I’m going to tell you something I’ve only ever told two people in the whole of my life. One of them is dead. The other one is the man I walked eleven miles to find.

What I told him changed both our lives. What he told me when I was finished — when I had said what I had walked through the rain to say — changed mine more.

You can listen however you like. I have been a long time learning how to talk about this. And I am eighty-six years old. And I would prefer to tell it once properly before whatever it is that takes us takes me. So I will tell it the way it happened. And you can decide what to make of it.

 

My name is May Halloran. I was born in 1862 in a small town in eastern Kansas, the second of four children, and I came west with my parents in 1875. We settled in the Redstone Valley on a piece of land my father had bought sight unseen from a brochure that lied about almost every detail.

The brochure said the land was watered. It was not. The brochure said the soil was rich. It was thin and rocky. The brochure said the climate was temperate. I’m here to tell you the climate was not.

My father stayed anyway. He stayed because he had spent the last of our money getting us there. And he had no money left to take us anywhere else. He stayed for the rest of his life. He died in 1893 on the same land, in a cabin he had built with his own hands and improved every year for eighteen years.

By the end, the soil was richer. By the end, he had dug two wells and irrigated four acres. The brochure had been a lie, but my father had spent his life turning the lie into a truth. And the truth, when he was finished with it, was good.

I tell you this about my father because he is the person I have to mention first. He is the second of the two people I told this story to. And because telling him was the hardest thing I ever did. Harder than telling the man in the rain, harder than walking the eleven miles, harder than any of the rest of it.

But I am ahead of myself. Let me go back.

 

In the autumn of 1879, I was seventeen years old. We had a hired man on the place that year. He was twenty-two. His name was Jonas Whitcomb. He had come up from Missouri in the spring looking for work, and my father had taken him on for the harvest because we were short of hands and he came cheap.

He stayed through the autumn.

He was a quiet man. He was a carpenter by trade. His father had been a carpenter and his grandfather before that. But the carpentry work in Missouri had thinned out after the war, and he had gone west the way young men in those years went west because the going was the only direction available.

He slept in a small room off the barn. He ate his meals with my family. He worked from sunrise to sundown without complaint. And at the end of the day, he would sit on the back step of the cabin and read. He had a book of poetry that I never saw the title of because he held it in such a particular way that the cover was always hidden against his knee. And he would not speak to anyone unless someone spoke to him first.

I noticed him. I want to be careful about how I say this. I noticed him the way a young woman of seventeen notices a quiet young man who reads poetry on the back step — which is to say, I noticed him with all the precision of a hunter and none of the experience to do anything useful with what I noticed.

I had not known anyone like him before. The young men in the Redstone Valley were almost entirely ranchers and ranchers’ sons. They were good men, most of them, but they did not read poetry, and they did not sit quietly on back steps. They sat loudly on front porches.

Jonas Whitcomb did not sit loudly. That in itself was almost enough.

 

I want to tell you what kind of girl I was because I do not think anyone who has not been a girl in a frontier valley in 1879 fully understands what the choices on offer actually were.

You could marry. That was choice one. You could marry one of the local boys, almost certainly within ten miles of where you had been raised, and you could begin the work of being a frontier wife, which was, on average, twice the work of being a frontier farmer with half the recognition. You could have children. You could lose some of them. You could lose your husband to a horse, to the weather, to typhoid, to the simple slow exhaustion that took men in their forties on the frontier. You could survive him by twenty or thirty years in a cabin that was now too big for you, and you could die in a bed your daughters had moved into the kitchen to be closer to the stove.

That was choice one. It was the choice most of the girls I had grown up with took, and many of them took it well, and I am not telling you this to disparage it.

Choice two was you could leave. You could go east. You could become a schoolteacher in a town that had a school. You could become a clerk in a city that had clerks. You could find work, if you were lucky, in the kind of position that frontier daughters were considered just refined enough to qualify for, and just rough enough to do without complaint. You could not go far without family help, and most of us had no family help to give, but the option existed.

