August 1891 Larkspur, Colorado

From a thick stand of aspens, Mary Agnes hears a mockingbird chitter its cheh cheh cheh ah-ooo. Drowsy clouds range high in the expansive Colorado sky, skirting the sun. The rest of the sky is charged with the bluest of blue, the air bone dry. An unexpected late cattle drive arrived the day before yesterday, and she and Dutch are back on the range for the last time this season.

It’s a measly bunch, only a dozen cowhands and less-than-market-worthy cattle. The drive had been halted at Raton Pass during a nasty skirmish and had to detour, costing them almost a month. The trail boss is out of sorts, and the cowmen look like they’d rather be anywhere than within spitting distance of him. Mary Agnes has plied her charm—that’s when her brogue is the thickest, and she’s learned to use it to her advantage, whatever her tutor Seamus Bourke had said.

“And you’re doing what, exactly, Irish?” Dutch taps her on the shoulder.

Startled, Mary Agnes turns toward her crew boss. Her heart quickens. She’s taken to picturing Dutch in bed next to her. Stop, Mary Agnes, she tells herself. Stop.

“Same as yesterday, Dutch. Getting to supper.” She hefts the blackened pot from its hook and scrapes it onto the stove. In it, beans and pork and the last of the carrots. Flour is low, too. It’s a good thing they’re nearing the end of the season. Talk is, it’s the end of the line for the cattle drives. Barbed wire. Lack of grass. The railroad. But today, there are twelve hungry cowhands due in by nightfall.

Mary Agnes squints. Just yesterday, she misplaced her eyeglasses. “Can’t see my way,” she said, when she told Dutch.

“Do the best you can,” he said.

She stirs the chili and reaches for the cornbread pan. The western sky bleeds red above the mountains, the eastern sky tinged with an echo of it. Beyond the ruddy sky, the weathered grassland, the teeming cities, the black ocean even, she sees a green place, a winding lane flush with wild strawberries. She follows the lane to where it veers left at the Jones’s crooked turnstile. It’s a familiar sight, and one she returns to often in her daydreams.

It is then she spies the corner of the cottage. Hurrying, her skirt whipping against bare legs, she stops at the edge of the snug house to inhale its stone face, weeping with moss. Even before she rounds the corner, she hears their voices. She knows without a doubt the door is open.

Maybe, she thinks, the ending will be different this time.

“Today, Irish?”

Mary Agnes snaps back. Ireland is far, far away and the chili is boiling over.

“Yes, Dutch. Give me ten minutes and you’ll think you were sitting at The Empire Grill in Denver.”

Dutch pulls his hat over his mop of hair. “It’s a date, you and me at The Empire.”

Mary Agnes colors and turns her head away. A date. Can I really love another? After Tom? She looks at Dutch. I think I can.

Dutch clears his throat, dips his head. “I’d better get cleaned up then.”

She stirs the chili, then, and burns a finger. She swears, sucks it dry. She recalls the story her granddad told her about the boy who caught the magic salmon and then knew everything, past, present, and future.

Mary Agnes can see the past, and clear enough for the present. But damn if she can’t see the future with or without glasses.

After supper, Dutch lights a cigarette and settles back against the wagon on a three-legged stool, long legs splayed in front of him. Mary Agnes sits next to him as the sky bleeds to black.

“I’ve decided to go to Santa Fe,” he says.

Santa Fe? Santa Fe?

Caught off guard, Mary Agnes’s pulse races. Slow down, girl, slow that heart of yours. What does he mean? He’s leaving? Leaving? “D-d-do you have family there?”

“No. I’ll be ranching.”

“But what about Henry?” It’s all she can say.

What about me? is what she thinks.

“Time comes, a man’s got to strike out on his own.”

Her heart hasn’t slowed. She doesn’t even know where Santa Fe is on a map or how long it takes to get there. She wants to scream, “When?!” or “Why?!” but asks instead, “Santa Fe?”

Dutch settles back, takes a long drag on his smoke, holds it, and blows out rings. “Don’t know where to start, Irish. It’s got a grip on me, like a woman.”

Like a woman.

“And you’ll tell me more?” Please tell me more. And tell me you’re not really leaving.

“It’s hard to put to words. Up Guadalupe from the depot, there’s a maze of crooked, narrow streets, two-storey buildings built Spanish style. You can lose yourself there.” His hands weave through the air.

“Spanish style?”

“Adobe, tile roofs, wide porches, murals around the plaza. She’s mysterious, Santa Fe, filled with all kinds of people—Indians and Mexicanos and Black—people with secrets who’ve come from somewhere else and chosen Santa Fe to start over with.”

Can I start over with you? Mary Agnes longs to say it aloud.

