May 1891 Larkspur, Colorado

Mary Agnes runs her fingers over knobby white aspen bark as she walks through budding bluestem toward the creek bottom. It’s certainly not summer yet here. She’s been at Double H Ranch for two weeks now, settled into duties and an empty bed. She still wears black, seven months now since Tom has passed. She gets teary most nights, but never lets anyone else see. Nothing she can do will bring Tom back.

It’s the first day she’s been out alone with Clara, a gorgeous mare, Henry Hansen’s gift to her when she arrived at the ranch.

“You’ll be needing a mare,” he said when he handed her the reins the first day.

“A mare? I’m afraid I don’t ride.”

Henry laughed. “We’ll remedy that in no time. I’ll have Dutch teach you. He’s the best horseman I have. But I must warn you, we don’t have a sidesaddle.”

That night, she snips one of her older black skirts and refashions it into a split skirt, keeping the extra fabric for rags. The next afternoon, after completing Henry’s list of duties, and not without a tremble in her stomach, Mary Agnes walks to the barn for her first lesson. The split skirt rubs her thighs.

“A first time for everything,” Dutch says as he opens a stall where a medium-sized sorrel munches hay. “You need to learn together. How to handle each other.”

Mary Agnes enters the stall tentatively, nervous but excited. The mare, much bigger than her granddad’s donkey, looks at her with soft eyes, her copper-reddish mane framing a beautiful face.

“Go on, touch her neck, gently,” Dutch says. “That’s good. Now pat her, say a few words.”

“Hello, girl.”

Dutch grabs a halter. He gently tacks the horse: Halter, saddle, bridle, girth, explaining how each is used.

“You lead her,” Dutch says. “I’ll be right here beside you.”

With her stomach a-flux, Mary Agnes walks the mare from the barn, talking to her with every step.

Once in the ring, Dutch takes the reins. He places a mounting block to Clara’s left and pats her. The horse stands still. Mary Agnes steps up on the mounting block and gathers the reins with her left hand.

“Not too tight,” Dutch says.

He takes her right hand and places it farther back on the seat.

“Ready?”

She nods.

“Bend your left leg and put it in the stirrup,” he says. “I’ll hold you under your knee and help you up and over with my other hand.”

Mary Agnes’s hands shake.

“You’ll be fine,” he says. “On my three.”

She bounces, and on the count of “three,” Dutch lifts Mary Agnes’s left leg and guides her right leg over. She is now astride the mare. The seat is deep and secure, made for a man. She fits her boots firmly in right stirrup and rearranges her split skirt, legs now against a leather fender.

“Alright?” he asks.

“I think so.”

“Easy as you go,” he says. “Soft hands on the reins. I’ll lead you around the ring now. Try to keep your body straight and heels down.”

“Heels down?”

“Like this.” He grasps her ankle and moves her heel lower than her toes. He moves his hand up her leg to her calves.

She feels a stretch there.

“Good, very good, Irish. Now take the reins and pull gently.”

Mary Agnes squeezes her legs against the mare’s flanks and Clara moves quicker than she anticipates.

“Whoa, girl.” Dutch looks up at Mary Agnes. “Keep your legs quiet,” he says. “When you squeeze her flanks, that’s a signal for her to quicken her pace.” Again, he puts his hand on her leg. It is warm and large and comforting.

“There’s so much to learn.” Mary Agnes is overwhelmed with the smell of the mare, her inexperience riding, Dutch.

“Soon, it will be second nature to you. Take it slow and easy.”

The first lesson makes way for the second and third and fourth, and, more a credit to Clara than me, Mary Agnes thinks, she is trotting, Dutch watching from the edge of the ring.

Two weeks later, Dutch suggests an evening ride.

“Out of the ring?”

“Like I say, there’s a first time for everything.”

They ride for a half hour toward the western edge of Henry’s property, the vast, open landscape covered with low grasses. Mary Agnes follows Dutch at an unhurried pace, clucking and talking to Clara as they climb a low knoll and dip into a verdant valley. She trusts Clara but is glad Dutch is nearby. Pronghorn antelope dash across the valley beyond, their white rumps bounding. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk, its hoarse, piercing kee-kee-arrrr a warning to rabbits and rodents. The sun is not yet set, but the sky takes on its evening dress: orange pink purple above the Rocky Mountains.

When they reach the western boundary, Dutch pulls his horse to a halt and waits for Mary Agnes to come alongside.

“You’re a right horsewoman now.”

“You’re too kind.”

“I’ll follow you back,” he says. “If you’re as good as I think you are, you’ll be able to take Clara out on your own from now on.”

