The door of the stone smokehouse had been sealed with tar and nails and leather strap, sealed so tightly that whoever had closed it intended it to stay closed forever. Martha Mercer had been on the property for barely a day when she pried it open with her father’s folding knife, and found, behind a row of wax-sealed crocks, a black japanned tin box the size of a family Bible. Inside was $482 in coin and banknotes, and a letter written forty years earlier by a woman named Hannah Whitfield, who had saved it all and left it for whoever came next. Eight months before that, Martha had been turned out of the only home she had known.
She was twenty-four years old, alone, with a carpet bag, two dresses, her mother’s tortoise shell comb, a tin coffee can holding eleven dollars and forty cents, and nowhere to go. She had been born on the sour end of a leased quarter section outside Fentress. Her father, Josiah Mercer, was a hired hand who did the work of two men for the wage of one and never complained. Her mother, Ruth, took in mending and washing and kept a garden that fed them through winters.
There had been a brother, Thomas, who lived seven months and then did not, and after that her mother had no more children, and the small brown back room stayed empty and became the place where Ruth kept her sewing basket and the tortoise shell comb her own mother had carried west from Ohio in a trunk lined with newspaper. Martha learned to work early. By eight she could pluck a hen and set bread. By twelve she was hired out during harvest weeks to a widow named Ellery Booker, who owned forty acres and a two-story house on the far side of the county road.
Mrs. Booker was seventy-one the summer Martha first came to her, a spare woman with iron-gray hair and a mouth that hardly moved when she spoke. She took one look at the girl and said, “Well, come inside then. We’ve got squash to put up.
”
That was the beginning of it. Over the next eleven years, Ellery Booker taught Martha nearly everything worth knowing: how to salt pork and cure hams in a proper smokehouse, how to render lard clean enough to keep two years, how to lay a cold frame, how to graft apple whip onto rootstock, how to read the sky for a hail storm coming out of the west, how to mend a plow harness and sharpen a scythe on a wet stone wet with spit. She did not praise Martha and did not need to. She simply handed her the next tool and expected the work done.
And when the work was done, she set out two cups of coffee and a plate of soda biscuits, and they sat on the porch and did not speak. And Martha felt in those silences more valued than she had ever felt anywhere. Then the fevers came in the winter when Martha was nineteen. Her father took a chill hauling hay in a sleet storm and did not recover, and her mother, thin already from a bad summer, followed him inside of five weeks.
Martha buried them both in the Fentress churchyard beside her brother, with no money for stones, only wooden markers hammered together from scrap. The lease on the quarter section was not hers to inherit, and by the following spring she was living in Ellery Booker’s back room, working full-time for board and a small wage. And it was there she learned the last of what Mrs. Booker had to teach: how to be alone without being lonely, and how to hold on to her own dignity when the world had quietly decided she was no longer anyone’s daughter.
Mrs. Booker died in her sleep the winter Martha turned twenty-four. She left the farm to a nephew in Kansas City, who arrived on a Tuesday in a wool overcoat and had the place inventoried by Thursday and sold at auction by the following month. He was polite.
He shook Martha’s hand and said he was very sorry for her loss, and he gave her three weeks to find somewhere else to be. Martha packed her carpet bag on a Sunday afternoon. Into it went two dresses, a work shirt, wool stockings, a Bible with her mother’s name in the front, a folding knife her father had carried, and the tortoise shell comb wrapped in a scrap of linen. Into a tin coffee can she put the eleven dollars and forty cents that were the whole of her wages saved across four years.
She set the coffee can inside the bag on top of the comb and closed the clasp. She stood for a long moment in the doorway of the back room and did not cry, because she had learned from Ellery Booker that crying in a room where no one could hear you was a waste of good water. She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her. The latch caught with the same small tin sound it had made every morning for four years.
She went down the narrow stairs with the carpet bag in her right hand and Mrs. Booker’s key ring in her left, and she set the keys on the kitchen table beside the sugar bowl where the nephew would find them. She walked out through the front room and across the porch where the two cups had used to sit. She did not look back at the house, because looking back was another waste of good water.
