knew he had failed as a husband the first time around. Sometimes, he questioned whether he was a good enough father to his children. But, he was proud of what he had accomplished with his land. It had taken years, but he finally felt like he was established. His cattle and horses had a growing reputation and provided enough income to live on. The amount of land planted in crops was also expanding.
“I barely know anything about living on a ranch. Or a farm.”
Millie’s mask was good, but her hands were still clenched. He had not managed to put her at ease at all. Adam fought the urge to touch her. Reassure her.
Then he stopped fighting. He was determined that this was going to be a good marriage. He might not want the intimate aspects of having a wife, but he did want a friendship. He wanted his children to be surrounded by love. Companionship. Adam transferred the reins to one hand and used the other to reach out and touch Millie’s arm. He tried to make his touch safe and comforting.
“I can teach you anything you need to know. I told you I lived in the city for a bit. I have a good understanding of what you’re used to. The farm won’t be that different. Day-to-day life inside a home is pretty much the same everywhere.”
Millie nodded her head and smiled. But, her hands were still clenched like she was clinging on to something for dear life.
Adam drew his hand back, unsure yet again whether he had helped at all. He sure didn’t feel like he had lessened her fears.
To Do:
Breathe
Get to know the children
Learn about farms—Livestock? Crops?
Is it better to live on a farm or a ranch?
Millie needed her notebook. Her pencil. And fifteen minutes alone to lose her composure without an audience. But, she was not going to get any of those things, so she concentrated on the scenery. It was, well, beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking in fact.
Funny, when she made her long list of pros and cons for marrying a total stranger, the place where he lived did not ever cross her mind. She was looking for security. Safety. To feel like she could breathe again. She’d have been willing to take up residence at the bottom of a coal mine as long as she could have those things. Millie would never, ever forget what it felt like when she realized that she was, indeed, pregnant and homeless. And without the skills to find a job. Dependent on the kindness of strangers in a world that had never been very full of kind strangers to Millie’s eye.
She tried to suppress a shiver, tightening her muscles viciously. She didn’t want Adam to see and ask if she was okay. And he would. She had already learned some things about her new husband.
Millie slowly relaxed her muscles, and refocused her eyes on the scene in front of her. Beautiful was still the primary word she could find to describe it. Yes, it was the same blue sky that had been above her in Saint Louis. But, the rest was revelation.
Gold-and-green grass, at least four feet tall, swayed in the wind. She was looking at a never-ending golden-green sea, in fact. There were waves. Honest-to-goodness waves. In grass. The ground was so straight here that the dark spots on the horizon could well be hundreds of miles away.
Her first impression off the train was that Marrison was small and remote and quaint. A little settling trying to be a town. And now she was going to live almost an hour away from even that small civilization. It didn’t seem possible, but the landscape just got more and more remote the farther they went.
Millie was used to being on her own. However, she wasn’t used to being in a place that felt so foreign. The Keller ranch had been right outside Saint Louis. Knowing she was near the city had made the location feel close. Familiar.
Not now, though. Millie was far from the rivers and bluffs and the buzz of the city that she’d known all her life. A whole new start in a whole new land. It was both one of the scariest and one of the most comforting things Millie had ever seen.
Her plan for how she would act in this new marriage had not accounted for all the details of her new reality. How could it, though? She’d never been to Kansas. Never lived on a farm.
But, she would figure it out. She always figured it out. Millie just needed to gather as much information as possible. She would ask questions. Pay attention to what everyone else was doing. Take notes. And then, she could make her plan.
Millie sat up straighter as Adam turned the wagon off the worn trail of dirt that she assumed counted as a main road out here. The new path they had turned onto barely looked like a path at all. Instead of a solid width of light brown dirt, the way was designated by yet more grass. The grass was just shorter than the golden-green ocean surrounding them.
There was also a parting of the waves, so to speak. The moving grass gave way to rectangles of what had to be crops. Millie didn’t know what was growing, but she saw the neat rows of dark earth and the green plants seemingly shooting up out of the ground. She also saw cattle and horses.
Millie couldn’t contain her excitement. Though the large animals frightened her, they also thrilled her. She had never seen such creatures up close before. Sure, there were horses in the city, not to mention plenty of them at the Keller ranch, but these horses looked bigger. Rougher. More fitting to the wild frontier she’d been told existed once a person traveled past Saint Louis. She could hear them. And, though it was strange and perhaps unpleasant, she could smell them—a stronger odor than she’d noted at the Kellers’ home, where she’d rarely been outside. Instead of being a picture through a frame, they were very much real.
“This is our land. We’re only about ten minutes from the house.”
Our land. He’d done that earlier today, too. Millie wondered at how Adam seemed to have no problem moving from being a widower to being completely married. He acted as though he was pleased to share everything he had worked for with her.
Or else, he was very good at pretending. Millie had known more than one man who could put on a grand show of being generous and kind in public while being secretly stingy or cruel behind closed doors.
You’re too cynical, Millie. There are good people in this world, who genuinely want to help others without any strings attached. You need to have a little faith.
Mrs. Thompson’s words echoed through Millie’s head. It wasn’t the first time they had made an appearance. It seemed as though they had done nothing but ricochet around since the pastor’s wife had said them.
“Well, what do you think?”
Millie realized that she could see buildings now. A small house. A barn. A couple of other structures whose function she couldn’t place. The house looked sturdy. There was a porch and couple of windows out front. Millie saw two rocking chairs, and the whole scene reminded her of a picture she had seen in a book about life on the prairie. Seeing essentially the same picture now, in living color, with sunshine and a breeze on her face, and the ambient noise of animals was nicer.
She had a place to live. Food. Her baby would not be born fatherless and on the streets. No. He or she would have a home and a family and would never know the experiences that plagued Millie’s own youth. That was what she had wanted. What