Today, out on her own, Mary Agnes rides through rolling, grassy hillocks bathed in every shade of green. She clucks as she guides Clara through rock outcroppings that line the foothills of the Front Range. A lazy creek meanders through hills and swales, taking its own time. Cattle graze along aspen-lined creek bottoms, sheltered from the sun. Keeping her distance from the cattle—“Be slow and gentle around them,” Dutch says—Mary Agnes dismounts, removes her hat, and pegs Clara to a tree. She wipes her forehead with a kerchief and sits under a clutch of aspens, her back against bark and skirt pulled up to her knees, tracing the sun as it filters through branches and fluttering leaves. She’s aware of all her senses, the warm breeze, the trill of birdcall—a finch?—and the strong, earthy scent of the ground beneath her. If there is another place as beautiful as this, it can only be at Dawrosbeg, she thinks. A sharp pang hits her midsection. They’ve come more regularly now, the pangs, every time she thinks of something she wishes to ask Tom but there’s no Tom to ask. What did his home look like in Monaghan? Landlocked northwest of Dublin? She cannot imagine not growing up near salt water. If she lived in Monaghan, she thinks, she would burst across county boundaries and run for the shore. But here she is, nowhere near the sea, and too far to run.

Maybe she will stay in Colorado, like Tom had wished, tend for Henry Hansen, cook for cowhands, sell pies to neighbors. Or maybe she will return to Chicago, to Helen and family. Or maybe she will go home to Ireland. But what is home if no one you love is there?

A sickly greenish-yellow cloud covers the sun. Is this one of those tornadoes Dutch told me about? That can touch down anytime here in higher altitudes? “If you see what looks like an elephant trunk dangling from beneath the clouds,” he said, “it’s time to be up and moving.”

How long has she been resting here? Three-quarters of an hour? More? Weather comes on fast here on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, and it behooves her to turn back now. The slightest downspout confirms her decision. If she’s learned anything since living in Colorado, it’s that the weather is always one step ahead.

“Come now,” Mary Agnes says to the mare, coaxing her away from her spot under a tree. “We best be back now.” Clara whinnies, as if she knows, too.

Instead of riding—she doesn’t want the mare spooked by a tornado, she’s spooked enough herself—Mary Agnes walks two miles back to the ranch, just beating rain. As she comes around the corner of the barn, Clara in tow, she almost bumps into Dutch. He stands well over six feet tall with wide shoulders, as if he could carry an ox. His worn farm clothes need washing, but he is adamant about doing his own laundry. His blond bangs hang low on his face, in desperate need of a haircut. Maybe she can offer to give him one soon.

“Here, let me,” he says, and takes the mare’s reins. A jet-black cat brushes against his leg. “Shoo!” he says, but the cat doesn’t budge. “Mind of her own,” he says.

“What do you call her? Snowball?”

He laughs. “Mind of your own, too, I see. Midnight’s her name.”

Mary Agnes removes her hat and swipes at her face with her kerchief. A ring of sweat circles her underarms and drips of perspiration run down her cheeks. She is in need of a sponge bath.

“Not exactly ready for a dance,” he says.

She tries not to smile, but it escapes her. “Not today.”

“We had a grand time that night at The Antlers.”

Mary Agnes bites the inside of her lip. “That was the last night we”—she checks herself here before she continues. “What I mean to say is that is the last night Tom and I went out.” But it isn’t Tom she’s thinking about at this moment. She can still feel Dutch’s large hands circling her waist as they danced and how strong his arms felt around her. How she misses a man she could love.

Dutch lowers his head. “I’m right sorry for bringing it up.” He clears his throat. “See the bulls?”

“Did. Under the aspens by the creek.”

“They should be alright there. I’ll ride out in the morning.”

Mary Agnes looks at the threatening clouds, ready to burst. “If we’re not under water by then.”

“Henry’s gone to Denver overnight, told me to tell you. Cattleman’s meeting.”

“Well, that lightens my load.”

“A night off.”

“Off? I’ve got to have a bite myself. Supper’ll be on within the hour. Come in at seven. We’ll eat in the kitchen.”

Dutch tips his hat and dips into the barn with her mare. Mary Agnes opens the kitchen door and hears the familiar squeak. She goes down the dark hallway to her room and splashes water on her face and underarms, changes her shirtwaist, and scrubs her hands. The crucifix is mounted above her bed. She had asked for a hammer and nail. With evening coming on fast, she lights the oil lamp in the kitchen and sets out to fix supper.