The county road was frozen hard, and she walked the four miles into Fentress, switching the carpet bag from hand to hand every quarter mile. There she waited by the feed store until a hauler named Witham was ready to leave for Cotton Hollow with a load of empty barrels. He took her up on the seat beside him for nothing at all, because he had known Josiah Mercer in a way that meant he could not charge Josiah’s girl for a ride. Cotton Hollow was thirty-one miles east through low hills and cottonwood bottoms, and they arrived late Monday afternoon.
Witham set her down at the corner of Main and Elm, touched his hat, and said, “Take care of yourself, Miss Martha,” and drove on. The recorder’s office was a single narrow room above the freight depot, reached by an outside stair. Inside there was a coal stove, a long counter, and a wall of ledgers bound in brown canvas. The clerk was a thin man of perhaps fifty with ink on his cuffs and reading spectacles pushed up onto his forehead.
Martha set down her carpet bag and said she had heard there was land in the county that had gone unclaimed long enough to be taken up under the tax forfeit statute. The clerk looked at her for a long second, then said there were three such parcels currently open. He turned a ledger around on the counter so she could read it herself. One was a sliver of creek bottom too narrow to run a plow through.
One was a homestead half buried in a shale slide. And one was a hundred and sixty acres northwest of town on a bench above Cotton Hollow Creek, with a house, a barn, a corral, and outbuildings, abandoned for thirty years by the estate of a man who had died without heirs and without paying his taxes, unclaimed since, because everyone who had walked out to look at it had walked back and said no. She asked the clerk if there was a filing fee. The clerk said the statute waived the fee for a claimant who intended to occupy within thirty days.
She said she intended to occupy that afternoon. He nodded once, dipped his pen, and wrote her name in the ledger in careful copperplate, and turned the book so she could sign beside it. She signed Martha Anne Mercer in the same steady hand her mother had taught her. The clerk blotted the ink, tore a receipt from a pad, and slid it across the counter to her.
And just like that, a hundred and sixty acres of somebody else’s failure became hers. She left Cotton Hollow on foot in the early afternoon, with the deed folded into the Bible in her carpet bag and a rough map the clerk had drawn on the back of a handbill. The road ran northwest along the creek for six miles before it climbed onto the bench, and the bench ran another three miles before it dropped into the shallow draw where the ranch buildings stood. The sky was the flat thin blue of late winter, and the wind came off the hills in slow steady pushes that smelled of old snow and pine sap.
She walked with the carpet bag balanced on her hip, and after the first mile she stopped counting the miles and only counted the fence posts, split cedar, gray with age, some leaning, some fallen. A hawk hunted the draw to her left, and a jackrabbit broke from the sage ahead and ran a hundred yards and stopped and looked back, and she stopped when he stopped and stood still until he moved on, because Mrs. Booker had taught her that most creatures give you the courtesy of leaving if you give them the courtesy of not chasing. Twice she set the carpet bag down and switched hands.
Once she sat on a flat rock in the sun and ate the piece of cornbread wrapped in a handkerchief that Mrs. Booker’s cook had pressed into her palm before she left, and drank from a small tin flask of water. When she topped the bench, the wind rose to meet her, and she pulled her scarf up over her mouth and squinted into it. Out ahead, across the flat brown grass, she could see, still a mile off, the low dark shapes of a barn and a house and two smaller outbuildings clustered in the lee of a stand of pines.
She did not smile and she did not sigh. She only shifted the carpet bag to her other hand and started walking again, because looking was not the same as arriving, and the sun was already tilting west. The house was a low log and frame structure of perhaps twenty-four by thirty feet, one and a half stories, with a shingled roof gone silver and green with moss and a stovepipe leaning north where the flashing had failed. The front porch ran the width of the house, and one of its two posts had rotted at the base and been propped with a length of split fence rail wedged against a stone.
