no more investment than your own courage and labor…

She stood frozen, oblivious to the stream of jostling people that eddied around her.

Home, her own home.

She’d never had one, not one of her own since she was five. Oh, she’d lived places, she and her sisters, places she’d always understood she’d have to leave eventually. Even the beautiful house she’d lived in for the last fourteen years—no one had ever allowed her to labor under the delusion it was hers. And now Norine, her sister Kate’s stepdaughter, had made no secret of the fact that she was impatient to move back into the house her father had willed her.

Where would Emily and Kate go now? She’d no idea. Kate cheerfully insisted Emily shouldn’t worry, all would be fine. And then she’d popped off to dinner with Floyd Ruckman, the late Dr. Goodale’s old, very rich, and utterly unappealing friend.

Emily was terribly afraid that Kate had every intention of sacrificing herself on the altar of not-so-holy matrimony for Emily’s sake once again. Emily had been too young to stop Kate all those years ago when she’d married Dr. Goodale. But now that Emily was fully grown and quite capable of taking care of herself, she had no intention of allowing Kate to make the same mistake again. But allowing, or not allowing, Kate to do something was never as easily accomplished as decided.

Kate had already given years of her life for Emily’s sake. Emily had no doubt she would continue to do so until Emily proved it completely unnecessary. She’d wracked her brain for weeks in an attempt to figure out how to do just that, but short of marrying Mr. Ruckman herself, she’d yet to come up with a plan.

Someone plowed into her back, and she stumbled forward, reflexively clutching the precious paper.

“You’re holdin’ things up, missy,” a man in a natty suit and handsome black bowler growled at her.

Blinking, Emily surfaced from dazzling dreams of a snug little cabin surrounded by acres of burgeoning fields and pretty orchards. Hers, all hers. “Oh. I’m terribly sorry.” Around her, harried people rushed to catch the next train, shouted to hail a cab, or hurried toward the shops and businesses on the street, the ebb and flow of a great city and busy lives.

“Time to get movin’.”

“Yes.” She grinned so brightly the impatient gentleman couldn’t help but smile back. “It certainly is.”

It took her three weeks to prepare. Luckily, those three weeks had been busy ones for Kate as well, swept up in the details of settling the doctor’s immense estate and of mediating between Loren and Norine, her stepchildren, who hadn’t been able to divide a breast of chicken at dinner without squabbling when they were younger. Things had not improved greatly over the years.

Emily often wondered if Kate was tempted to simply step aside. There was no advantage in her standing between them; the amount of his estate that Dr. Goodale left to his second wife was a tiny sliver of his wealth. But Kate was never one to leave a project undone, and her marriage to Goodale was as much a business agreement as anything else in her life.

And so Emily had little trouble convincing Kate to allow her to journey to Colorado to visit their other sister, Anthea, and her family. Though Kate didn’t approve of Emily’s traveling alone, they’d made the trip several times over the years. The train to Denver was both safe and reliable, and Gabriel, Anthea’s husband, always met them at the station himself. Anthea could always use a little assistance, Emily reminded Kate; their oldest son, twelve-year-old Jimmy, seemed to have inherited every one of his father’s hellion tendencies.

Kate simply could not leave Philadelphia until the estate was completely settled. She must not consider it, Emily insisted. And Kate could concentrate on the numerous details more fully without Emily’s presence distracting her.

Not to mention that, though she would appear in public with her petticoats hanging out before admitting it, Kate was not nearly as fond of the rustic charm and wide-open spaces of Gabriel’s ranch as Emily and Anthea were. Anthea had been married for years before Kate was fully convinced that, yes, Anthea really
wanted
to live in such uncivilized conditions.

And so, three weeks and several twinges of conscience for her justifiable lies later, Emily Bright was ready to begin her grand and independent new life.

Free land, Emily soon discovered, was not nearly as cheap as one might have thought.

She’d expected the cost of the train ride that got her to Billings. The stagecoach, a dusty, bone-rattling affair, had sliced another ten dollars from her tiny hoard. She hadn’t slept a wink throughout the entire ride, not only because every time she came close to nodding off the road had other ideas, but because she was also too thoroughly excited to sleep. She was nearly there! The vast, empty brown plains and low hills that rolled by outside—perhaps that one, that empty stretch right there, might be hers soon. The thought had her nearly drunk with excitement.

But she hadn’t anticipated the kind land agent, who’d been so friendly and helpful, informing her that the government expected her to hand over fourteen more dollars to claim her free land.

“Fourteen?”

“Yes, miss, fourteen dollars.” Imbert Longnecker stroked his handlebar mustache, of which he was, he considered, justifiably proud. They didn’t get many single women out there, especially not ones as charming as this fresh young thing. The dismay on her face had him rushing to allay her fears. “But the remainder of the fee won’t be due till you prove up. Eighty dollars in eight months—”

“Eighty dollars!”

“Only if you prove up on the short schedule,” he assured her. “If you stay the full five years, your additional fees will be negligible.”

“Five years.”

“Yes.” He devoutly hoped she would stay that long. “The rules are quite simple, Miss…?”

“Miss Bright.”

“Bright. How appropriate.”

“Oh.” She flushed, as if compliments were new to her and she wasn’t quite sure how to take them. “Thank you.”

“You’ll need to plow thirty acres,” he told her. “And pay the fees, and be in residence the entire time. Beyond that, the only requirements are to be an American citizen over the age of twenty-one.” Her healthy color drained in an instant. “Are you all right, Miss Bright?”

