Outside, the wind pushed against the barn boards. A loose plank tapped softly, again and again, like someone knocking from the wrong side of a grave.
‘Miller’s Crossing,’ she said at last.
Boon knew the town. Twenty miles east. Bigger than most, proud of its church bell, its courthouse, and its opinions.
‘There was an orphan house there,’ Clara continued. ‘I worked in the kitchen. Mostly washing, mending, feeding whoever was too little to feed themselves.’
‘Was?’
Her eyes lowered.
‘It burned 3 nights ago.’
Boon’s breath caught.
Clara stroked the back of the smallest boy without looking at him, the movement automatic and protective.
‘The fire started near the laundry stove. I do not know how. Maybe a coal rolled. Maybe someone forgot to bank it. By the time we smelled smoke, the back hall was already burning.’
Her voice stayed calm, but the calm itself was terrible.
‘I carried two out first. Ruthie carried Tommy. Mrs. Haskell took the babies from the front room. People came running from town. Everyone shouted. Everyone prayed. Everyone had an opinion after the roof fell in.’
She looked up at Boon again.
‘By morning, most of the children had somewhere to go. Families took the pretty ones. The healthy ones. The ones old enough to work but young enough to obey. These four were left.’
Boon looked down.
The girl Ruthie could not have been more than 9. The boy beside her perhaps 6. Another child was maybe 4, with a cough in her sleep. The smallest was the toddler against Clara’s shoulder.
‘Why were they left?’ he asked, though he already knew he did not want the answer.
Clara’s mouth tightened.
‘Ruthie talks back when she is scared. Samuel limps. Annie coughs in winter. Tommy still wets himself when he has nightmares.’
She said each fact like a charge laid against innocent souls.
‘The town council said the county would decide what to do with them. But the county man was not coming for a week. They put the children in the church shed with old blankets and a bucket of water.’
Boon felt heat rise in his chest despite the cold.
‘In this weather?’
‘Yes.’
‘With no stove?’
‘They said a stove would be dangerous.’
The bitter edge in her voice told him exactly what she thought of that kind of safety.
‘So you took them,’ Boon said.
Clara lifted her chin. ‘Yes.’
‘Without asking?’
‘There was no one left worth asking.’
The answer should have sounded reckless. Maybe criminal. Instead, it sounded like the only decent thing anyone had done.
Boon looked toward the barn door. His house stood across the yard with lamplight still glowing faintly in the kitchen window. It had a stove. Quilts. A roof that did not leak much except over the back room. It also had a pantry that was not ready for five extra mouths.
He thought of his ledger.
Eight cattle.
Two sacks of flour.
A barrel of beans.
Half a side of salt pork.
Winter.
Then the smallest boy whimpered and curled closer to Clara, and Boon hated himself for counting beans while a child shook from cold.
‘Stay put tonight,’ he said.
Clara blinked as if she had expected a harsher sentence.
‘Do not light any fires,’ Boon added. ‘Hay