Choice three was you could stay. You could remain on your father’s place. You could remain unmarried. You could become gradually the kind of woman the valley referred to as “miss” or “auntie” without quite knowing which. You could care for your parents in their last years. You could inherit nothing because the property would go to your brothers. You could end up, if you were not careful, in a small cabin at the back of one of your brother’s properties taking in mending until the brother’s wife, who had not chosen you, decided whether you had been useful enough to keep.

That was choice three. It was the choice I most feared.

By the autumn of 1879, when Jonas Whitcomb appeared in our barn, I had been thinking about the three choices for nearly a year. I had been thinking about them with the particular intensity that comes from being seventeen and from having understood suddenly that the next two or three years were going to determine which choice my life would fall into.

I had not chosen yet. I was leaning toward choice one. I was leaning toward it not because I wanted to marry, but because I could not see how to manage the other two.

And then Jonas Whitcomb sat on our back step with a book of poetry, and the leaning shifted.

 

I want to be honest. I did not fall in love with him because of who he was. I fell in love — if love is even the right word for it, and I am no longer certain it was — with the idea that the future might have a fourth choice in it that I had not previously been allowed to imagine.

The fourth choice was a particular kind of marriage to a particular kind of man. In which a person could be loved for being quiet and could read books and could leave the eastern Kansas brochure soil behind and go somewhere. I did not know where. That the two of us eventually might find together.

That was a lot to put on a hired man. He did not know I had put it on him. He did not know for almost two months.

 

In the second week of November, 1879, a storm came through the valley. It came hard. We lost a stretch of fence on the south side of the property, and we lost two chickens. Small losses by frontier standards, but worth mentioning because the storm is what created the circumstance.

My father went out to inspect the damage with my older brother. They were gone all day. They had taken the wagon, and they had ridden out before dawn.

My mother was in town that day helping with a neighbor’s lying-in.

My younger brother and sister were at the schoolhouse.

I was at the cabin with Jonas Whitcomb.

I did not engineer this. I want you to know that. I had not arranged for everyone to be away. The weather and the schedule had done it on their own. But the empty cabin and the absent family were the conditions. And the conditions made possible a conversation that would not otherwise have happened.

And a conversation made possible something else that would not otherwise have happened.

We talked. He was working in the barn that morning replacing a section of fence that the storm had taken. And I had brought him coffee at midmorning and bread at midday and supper at four o’clock because my mother had asked me to make sure he ate. The supper he ate with me at the kitchen table because the wind was bad and his small room off the barn was cold.

We talked for nearly three hours.

I want to tell you what we talked about, but I cannot remember most of it. I remember that he told me about his mother in Missouri, who had taught him to read before she died when he was nine. I remember that he told me about a job he had been promised in the new town of La Junta, Colorado, where a small carpentry shop was looking for an apprentice. He was thinking of taking the job. He had not decided. He had not, in fact, mentioned it to my father.

I remember that I told him I had never been anywhere except eastern Kansas and the Redstone Valley. I remember that he said he would like to take me to see La Junta one day. He said it in the manner men of that period said such things — half joking, half not, with the half-not part understood by both parties but not under any circumstances said aloud.

I remember that the wind shifted at some point, and the lamp on the table flickered, and that in the flicker, his face looked very young in a way I had not previously realized. And that I was very young in the same way.

I remember the rest of the evening more clearly than I have ever remembered anything in my life.

I will not tell you about it in detail. You can imagine it. We were seventeen and twenty-two, and the cabin was empty, and the storm was outside, and we had been talking for three hours. And what happened, happened. And I am telling you it happened without shame, because shame is not the right word for what it was.

It was not shame. It was not even — and I say this with no false modesty — wrong. It was something we both chose with full knowledge of what we were choosing, in the small window of time we had been given.