“The air, it’s clear and dry, at seven thousand feet,” he continues. “And the sunsets, they come quickly, like snuffing a candle.” He blows out another waft of smoke. It’s as if he’s somewhere else, his eyes focused on the horizon. “And then the lip of the moonrise over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains . . .” His hands outspread against the night sky.

Mary Agnes holds her breath, mesmerized, and watches his large hands backlit by the moon.

The moon scrambles higher and higher in the sky and stars begin to speck the night sky, the tail of Scorpius curling around toward Antares and then forking out like fangs.

“It sounds lovely, all of it,” Mary Agnes says. He’s thinking of leaving? “But it’s lovely here, too.”

Dutch takes a long, last drag on the smoke and then crushes the butt beneath his heel. “Oh, I haven’t scratched the surface, Irish.”

“Like the food?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” He elbows her. “Roasted chiles, barbecued meats, frying bread. You can almost taste it.”

They sit in silence.

“I can almost hear it,” he says.

“Hear what?” Coyotes? Dogs? Owls?

“The bells, the way they peal from the basilica. It’s a wild, beautiful tangle of noise, it is, ringing and clashing and full.” He turns to look at her. “I’m in love with Santa Fe.”

WHEN MARY AGNES WAKES AT DAWN the day after they’ve returned from the range, she’s acutely aware of silence although she can’t get last night’s conversation out of her mind. He’s really going to Santa Fe? She pulls up the covers and looks at the ceiling.

What am I to do? Stay here? Go back to Colorado Springs? Chicago? Ireland? Eenie, meenie, miney, moe. Do I list the reasons or just decide? Follow head or heart?

By this time, Henry is usually clattering around the kitchen, getting coffee on. “No one makes coffee better, so why not do it myself?” he had chided her the first morning she arrived. “Not that I can cook like I’ve heard you can, young lady.” She hadn’t seen him last night, either, when she and Dutch got back late. His door was closed and she didn’t want to disturb him.

She slips on her black day dress and slippers and pads down the hallway. “Henry?”

Henry’s bedroom door is ajar and bed empty. He must be out already as she doesn’t hear his usual rattling around the kitchen. As she rounds the corner, she grabs her apron from a peg on the wall. Midnight rubs up against her leg.

“What are you doing inside, little one? You know Henry won’t stand for that.” She reaches down to scratch the cat’s jet-black head. It’s then she sees Henry slumped at the kitchen table, his mug on its side, coffee dripping from the lip of the table onto the floor drop by drop. The door is ajar.

“Henry!” She calls his name again, but he doesn’t answer. She tugs at his shoulder, but he doesn’t move. No one needs to tell her he’s dead. She’s seen more dead bodies than most girls her age—in Ireland, on the ship to America, in Colorado Springs. She races out the open door in the dry morning to Dutch’s shed and bangs on the door. “Dutch! You awake?”

Dutch opens the door, hoisting suspenders over his shoulder. He wears a union suit under his trousers, hasn’t had time yet to put on a shirt. “What’s the fuss?”

He runs a hand through his hair.

“It’s Henry. He’s left us.”

“Left us? What in—” Dutch looks at Mary Agnes. “You mean—?”

She nods.

“I’ll be less than a minute.”

Mary Agnes peers inside Dutch’s shed. She’s never been inside. Next to his mussed bed, a bedstand, and on it, a lamp and a framed picture. She can’t see whose image appears. A clothes tree holds all his familiar garb: Wool shirts, rough trousers, hat. Less than a minute later, like he said, Dutch flies out the shed door, brushing past her.

In the kitchen, with the cat now underfoot, Mary Agnes and Dutch lift the dead man and carry him back to his bed. The room is, as to be expected, very orderly. Bed, bedstand, dresser. A large armoire and looking glass. A large rocker draped with a fringed ivory shawl. His mother’s? Sister’s? Lover’s?

Mary Agnes straightens the sheets and combs Henry’s hair back from his face. There’s an intimacy with the dead. She would never find herself in Henry’s room for any reason, and would never think of touching him, not even a handshake. She steps back and Dutch steadies her. She turns and buries her face in his chest. He waits a moment before encircling her with hairy arms.

“Shhh,” he says.

She sobs, all the grief held in since Tom died spilling out in wracking jerks. He holds her there until she pulls away. “I’m sorry, Dutch, I don’t know—”

“It’s alright, Mary A.” He’s never used her given name before.

They sit at the foot of Henry’s bed. Dutch puts his head in his hands. Small shudders rise from his shoulders.

Is he about to cry, too?

He raises his head after a minute, his eyes red and moist. “Been with Henry since the time I was first shaving.”

“Shaving?”

“A long time. Years. He saved my life, you might say.”

“We can talk of that over coffee.” She rises from the chair.

