The ink on the county registrar’s duplicate had dried three days before Maude Zimmerman ever saw the cedar brakes of the Pedernales, and she had spent every mile of the stage journey from Round Rock wondering if the clerk’s nib had slipped when he copied her middle initial. “It did not slip,” Maude said aloud to the empty mule-hitch behind the dry-goods store, her voice dropping into the limestone dust before the breeze could take it. She was twenty-nine years old, weighed down by a trunk of grey bombazine that smelled faintly of camphor and unfulfilled expectations, and she was standing precisely where Justin Langford’s second cousin had promised she would not be—namely, four hundred miles away from the man who had signed his letters *Your affectionate intended, Arthur.*
The man coming down the limestone ridge now, leading a roan mule laden with split cedar rails, was not Arthur Langford. Arthur had written that he wore a bowler hat and possessed an affinity for Methodist hymnody; this man wore a salt-crusted wool shirt with the sleeves rolled past elbows scarred by fire, and his hat was a shapeless horror of greasy felt that had clearly served as a water-scoop for livestock.
“You’re the Cincinnati girl,” the man said. He did not drop the mule’s lead rope. His boots made a wet, sucking sound against the travertine rim of the spring where the water bubbled up clear and cold enough to frost a tin cup.
“I am Miss Maude Zimmerman,” she said, clutching her reticule with fingers that had gone bloodless during the four-day carriage-rattle across the limestone flats. “And if you are Arthur Langford, your handwriting has suffered a remarkable decline since the spring thaw.”
“Justin,” the man corrected. He spat a stem of blue-stem grass into the pool. “Arthur’s my cousin. He’s up in Austin clerking for the land office, keeping his collars clean and writing poetry to three different women in Washington County. You’re at the wrong cabin, Miss Zimmerman.”
The Hill Country wind came up through the cedar brakes then, carrying the dry, medicinal reek of crushed juniper and sun-baked dust. It was October of 1878, and the Hill Country was sliding into one of those deceptive autumns where the sky stayed the color of a blue willow plate while the cisterns shrank by half an inch every sunrise. Maude did not faint—she was too tired and too thoroughly accustomed to the small, grey indignities of being an orphan schoolteacher in Ohio to indulge in hysterics—but she sat down very carefully upon her steamer trunk before the hinges gave out.
“Arthur said he owned an orchard,” she said, her eyes fixed on the muddy knees of Justin Langford’s trousers.
“He does,” Justin said, hitching the mule. “Two acres of neglected clingstone peaches and a mortgage held by the bank in Fredericksburg. He also owns a remarkably casual attitude toward the United States Postal Service. He used my name when he got tired of paying for the stamps, or else he used his own when he needed a horse hauled out of a creek. Get up off that trunk. The sun’s dropping behind the ridge, and if we leave your baggage here by the wagon track, the hogs will have your winter woolens shredded for bedding by midnight.”
That was how Maude Zimmerman came to occupy the north lean-to of a two-room limestone cabin three miles outside of Blanco, possessing neither a husband nor a return ticket, but owning sixty pounds of preserved quince and a signed contract of marriage that belonged to a man who spent his evenings drinking rye whiskey in the capital.
The first week did not resemble a romance. It resembled an audit. Justin Langford moved through his orchard with the methodical, unsmiling efficiency of a man who expected the sky to fall at any moment and had prepared a ledger to record the damage. He was thirty-two, though his beard—thick and bleached the color of dead bunchgrass at the temples—made him look older, and he spoke only when an animal or a tool required redirection.
On the fourth morning, while Maude was attempting to coax a reluctant sourdough starter to life in a cracked yellow bowl, he laid three dry cedar shingles on the puncheon table.
“Arthur’s letter came by the mail rider,” Justin said, laying a silver dollar beside the pine wood to weight it down against the draft. “He says he’s sorry for the mix-up. Says the girl who was supposed to come out from Cincinnati—a Miss Pettibone with some money from her uncle’s tannery—went to Galveston instead. He says he assumes you’ll want the stage fare back north, though the stage company won’t honor tickets purchased through a third-party broker in St. Louis.”