The barn stood forty feet behind the house, gambrel-roofed, its board-and-batten siding weathered to a dark uniform gray, one of its two big doors off its track and leaning inward against the beam. The smaller outbuildings were a low chicken house with a caved roof and, closer to the barn, a small square building of stone and mortar with a heavy plank door and no windows. She walked to the house first. The door latch lifted under her thumb.
Inside, the air was cold and dry and smelled of dust and mice and old wood smoke. The front room was empty but for a cast-iron cook stove with all four lids in place and a plank table pushed against the wall. She set the carpet bag on the plank table, laid the deed and the Bible beside it, and went out again to walk the rest before the light went. The barn stalls were sound, and the loft was half full of hay so old it had gone to gray fluff.
She came last to the small stone building behind the barn and stood in front of it with her hands in her coat pockets and studied the door. It was oak, four inches thick, banded with iron, and across the seam where door met jamb, a strip of tin had been nailed and then tarred over, and across the tar someone had driven a second set of nails through a leather strap, and the strap had been sealed a second time with pitch that had gone black and hard as coal. Whoever had closed this door had closed it to stay closed. She stood there a long moment in the wind.
Then she went back to the house to build a fire and boil water, because dark was coming and the smokehouse would wait one more night after thirty years. She slept that first night in her coat on the horsehair mattress with her carpet bag under her head and the folding knife open on the floor beside her. She woke before light and lit the stove with kindling split from a broken chair, boiled creek water in the tin coffee can, and drank it plain. At sunrise, she took a hatchet she had found hanging on a peg by the back door and went out to the smokehouse.
She worked the tar seam with the flat of the hatchet, patient prying and tapping, and the pitch came away in black flakes that she brushed into her palm and dropped in the grass. The leather strap she cut with the folding knife. The tin strip she pried loose one nail at a time, and each nail she set carefully in her coat pocket, because nails were nails, and she had none of her own. When the seam was clean, she took the wooden peg out of the latch and lifted, and the door swung open on hinges that had been greased before they were sealed and still moved without a sound.
Inside was dim and dry and smelled of old smoke and cedar and something sweet under it that she could not name. Two hams hung from the ceiling beam, black as coal and hard as stone and no good to any living thing, and below them along the walls stood shelves of stoneware crocks with their lids sealed in wax. She counted eleven crocks. The nearest held lard, still white, still clean, packed to the rim.
The next held salt pork in brine, gone brown. The next held dried apples, leathery but whole. She worked along the shelves in the growing light from the open door, and behind the crock on the bottom shelf her hand touched a metal box pushed back against the stone wall. It was a tin document box, japanned black, about the size of a family Bible, with a small keyhole and no key.
She carried it out into the daylight and set it on a chopping block in the yard and worked the lid with the point of the folding knife until it sprang. Inside, wrapped in oiled canvas, were three cloth pouches heavy with coin. And beneath the pouches, a leather wallet of banknotes folded flat. And beneath the wallet, a folded sheet of foolscap tied with a green ribbon and marked in a careful hand, For whoever finds this.
She sat down on the chopping block with the paper in her lap and untied the ribbon and unfolded the sheet and read:
“My name is Hannah Whitfield. I was born in 1821 in Belmont County, Ohio, and I came to this bench in the spring of 1856 with my husband Amos, who was a farrier by trade. We built this house and this barn and this smokehouse with our own hands over the course of four years. We had a son, John, who lived nine years and was thrown from a horse in the pasture below the house and died in my arms on the porch.
We had no other children after him. Amos took a fever in the summer of 1871 and was buried under the tallest pine at the north end of the pines behind the house. I stayed on ten years more and I ran the place alone and I did well enough. I am writing this in the fall of 1881 because I am sixty years old and my heart is not sound and I do not expect to see another spring.
There is no one left to leave this place to. What I have saved in coin and note comes to $482, and I am sealing it in the smokehouse with the last of the meat and the lard, because I trust the smokehouse better than I trust a bank, and because whoever comes to this place next will need it more than a bank ever would. I hope you are young, and I hope you are willing to work. The apple grafts I put in the north corner should still bear if you prune them.