“Excuse me?”

Perhaps she would faint. And then he could catch her. “A glass of water, perhaps?”

“No.” White-gloved fingers desperately clutched the thick braided handle of her string bag. “My apologies. Wh-what is the next step?”

Five years, nothing. He’d be lucky if she lasted five weeks. “You choose your claim.”

“We get to choose?”

“You do.” Imbert was the proud veteran of two whole lotteries, and he puffed up at the opportunity of assisting someone who could truly benefit from his vast experience. “Not when the reservation first opened, of course—oh, we handed out five times as many numbers as there were claims to be had! But now, well, the excitement has moved out to the newer openings. There are at least a dozen claims to choose from.” He stood up and grabbed a map. “Here. Would you allow my assistance?” He unrolled the big curl of thick paper and hummed while he considered.

Emily edged around the slab table to peer at the map. “May I?”

“Of course.”

Emily could make little sense of lines gridded across the paper, tiny, neat numbers painstakingly etched in rigid order. Her stomach jittered, excitement and nerves in equal measure. Somewhere on that paper was her home; she just knew it. And once she made that final decision, there’d be no going back.

“Would you—”

“Yes?” She lifted her head to meet his eyes, and he seemed momentarily to lose his train of thought. Flushing, he ducked his head, smoothing the edges of the curling paper with the palm of his hand.

“I thought perhaps that, well, if you hadn’t selected a place already, maybe…perhaps you wouldn’t mind a bit of advice.”

“I would be most grateful for any insight you could give me.”

One bony finger traced over the paper. “Maybe…no, not there.” He inscribed an arc over a wavering line that meandered down the left edge. A river, maybe? She’d always liked the sound of water. His finger took a right turn, wandered with agonizing slowness across the bottom, as her stomach lifted into her throat. “Hmm…we don’t have as many good ones left as I thought, I’m trying to find one that’s partially improved…”

If she got any more excited, she thought, she was going to expire before she ever set foot on her own claim.

“There.” He tapped his fingers on a square tucked into the far right corner. “Been empty a year now, maybe more. But it was first claimed in ’97, should be at least partially improved. Probably even has a house, that’s usually the first thing a homesteader puts up.”

Her hand wavered in the air. She took a deep breath, steadied it, and placed her finger firmly on the paper.
There
. “What happened to the people who claimed it originally?”

“Who knows?” He shrugged. “We don’t keep track. Sometimes they get called home. Some people are too restless to stay in one place that long. Some people find they can’t live this far from the city.”

She squinted, as if it could tell her something more. Straight, neat lines; thick paper discolored to mottled cream; rows of numbers; what could they tell her? A home couldn’t be condensed to bare facts on a map.

“What do you think?” he asked.

The future shimmered before her, full of promise, and she need only reach out and seize it. “I’ll take it.”

“Here you go.” Old Murphy, the locator Imbert—they were not so formal in the West, he assured her, and using his given name was not improper—had recommended to her, hauled on the reins.

“Here?” Emily, who’d been craning her neck for the past hour in anticipation, sat up even higher and spun in her seat, searching. “Where?”

Murphy climbed over the back of the seat into the wagon bed. “Right there.”

“But—” The sun was almost down, sliding low and red. Which was no doubt what was making it difficult to properly make out her new home. “It’s an improved claim. There’s supposed to be a house.”

“There is.” He pitched two crates over the side and jabbed his thumb west, into the glare. “That’s it.”

“But…” She truly had not expected a house like the ones back East. She’d rolled through the plains on her way to Gabriel’s ranch, marveling at some of the rustic settlements that she passed. She knew that houses were different here. Still…“That’s not a house.”

“Claim shack.” He heaved her trunk over the side. “Nicer than most, at that. Could use another layer of tar paper, ’course, but that’s easy enough to fix.”

The wind kicked, and Emily could have sworn the structure shuddered. The land around it, flat and broad, dense with grass the color of summer, dwarfed it, made it appear no more substantial and permanent than a tissue-paper flower in the rain. It was as if the land tolerated it for the moment, and would sweep it away as soon as it had tired of its interloping presence.

“You gettin’ out?” Murphy squinted up at her. “Or you want to go back? I’d just as soon you make up your mind before I unload any more of your gear.”

She told herself she wasn’t even tempted. What did she have to go back to? Thousands of men and women had made a success of homesteading; the newspapers trumpeted their stories regularly.

Though where all those people had gotten to was anybody’s guess. There certainly was no sign of them out there.

“I’m staying.” She clambered down from the seat and, for the first time, planted her feet on her own land. Give or take five years and a few legal details.

Old Murphy was as thin and resilient as the grass, and as much a part of the land. “I’ll probably be back this way in a week or two. I’ll stop by, see if you changed your mind by then.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Even if it did make her feel a whole lot better.

“Do it just the same.” It took him only a few moments to unload the rest of the wagon. “That’ll be twenty bucks.”

The figure had shocked her when Old Murphy first informed her of the fee. It cost her more to travel these last eight miles from McGyre than the train ticket from Philadelphia all the way to Billings.

She dug in her handbag, peeled off the bills, and tried not to think about how small her nest egg had become. Something would come up by the time she needed to pay the proving-up fees.

“There.” Murphy pulled the last of the crates from the back of the wagon and stacked it next to her two trunks, a valise, and three boxes of supplies. “You sure that’s all you need? Seems a small stash to get you through the whole winter. You wanna give me a list of dry goods? I can bring ’em back next time I’m through.”