Free The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout

smithy as though he didn’t trust himself to say more or stay longer.
    Mary Bee tightened the reins and clucked and waited and clucked again and this time the mules put shoulders to collars and moved.
    On the way out of Loup she met and passed two town women walking in, hoisting their skirts above the mud. She might have nodded, or spoken, but they took one long look at the frame wagon and, knowing where it was going and what it would carry, their own kind, turned their faces from it.
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    She stopped at the Linens place. Charley and Harriet knew what she was up to, everyone did. She told Charley she would start the gather in the morning, she expected to be gone four or five weeks, and would he please tend her stock? He said he’d be glad to, he’d look after her place like it was his own, and by the way, he wanted her to know how much he admired her sand. He’d never set eyes on a frame wagon. He looked inside and asked if he couldn’t stow the provision sacks on top for her, and she said she’d be grateful. While he was busy Harriet came out to say goodbye, and when Charley finished loading and covering with canvas and tying down, Harriet suddenly put her arms around Mary Bee and hugged her hard and retreated into their sod house in tears.
    Mary Bee drove on, and within a mile of home it struck her that this was her last day to be free for a long time. She changed direction. She thought she’d have a look at the gunpowder damage done to Andy Giffen’s dugout. It was only three miles out of her way, and the spring day still sparkled.
    She took an immediate liking to the mules. The off mule, the thinker, who twitched his ears often, was the more interesting, but the nigh mule was the worker. His nose was always an inch ahead of the other’s. He’d be the one she could depend on.
    She stood up once and looked behind the wagon at poor Dorothy being hauled along willy-nilly by the bit in her mouth, a new experience for her and surely a mortifying one. Then it struck her she was in the same fix, being hauled along by a wagon and women gone mad and a husband who wouldn’t do his duty and her own foolish heart rushing in where angels feared to tread. A new experience, yes, but scarcely mortifying. Terrifying was the apter word.
    She reached Andy’s stovepipe and held the mules under tight rein down into the ravine, along it past the stable, and pulled the span up before the wreckage of the dugout. She was appalled. To save Andy’s claim from the jumper they had had to destroy his dwelling. Lynching was too good for the man—she thought Buster had called him Briggs. From a coat pocket she took out the dime’s worth of cheese and crackers bought in town and ate her lunch. Somehow, sitting on the high wagon seat, eating, reminded her of the night last September she had given Andy dinner at her place, inviting him especially, gussying up in her maroon taffeta, putting together a sumptuous repast, and afterward, daring to get out her muslin keyboard and play and sing for him. Rocking in the Boston rocker, drawing now and again from the jug of whiskey he had brought, her guest seemed to enjoy himself. She could have loved Andy Giffen. He had beautiful black eyes. He was tall and strapping. He was twenty-nine, he’d said so, and the difference between that and thirty-one was nil. Then she ceased to sing and made him a proposition. Why not marry her? Why not throw in together—land, animals, implements, lives—the whole ball of wax? Why not use her capital and know-how to improve his claim as she had hers? As partners, they must prosper. If there were children, so much the better. Looked at from any angle, it made sense, so why not marry? She waited, breath held. Andy had a long pull from his jug. He said he intended to go back east for a wife. She would not take no for an answer. She pressed on, pleading a case, biting her lips, humbling