The well is good. The creek does not go dry. I hope you know how to salt a ham. I hope someone taught you kindly.
God bless you, whoever you are. Hannah Whitfield. ”
Martha folded the letter along its old creases, tied the green ribbon around it again, and set it on top of the coin pouches inside the japanned box. She sat for a long time on the chopping block with her hands on her knees and the sun moving across the yard.
Then she stood up, carried the box into the house, put it under the plank table, and went back out to work. She began with what could not wait. She cut the fallen porch post out with the hatchet and the folding knife, dug a fresh footing eighteen inches deep, and set a new post cut from a straight young cedar she felled along the creek. She wedged it plumb, tamped the hole with creek stone, and nailed a header across the top with square-cut nails pulled from the smokehouse strip and straightened on a flat rock.
She reset the barn door on its track. She pulled the boarded window from the front of the house, measured the opening with a length of string, and rode into Cotton Hollow on a borrowed mule three days later to buy glass. The mule belonged to a man named Otis Pruit, sixty-two, a small freighter who kept a lot behind the depot and had watched her sign the ledger the week before. He said the mule’s name was Junior, and she could have him for a dollar a week and a promise to feed him corn.
He asked no questions. She paid him from Hannah Whitfield’s banknotes, and he took the money without remarking on it. At the mercantile she bought a pane of glass, a pound of glazing points, a small can of putty, a coil of new fence wire, a bag of ten-penny nails, a whetstone, a bar of yellow soap, cornmeal, salt, coffee, beans, and a laying hen in a wooden crate. The proprietor was a woman named Della Hoy, fifty-four, a widow who ran the store with her son.
Della watched Martha count the money out on the counter, tallied the total twice to be sure, and threw in a paper of needles at no charge. Word moves in a small country the way weather does. By the end of that first month, a wiry old cattleman named Burl Aitken, seventy, rode out from a spread six miles east to see who had taken the Whitfield place, and finding her repairing corral wire with a fencing pliers, he dismounted and worked the opposite line with her for two hours without speaking more than eight words. He came back the next Saturday with his grown son Reuben and a wagon of split cedar posts he said were surplus.
A woman named Josephine Tullis rode up on a gray mare one afternoon with a basket of bread, two jars of preserves, and a pieced quilt her mother had made and never used. She stayed for coffee, looked at the apple whips in the north corner, and told Martha the pruning should be done before the sap rose. She came back in March with her pruning shears and showed her. By April, Martha had glass in every window, a mended stovepipe, a full chicken house with six hens and a rooster from the Aitken place, a garden double-dug and planted in rows to peas and turnips and potatoes, and a new leather latch on the smokehouse door.
She kept the japanned box under the plank table with the letter folded inside. The people of Cotton Hollow began to know her name. At the mercantile, Della Hoy greeted her as Miss Mercer and set aside the newspaper for her on Wednesdays. At the recorder’s office, the clerk with ink on his cuffs, whose name she learned was Mr.
Fenwick, asked after the north pasture as if he had known the place all his life. The Aitkens stopped by every second Sunday on their way back from church. And Reuben Aitken, who was quiet and steady and unmarried, took to fixing whatever thing on the barn he noticed on his way in and never mentioned it after. In May she butchered her first hog, a sow she had bought from Josephine Tullis for three dollars and raised through the spring.
She salted the hams and hung them in the smokehouse from the same beam where Hannah Whitfield’s two blackened hams had hung, which she had taken down and buried under the tallest pine beside Amos. She built the smoke fire from hickory chips Otis Pruit had saved for her from a broken barrel, and she tended it for three days and two nights, sleeping in the doorway of the smokehouse in her coat. When she pulled the hams down and hung them in the cool room of the kitchen, they were the color of dark tea and smelled the way Mrs. Booker’s smokehouse had smelled every October of the eleven years Martha had known her.