My family came home before midnight. Jonas was in his room off the barn by then. I was in my own bed. The storm had moved off to the east, and the stars were visible through the cabin window above my pillow. And I lay awake for the entire night, looking at the stars and feeling for the first time in my life that the world I had been living in was not the only world available to me.

 

In the morning, Jonas spoke to my father about leaving. He left the following Monday. He took the job in La Junta. He did not promise me anything before he left. He did not need to. We had spoken about La Junta the way we had spoken about it.

I waited.

Five weeks after he left, I knew I was carrying his child.

I want to tell you what it is to know, at seventeen, in a frontier valley in December of 1879, that you are pregnant by a man who is no longer in the valley and to whom you have not yet written. I want to tell you this because I do not think there is good language available for it in the world I am speaking from, which is the world of being an old woman. And I want to give you my best attempt at the language while I still have it.

It was not panic. I was not a panicking sort of girl. It was not exactly fear, although there was fear in it. It was the steady, settling certainty that the next several months of my life were going to be different from anything I had previously imagined. And that the difference was not going to be visible to my family for some weeks yet. And that I had a window during those weeks in which to make whatever choices I was going to make.

I made the choice quickly. I made it within forty-eight hours of being certain.

I did not write to him. I had thought about writing. I had begun a letter, in fact, on the third morning. I had sat at the kitchen table while my mother was out tending the chickens, and I had begun a letter, and I had thrown it into the stove before my mother came back because the letter sounded wrong.

It sounded apologetic. It sounded as if I were asking permission.

I was not asking permission. I was telling him a thing that he was a part of. I would tell him in person.

 

La Junta was eleven miles southeast of our property. There was no rail to it. There was a wagon road, but no wagon was going that direction in mid-December. There were two ranches between our place and La Junta, both of whom I knew, and either of whom would have lent me a horse if I had asked.

I did not ask. I had reasons for not asking that I did not fully understand at the time, and that I understood better later. I will not justify them. I made the choice I made.

I waited for a day when my parents would both be away for the full day. The day came on the seventeenth of December, 1879 — a Wednesday, eight weeks after the night of the storm.

My father was riding to Cheyenne to deliver a contract. My mother was in town again, this time for a different neighbor’s lying-in. My younger siblings were at the schoolhouse. My older brother was in the upper pasture for the entire day and would not return until evening.

I left a note on the kitchen table that said only, “Gone to town. Back by dark.”

It was a lie. I knew it would be back by dark. I did not know what dark would bring.

I left at seven o’clock in the morning. It was raining. It had been raining since the night before. The rain was not heavy, not at first, but it was cold — the kind of December rain on the high plains that arrives at thirty-eight degrees and feels colder than snow because it soaks through everything.

I wore my heaviest dress and a wool coat and a bonnet that did not in the end do much. I wore my best boots, which were two years old.

 

Eleven miles is a long walk. I had not walked eleven miles in one direction before that day. I would walk it many times in years to come in different directions. But the first eleven was the eleven that taught me what eleven miles felt like.

It felt like a lot of time to think.

I thought for the first three miles about what I would say to him when I arrived. I rehearsed in my head several different versions of the announcement. I thought about which one sounded most like me. I discarded all of them. I decided I would say what came out of my mouth, and that whatever came out would be the right thing because I was the one saying it.

For the next four miles, I thought about my father.

For the last four miles, the rain became serious.

 

I want you to picture me when I arrive at La Junta.

I was seventeen. I was soaked to the skin. My coat had given up around the seventh mile. My bonnet had lost its shape. My boots had filled with rainwater somewhere around the sixth mile. And my hair, which had been pinned up at seven o’clock in the morning, had come loose three miles back and was hanging down my shoulders in dark, wet ropes.

My hands were colder than my feet, and my feet were not warm. I had not eaten since six o’clock that morning.

