Four days later, a Sunday, Adelaide heard the snort of a horse. She’d been working in the wicker rocker, stitching holes that had developed in her gloves. In the days since Grace and Sam’s first visit, she’d already eaten half the potatoes and all the canned corn. Maybe they’d brought more this time. Or perhaps something even more succulent. Some rabbit or beef. Also Grace had promised to bring her wood. Burning brown coal inside the cabin had already made Adelaide develop a cough.
All this took seconds to consider and Adelaide felt her heart rate rising and her face going flush and all at once she had to pinch her thigh to bring her back to herself.
Had she come out here to live off a woman raising her child alone?
Her mother would be particularly appalled to imagine her daughter living off the charity of someone else. And a white woman? Might as well go beg a man for assistance next. Eleanor Henry’s child playing the helpless role?
No, thank you.
Adelaide Henry rose from the wicker chair and went to the stove, fed it brown coal, and began a fire as she heard the horse’s snort outside. So when the knock came at the door, she felt ready to welcome her guests, her new friend. She would offer hospitality and expect nothing in return. That is how she’d been raised. At the very least, she’d offer some labor of her own to pay back the gifts Grace had already given. That’s how a Henry acts.
But when she opened the door, two men were standing there.
White men.
Cowboys.
Adelaide felt so surprised she slammed the door shut.
“Ma’am?” one of them said, softly, as if speaking to a skittish horse.
Inside the cabin she scanned the kitchen, trying to decide if she should pick up something, a knife or a skillet. Greet them armed.
“Did we scare you, ma’am?” the same man said. “That was not our intent.”
He sounded sincere. Adelaide decided to believe him. At least until he did something that would suggest otherwise. But, she decided, she would not say sorry for her reaction, slamming the door on them. She found this difficult and had to keep her face completely still so that home training wouldn’t force the words out.
The two cowboys. They were nearly the same man. Each one thin as fence wire, their cheeks and foreheads a brownish red from years of work outdoors. Their fingertips were stained brown. Both wore denim overalls and boots. The cuffs of the overalls were threadbare, the soles of the boots worn thin. The younger man had a clean face; the one behind him—two decades older—wore a beard. When she opened the door again, they removed their hats. The younger man smiled and his teeth were small, stained. The one behind him nodded his greeting. Both men stood shorter than Adelaide.
“I thought you were my friend, Mrs. Price,” Adelaide said. “I’m…”
She caught herself and pursed her lips.
“My name is Matthew Kirby. This is my uncle, Finn. We know Mrs. Price,” said the younger man. “That’s how we heard about you.”
Against her will, Adelaide Henry blushed.
“You make me sound like big news.”
The older man gave a short laugh. “Ma’am, you are this month’s headline.”
The teakettle blew on the stove and Adelaide turned to it.
“You were sitting down for tea,” said the younger man.
“One moment,” she said, gesturing for them to remain at the doorway. They had not been invited in yet and they didn’t presume to enter.
Adelaide stepped inside to get the kettle off the stove. She shut the door because her bed was right there, unmade, and she didn’t want them to see it. She set the kettle on a stove plate to cool, quickly pulled the sheets up on her bed, and came back to the door. When she opened it, the bearded man was already walking around the side of the cabin toward the horses.
“You’re leaving?” Adelaide asked the younger man. Did she sound disappointed?
Matthew said, “We came to see if you were free.”
The bearded man rounded the cabin leading three horses. All of them saddled.
“We hoped…” Matthew paused. “I hoped you’d come out for a ride.”
Adelaide scanned the pair one more time, then looked back into the empty cabin.
“I suppose I’m free,” she said.
Matthew Kirby—whose birth name was Matteus, though he’d changed it for a good American name—took her out for a wonderful afternoon. Matthew’s uncle, Finn, rode a few lengths behind them the whole time. She’d thought they were cowboys but the men worked on threshing crews. Matthew’s uncle operated the straw-burning steam engine, and Matthew worked as a separator man.
Adelaide shared the story of her life as a farmer in the Lucerne Valley, some of her life at least. She spoke proudly of the Santa Rosa plums and the forward thinking of her father to grow them. But, for obvious reasons, she kept the last days of the Henry family a mystery. And to her pleasant surprise Matthew never prodded for more. As they rode, Adelaide realized Grace had been much the same. They didn’t ask what brought her to the territory. Maybe she wasn’t the only one outrunning a past.
Other men like Matthew and Finn visited Adelaide. Men who worked on threshing crews, and actual cowboys, too—the rise of ranching had already signaled the cowboy’s decline, but when they were here in force, nearly half of them were Black men. Not as many of them left in the territory now, Adelaide lamented.
Sheepherders came through, too, men who often spent months on the plains with only one partner and a flock of sheep. Black men and white men, a few brown men who spoke Spanish, not much English. They all came calling once word spread about the new “lone woman” on the land.
Adelaide came to Montana to hide away, but her anonymity was already over. Her name traveled as far as Helena and Butte. Men gossip so much. News of her arrival might as well have gone out over the wire. The visitors made themselves useful, though. Helping bring supplies that she might need. She repaid them with money and, sometimes, a drink or a meal.
Adelaide didn’t mind their visits, most of the time. The men asked her out on rides, bringing a saddled horse for her as she didn’t have one of her own yet. They might take her to a ranch where they lived and worked and she’d spend the whole evening eating dinner, making conversation. They were all so profoundly lonely. To her surprise, she realized she was, too.
And yet, despite the sense of camaraderie, the warmth, a woman on her own, a Black woman out here in Montana, far from the Black community she’d known in Lucerne Valley, must remain vigilant for her own sense of safety. In truth, she’d never been around so many white people. So far, the experience hadn’t been bad, far from it in fact—generally—but she still felt like she was visiting another nation, one where she didn’t always know its customs and whose language seemed close to her own but not exactly the same. At times she remembered that conversation with Mr. Olsen, when he’d mentioned two names—Bertie Brown and Annie Morgan—and she would say their names to herself as if they’d been old friends. She missed Black people—Black women in particular.
Nevertheless, the company of all those men meant Adelaide no longer spent every evening locked up inside her cabin, reading the books she’d read many times before, listening to the wind howling outside the shack and the howling, growing louder each night, from the trunk.