She began to sell what she did not need. She took two of the hams into Cotton Hollow in June and sold them to Della Hoy for the mercantile counter, and Della paid her cash and asked her to bring four more in the fall. She took a crock of rendered lard to the boarding house on Elm Street and sold it to the cook there, a Black woman named Miss Ivy Rowan, sixty-eight, who tasted it on the tip of her finger and said it was the cleanest lard she had bought in seven years and would take all Martha could bring her. Miss Ivy paid in silver and taught her, over the boarding house kitchen table with a cup of coffee between them, how to render tallow for candles.
By July the house had white curtains at the four front windows, sewn by Martha in the evenings from cotton bought at the mercantile with lard money. The porch had two straight-backed chairs set side by side under the front window and a small table between them where a tin coffee pot sat in the afternoons. She read the newspaper on the porch on Wednesday evenings. And on Sunday mornings she rode Junior into town for church at the small clapboard Methodist chapel on the corner of Second and Pine.
The pastor, a young man named Reverend Alder, called her Sister Mercer and put her on the list to bring cornbread for the second Sunday of every month. She did, and hers was gone first. By the end of that first summer, Martha kept a habit of sitting on the porch after supper with a second cup of coffee. And one evening in late August, she brought the japanned box out from under the plank table and set it on the small table between the two straight-backed chairs.
She opened it and took out Hannah Whitfield’s letter and read it again in the slow yellow light that came off the pines. She no longer read it for the account of the money, which she had long since counted and put to work, but for the plain sentences in the middle, where Hannah wrote that the apple grafts should still bear if pruned, and the well was good, and the creek did not go dry. Those were the sentences of a woman who had lost a husband and a nine-year-old boy and had stayed on the bench for ten more years by herself, and who had chosen at sixty to leave what she had to a stranger with a note that said only For whoever finds this. Martha understood that Hannah Whitfield had loved someone she had never met in the plain practical way that a person who has buried her own can love the one who comes next.
And Martha understood that Mrs. Booker had loved her the same way across the same distance of years. She took the tortoise shell comb out of the linen scrap in the top drawer of the bedroom chest and set it on the porch table beside the letter. She set beside the comb a small pewter thimble she had found in the japanned box on a later count, tucked under the wallet, engraved on the flat top with the initials HW.
She looked at the two things a long time. Her grandmother had carried the comb west from Ohio in a trunk lined with newspaper, and Hannah Whitfield had carried the thimble west from Ohio in some other trunk in some other year. And both had ended on a plank table on a porch on a bench above Cotton Hollow Creek, in front of a woman who was twenty-four years old and had had eleven dollars and forty cents to her name eight months before. She thought of the nephew in the wool overcoat, who had shaken her hand on a Tuesday and given her three weeks, and she found she could think of him without heat, because he had turned out to be a small man in a small story, and this was a larger one.
She thought of Josiah and Ruth and Thomas in the Fentress churchyard under their scrap-wood markers. And she decided, sitting there with the coffee going cold, that in the fall, when Della Hoy paid her for the four hams, she would order three stones from the mason in Cotton Hollow and have them carried over to Fentress and set. She thought of Mrs. Booker on the porch across the county road with two cups of coffee between them and no need to speak.
And she understood that she had learned in that silence how to sit alone on this porch now without being lonely. She folded the letter, tied the green ribbon, laid it in the japanned box with the thimble on top of it, closed the lid, and carried the box back to its place under the plank table. She put the tortoise shell comb back in its linen scrap. She washed the two coffee cups.
She went out once more before bed to look at the smokehouse, which stood square and quiet in the moonlight with a new leather latch on its door and hickory smoke still faint on the air. And she thought that it had waited thirty years for someone to open it, and had been right to wait. Martha Anne Mercer was twenty-four years old and had been turned out of a house that was not hers with a carpet bag, a tin coffee can, and eleven dollars and forty cents. She had walked into the recorder’s office in Cotton Hollow and signed her name for a hundred and sixty acres nobody wanted, and she had spent the eleven dollars and forty cents on the walk out and the meal that followed and the pane of glass for the front window.
It was the best eleven dollars and forty cents she ever spent.