I had a single piece of paper in the inner pocket of my coat, folded small against my chest where the rain had not reached. On the paper was the address of the carpentry shop where Jonas was apprenticing. I had gotten the address from a letter he had written to my father the week he arrived in La Junta — a letter that was about his employment and was not addressed to me, but that I had read carefully because I had read every letter in the house carefully for the whole of those five weeks.

The carpentry shop was on the eastern edge of La Junta, on a street that was at the time almost the edge of the town itself. La Junta in December of 1879 was a small place. There were perhaps two hundred residents. There were six storefronts on the main road. There was no church yet, though they were building one. There was a livery, a feed store, a hotel that had nine rooms, and the carpentry shop.

I walked into the carpentry shop at twenty minutes past two o’clock in the afternoon.

The shop was warm. There was a stove against the back wall. There were three men working. One I did not know. One was the proprietor. And Jonas.

He saw me before I saw him.

He had been at a workbench at the far end of the shop, planing a long piece of oak that he had clamped to the bench. He looked up when the door opened — the way a man looks up when a door opens, automatically, without expectation. And his face moved through three different expressions in the space of perhaps two seconds.

The first expression was surprise. The second expression was recognition. The third expression — and I want you to remember this, because the third expression is the part of the story that turns — was something I had no name for. It was not surprise. It was not joy. It was something steadier than either of those, and quieter, and it had in it a small, private nod.

It was as if he had been expecting me. Not at exactly that moment, perhaps, but in a general sense, for a number of weeks. And the door opening had only confirmed an arrival he had already partly imagined.

He set down the plane. He said something to the proprietor in a low voice. The proprietor, a heavy older man with white whiskers, looked at me, looked at Jonas, and nodded.

Jonas came across the shop to me. He did not say my name. He did not greet me. He took off his work apron and he picked up his coat from a hook by the door, and he said, “Come with me. There is a fire at my room. I will explain on the way.”

 

His room was three doors down — a small loft above the feed store. He led me up the stairs. The room was warm. The stove was lit. There was a single chair, a small table, a bed in the corner.

And I did not see it at first because I was concentrating on the warmth of the stove.

There was, in the opposite corner of the room, a wooden cradle.

A hand-carved cradle. Pine. Light-colored, smelling still of fresh sawdust. About thirty inches long. Two carved rockers along the bottom. The headboard had been worked into a small, scalloped curve. The footboard was plain.

I stared at it.

He saw me staring. He said, “I have been making it in the evenings for about six weeks. I did not know how to tell you exactly. I had not finished the letter.”

I sat down on the chair. I sat down because my legs had stopped working. I want you to understand that the chair was wet within seconds because my dress was wet, and that nobody in the room moved to do anything about it because the matter at hand was not the chair.

He stood across the room from me. He said, “May, I want to explain why the cradle is here. I have been thinking about it for some weeks, and I want to say it correctly. I do not know whether you came here today for the reason I am about to assume. If you did not come here for that reason, then you can leave whenever you wish, and the cradle will be no more than a strange thing I made, and we will not speak of it again. But I am going to tell you anyway. I am going to tell you because I want you to know, whether or not you knew it before you came.”

I did not interrupt him. I waited. I had walked eleven miles. I could wait three more sentences.

He said, “I took the job in La Junta because the wages were better than what your father could pay, and because I needed to save money quickly. I needed to save money quickly because I wanted to come back to you with enough to be able to ask your father something. And the carpentry shop pays five dollars a week. By spring, I would have had twenty-eight dollars saved. By summer, fifty. By next autumn, I would have come back to ask. I had been planning this since the day I left.”

He paused. He looked at the cradle. He looked at me.

He said, “The cradle was — I started it because I have been hoping every day that the spring would not be too late. I have been hoping that something the two of us were not quite saying that night would prove to have been more than something we were not saying. I have been making the cradle in case something proved to be a person. I did not know I would be right. I hoped I would. I would not have said it aloud to anyone, including you, until I was sure.”