Henry’s list of duties for Mary Agnes (written out in his spidery hand and still tacked to the kitchen wall, as if she might forget): Meals, housekeeping, laundry, chickens. Oh yes! The chickens! She asked Henry for permission to have a small kitchen garden, and he agreed, so for the last few days, she’s been digging and tilling a garden plot not far from the kitchen door. In it, she’ll plant lettuces and carrots and onions and herbs. The next time she’s in Colorado Springs, she’ll get seeds and seedlings to plant.

It suits her, the ranch life. There’s no civic club or general store or grange or school nearby, so she doesn’t need to dress for town, although she misses attending Mass, as sparsely as she did in Manitou Springs. There is finally going to be a church erected in the next year in Colorado Springs itself, St. Mary’s, downtown on Kiowa, but it’s too far for her to attend regularly. Dutch says a traveling priest comes once every couple of months to Larkspur to offer Mass to neighboring Catholics. She will mark her calendar and save up her sins.

Tonight, there’s leftover stew and biscuits so all she needs to do is get coffee on and whip up an applesauce cake with preserves she found in the cupboard. Mary Agnes hums as she works and wonders why Henry, kind, soft-spoken, never assuming, never found a wife. But she dares not ask. His clothes—trousers, shirts, vests—are always clean and pressed, the mark of a man who is used to keeping house for himself, long past sixty years of age by now.

And tidy, she thinks, not just generally, but down to kitchen shelves and pantry. And probably his dresser drawers, not that I’ll ever have a look. As she prepares supper, she can’t help but think that maybe Henry had a sweetheart once who broke his heart, and that is why he is still unmarried. Or was it he who broke her heart?

When the cake is in the oven, she takes the batter-crusted spoon and curtsies to it.

“I’d be delighted,” she says. She licks the wooden spoon, clasps it to her chest, and waltzes around the kitchen by herself, humming one of the popular tunes she heard that night at The Antlers.

A knock startles her. “Come in, come in,” she says. Her face is flushed. “You caught me—”

“I know. I saw.”

After supper, eaten mostly in silence, only interrupted with shy glances, first from Dutch and then from her, she clears the dishes away. Something has changed between them, it’s palpable. You need to learn together. How to handle each other, he said. Did he mean me and the mare? Or me and him?

The thought excites her. But she’s at once confused by her feelings. Her husband of two years is dead. She hopes for a long life—and maybe someone to love again—but this is too soon. She will have to temper her desire, it’s not appropriate.

When Dutch gets up to leave, she motions for him to stay. I will think of him like a brother, she thinks. That will serve. “Five more minutes. You’re needing a haircut.” With that, she retrieves sharp shears and ties one of her aprons around his neck.

Dutch looks up. “Have you done this before?”

“And is the sky blue? I have six brothers.” She flexes her hands to keep them from shaking. “Sit still now.”

He looks straight ahead as she lops off several inches of thick blond hair.

What is he thinking?

Aware of his smell—a mixture of hay and sweat and something else she can’t put her finger on—she clucks and fusses to fill the silence, the kitchen clock the only other sound. She has not been this close to him except when they shared that one dance a year ago, and he was shined up that night.

What am I thinking? I was married then. And not thinking the thoughts I’m thinking now.

Mary Agnes tries to clear her head, but all she can think of is running her hands through Dutch’s mussed hair. And then down his chest. And then . . . She snaps back and finishes clipping his blond sideburns. A brother, a brother, I must think of him only as a brother. She stands back then and hands him a looking glass. Their fingers brush.

“Fine job,” he says, and gets up to leave. “’Til the morning then.”

Mary Agnes finishes the washing up and turns down the lamp. The room seems so empty. She undresses in the dark, pulls down the covers, and slips in between the sheets. Her mind races—his hands, his smile, his hair, his . . .

She tries to still her mind, first reciting the Hail Mary three times and then going through the alphabet A to Z, praying for Helen and her aunt, her brothers and the repose of Tom’s soul. She hums a shanty. Starts a poem. But Dutch is there, luring in her mind. It’s no use, she thinks, and pictures his rough fingers touching hers, the deep, weathered lines around his eyes, that sunburnt smile to light up a room. And his laugh.

What is it that Tilly said? You can wallow in your grief or continue to live. It is up to you to decide.

She runs her fingers around her nipples and then tentatively down her thin torso until she reaches the dark mass of hair between her thighs. With a deep breath, and a prayer of forgiveness, she takes her hand to herself in the dim moonlit room. It is not the first time since Tom has been gone that she has done this, and it will not be the last. If she’s saving her sins up, she may as well have a long list when that traveling priest arrives.