“Sit down, Irish. It’s early yet, no one else will be up for an hour yet. We can stay here with Henry until then. Isn’t right to leave the dead alone, at least that’s what my moeder said. Coffee can wait.”

Mary Agnes sits again and Midnight hops onto her lap.

“Here, here,” she says, as she strokes the cat’s sleek, black fur. Midnight looks up at her, yawns, and curls up, head disappearing into fur near her tail, a perfect circle of black, as if she hasn’t slept in years and isn’t wasting the chance.

“THERE WERE EIGHT OF US: ME, MATHILDE—that’s Tilly—Lena, Dirk, the twins, Atje and Anje, and two others who died, one a boy who died young—Moeder felt that was God’s will, although I have my own thoughts on that—and another, a girl, who died at birth. Moeder never got over that. She left us a year after she lost the child, God rest her soul, and Vader couldn’t care for us. Tilly and I tried to step in, but we were poor substitutes for a mother. We were ten and nine at the time.”

Dutch rubs his hands together.

“Shall I put coffee on now?” Mary Agnes asks. She rustles Midnight, who issues a huge yawn and then settles back on her lap.

He shakes his head. “Everything can wait.” He looks at Henry and pauses the story. He reaches to touch the blanket, his fingers lingering there. Clearing his throat, he continues. “By this time, it was clear our father had found another woman to take Moeder’s place. She was the daughter of our neighbors in Ontario, the VanVliets. Tess was her name, a very comely girl. She wasn’t more than eighteen, though, and by that time, my father was forty.”

Dutch must be thirty-two or thirty-three by now, almost twice my age.

“Did they marry?”

“Less than a month after Moeder died. Tess moved in and it wasn’t a week before she said she couldn’t care for all of us. But she loved the twins, she said. She could care for them.” His face darkens.

“My father was faced with an unenviable choice then—honor his new wife’s wishes or she threatened to go back to her family. We all heard the argument; it was hard not to hear in such a klein huis. No man should have to make that decision, but he did. That left Tilly, Lena, Dirk, and me, farmed out first to two different families, Lena and Dirk to the local preacher and his wife, who had no children, and Tilly and me to relatives back home.”

“The Netherlands?”

“Yes, he sent us off. Tilly got a pat on the shoulder. I got a handshake, although he didn’t meet my eye. That is the last time I saw him.” Dutch lowers his head into his hands again.

“We lasted there less than year,” he says, softly now. “Beaten one too many times. I could take it, but I couldn’t bear to see Tilly ill-used. I stole money from our uncle and took Tilly with me. We lived on stale bread and pigeons on the way to Rotterdam and stowed away on a merchant ship to New York. We weren’t found out until five days at sea, and the captain was kindly, although I don’t know if he would have been if it hadn’t been for Tilly. No one dislikes her, as you know. The captain took a shine to her, but to my knowledge, she was not mistreated.”

“That’s horrid what your father did. And your uncle!” Her face darkens. “I had a beastly time at home myself.”

“Which was where?”

“County Galway. But this is not a time to speak of that. They are all dead, too. At least to me. Please, go on.”

“This is surely boring you.”

“You are most certainly not. Please, go on.”

Dutch wrings his hands, right, then left.

She waits, silent as Henry.

He begins again, at first haltingly. “In New York, I went to work as a butcher’s assistant. We boarded at a rooming house run by the Dutch Reformed Church. They were severe, but not unkind. Tilly began cooking there, feeding hungry mouths morning, noon, and evening. It broke my heart to see her, maybe twelve she was by this time, with burns on her arms and bloody feet.” His face contorts and he presses his eyes. “We couldn’t afford boots then.” He scuffs his boot on the floor.

“How did you end up in Colorado?”

“Like I said, Henry Hansen saved me.”

“In New York?”

“No, I headed west and told Tilly I would send for her. Which I did, several years later. When I got off the train in Colorado Springs, I went straight to a butcher and offered my services. Henry here”—he reaches toward the man on the bed—“was in the shop just at that time. ‘A strapping young man like you? I’ll best any wages Fred Feigl here can offer.’ He winked at me and shook the butcher’s hand. ‘Came in for the best steak in the state and came away with a new cowhand.’ He shook my hand then. ‘Got an opening at Double H Ranch, half-a-day’s ride north of here, if you’re interested.’ I said I was, and that afternoon I sat on the wagon seat next to Henry and have been here ever since. But now I’ve got no reason not to go to Santa Fe before fall.”

Mary Agnes’s eyes are moist. Dutch stands and offers Mary Agnes a hand. She rises, tentatively, and doesn’t let go.

“Here,” he says, and envelops her in a hug again.

Oh, how she wants to melt into him, right here, take his hand and lead him to her bed and let him undress her slowly. But it wouldn’t be right. She is caught between longing and propriety. After a few awkward seconds, she pulls away. “I’ll get coffee on.”