Maude did not look up from her flour-dusted hands. Her knuckles were red from the well water, which tasted of sulfur and old iron. “And what does Arthur suggest I do for the four weeks until the next cattle drive affords a safe escort back to the railhead?”
“Stay here,” Justin said, reaching for his skinning knife. “Or go down to Mrs. Gentry’s boardinghouse in town and wash shirts for fifty cents a dozen. She’s short of hands since the fever took her niece.”
“I am a certified instructress of the lower primary grades,” Maude said, her voice dropping an octave into that cool, defensive register she used when the school board in Covington tried to dock her wages for buying slate pencils out of season. “I did not cross four states to become Mrs. Gentry’s laundress.”
“The schoolhouse in Blanco burnt down in July,” Justin replied without malice. “There are twelve children within six miles who don’t know their own names in ink, and three of them belong to the widow Vance, who can’t pay tuition except in goat’s milk and dried sage. Take your pick.”
He walked out then, his boots clicking on the limestone flags, leaving her alone with the sourdough and the blue-stem wind. Maude stood by the window for a long time, watching him string wire along the upper fence line where the Hill Country scrub oak gave way to the ridge. She was frightened—not of him, exactly, but of the immense, indifferent vastness of the plateau, where the horizon did not stop for fences and nobody knew her middle name. Yet when she looked down at her hands, she realized she had not touched a slate pencil in six months, and the smell of the cedar smoke was cleaner than the tenement coal-gas she had breathed since she was twelve.
By the second week, the domestic arrangement settled into an uneasy, unspoken truce. Maude established her boundary at the hearth-stone; Justin stayed out of the cabin until dark, working the dry stone walls that kept the sheep from the orchard. They spoke in short, declarative sentences about firewood, well depth, and the price of cornmeal at the mercantile.
Yet texture accumulated between them like dust in the corners of the room. Justin had a habit—not listed in any register—of setting his pocket watch on the mantelpiece at precisely six minutes past five every evening, winding it twice with a small brass key he kept on his watch-chain, though the mainspring had been broken since the Antietam campaign. Maude noticed it because she spent those six minutes sweeping the hearth, her broom-strokes rhythmic and flat against the stone.
“You’re wearing the brass thin,” she said on a Tuesday evening as the smell of salt pork and wild onions filled the small room.
Justin stopped his hand on the watch-case. He looked down at the little brass teeth as if he were seeing them for the first time. “My brother gave me this in ’62,” he said. It was the longest sentence he had volunteered about his past since she arrived. “At Corinth. He didn’t come back from the orchard behind the church.”
“Arthur has one,” Maude said quietly, turning the pork in the skillet with a flat-bladed knife. “He keeps it in his vest pocket with a gold chain. He let me hold it once while we sat on the porch of the literary society in Covington. It didn’t tick; he’d forgotten to wind it.”
Justin looked up then, his grey eyes narrowing slightly against the wood smoke. It was the first time their eyes had met without an intervening chore or an argument over the flour bin. There was no spark of sudden, cinematic revelation in it—only the heavy, recognizable weight of two people who had both been second choices in someone else’s correspondence.
“Arthur always was a damn fool about clocks,” Justin muttered, and dropped the watch into his pocket.
The real test came on a Thursday when Amos Rutledge, the local magistrate whose family claimed three leagues of the Pedernales valley by right of an old Spanish grant that everyone suspected had been modified with a penknife in 1856, rode his bay stallion right through Justin’s lower melon patch.
Maude was hanging dish-towels on the juniper bushes when Rutledge pulled up his horse. He was a large man with mutton-chop whiskers stained yellow around the mouth from cheap tobacco, and he looked at Maude with the appraising eye of a horse-trader inspecting a three-year-old filly with a questionable brand.