He stopped. He had said his piece. He stood in the middle of the room in his work shirt with sawdust on his forearms, with the cradle behind him, and he waited for me to speak.

I had walked eleven miles to say one sentence. I had rehearsed the sentence for hours and discarded the rehearsal entirely. What I said when my voice came back was not the sentence I had rehearsed. It was not the sentence I had thought I would say. It was the sentence that came out.

And it was the right one.

I said, “I came to tell you that you were right.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them. He crossed the room in three steps, and he knelt next to the chair, and he took my hand, which was still cold, and he put it between both of his hands, which were warm, and he did not say anything else for a long time.

We stayed like that until the fire in the stove needed feeding.

 

He walked me back to the valley the next morning. He walked eleven miles with me. He carried what I had brought, which was almost nothing, and he carried also a small bundle that contained two letters — one to my father, one to my mother. The letters had been written in his room that night while I had slept by the stove. He had asked my permission before he had written them. I had given my permission.

He delivered the letters in person. My father read his letter first. He read it twice. He did not speak for some time. When he did speak, he said only to Jonas, not to me, “Sit down, son. We have things to discuss.”

The discussion lasted four hours. It was not, in any conventional sense, a pleasant discussion. My father was a fair man and a decent man, but he was also a father, and he had been deceived by his daughter in a matter of considerable consequence, and he had certain feelings about being deceived that needed to be expressed and absorbed before any progress could be made.

When the four hours were over, an arrangement had been reached.

 

We were married on the second of January, 1880, by the Reverend Paxton in the small Redstone Valley church. It was a quiet ceremony. My mother had made a dress in three days. My father gave me away. He spoke six words to Jonas at the altar that I did not hear at the time but that I learned decades later from Jonas himself.

The six words were, “Be the man you said you’d be, Jonas.”

He was.

 

We lived at La Junta for the first three years while he finished his apprenticeship. Our first child, a daughter, was born in July of 1880. We named her Charity. She is the older woman who, in the version of this story I am now telling, has been listening from the next room for the last several minutes, and who will, in a few moments, come in with tea.

We had four more children after Charity. Two boys, two girls. All five lived. All five married. Between them, they have given me twenty-three grandchildren and, at last count, forty-one great-grandchildren.

We moved back to the Redstone Valley in 1883. We bought a property two miles south of my father’s place. Jonas built our house himself. He built it slowly, the way he built everything, and the house is still standing.

The cradle — the original cradle from the room above the feed store — is in it. It has held all five of our children and several of the grandchildren, and last year, a great-grandson, Thomas, who is the most recent member of the family to have used it.

The cradle is plain. There are no markings on it. There has never needed to be.

 

Jonas died in 1937. He was eighty. I have lived without him for almost twenty years.

I was asked recently by my granddaughter, who is writing a small family history for a school project, whether I had any single piece of advice for a young woman of her generation.

I told her I did not. I do not believe in single pieces of advice. I believe that lives are too different from each other for any one piece of advice to carry across them all.

But I told her this.

I told her that there was a day in my life — the seventeenth of December, 1879 — when I had walked eleven miles in the rain, alone, at seventeen, to tell a quiet young carpenter the most important thing I had ever told anyone. I had walked those eleven miles believing I might be received in any number of ways. I had not known which way I would be received until I opened the door of the carpentry shop and he looked up from his bench.

What I had learned that day, I told her, was that the world contains people who have been preparing for your arrival without your knowledge. They are not many. They are not on every road. But they exist. They are sometimes the person you are hoping is waiting, and sometimes the person you did not know to hope for.

And the only way to find out which is which is to walk the road and open the door.

She asked me whether I would walk it again.

I told her I would walk it twice if it were the same eleven miles and the same door.

 

That is what I came to tell you today. That is what the long story behind the cradle adds up to.

The cradle is in the front room. You may go look at it on your way out if you would like to. The wood is still smooth in the places his hands wore it down.

Charity will see you out.