Louisa was watching him closely in a way that made him a little uncomfortable. The only light in the cabin came from a small coal-oil lamp on the table. A few small bugs buzzed around the lamp, their movements casting shadows on the table. The corn bread was so dry that Roscoe kept having to dip dippenfuls of water to wash it down.
'Roscoe, you're in the wrong trade,' Louisa said. 'If you could just learn to handle an ax you might make a good farmer.'
Roscoe didn't know what to say to that. Nothing was less likely than that he would make a farmer.
'Why'd that sheriff's wife run off?' Louisa asked.
'She didn't say,' Roscoe said. 'Maybe she said to July but I doubt it, since he left before she did.'
'Didn't like Arkansas, I guess,' Louisa said. 'He might just as well let her go, if that's the case. I like it myself, though it ain't no Alabama.'
After that the conversation lagged. Roscoe kept wishing there was something to eat besides corn bread, but there wasn't. Louisa continued to watch him from the other side of the table.
'Roscoe, have you had any experience with women at all?' she asked, after a bit.
To Roscoe it seemed a bold question, and he took his time answering it. Once about twenty years earlier he had fancied a girl named Betsie and had been thinking about asking her to take a walk with him some night. But he was shy, and while he was getting around to asking, Betsie died of smallpox. He had always regretted that they never got to take their walk, but after that he hadn't tried to have much to do with women.
'Well, not much,' he admitted, finally.
'I got the solution to both our problems,' Louisa said. 'You let that sheriff find his own wife and stay here and we'll get married.'
She said it in the same confident, slightly loud voice that she always seemed to use-after a day of yelling at mules it was probably hard to speak in a quiet voice.
Despite the loudness, Roscoe assumed he had misunderstood her. A woman didn't just out and ask a man to marry. He pondered what she had said a minute, trying to figure out where he might have missed her meaning. It stumped him, though, so he chewed slowly on his last bite of corn bread.
'What was it you said?' he asked, finally.
'I said we oughta get married,' Louisa said loudly. 'What I like about you is you're quiet. Jim talked every second that he didn't have a whiskey bottle in his mouth. I got tired of listening. Also, you're skinny. If you don't last, you'll be easy to bury. I've buried enough husbands to take such things into account. What do you say?'
'I don't want to,' Roscoe said. He was aware that it sounded impolite but was too startled to say otherwise.
'Well, you ain't had time to think about it,' Louisa said. 'Give it some thought while you're finishing the corn bread. Much as I hate burying husbands, I don't want to live alone. Jim wasn't much good but he was somebody in the bed, at least. I've had six boys in all but not a one of 'em stayed around. Had two girls but they both died. That's eight children. I always meant to have ten but I've got two to go and time's running out.'
She munched her corn bread for a while. She seemed to be amused, though Roscoe couldn't figure out what might be amusing.
'How big was your family?' she asked.
'There was just four of us boys,' Roscoe said. 'Ma died young.'
Louisa was watching him, which made him nervous. He remembered that he was supposed to be thinking about the prospect of marrying her while he finished the cornbread, but in fact his appetite was about gone anyway and he was having to choke it down. He began to feel more and more of a grievance against more and more people. The start of it all was Jake Spoon, who had no business coming to Fort Smith in the first place. It seemed to him that a chain of thoughtless actions, on the part of many people he knew, had resulted in his being stuck in a cabin in the wilderness with a difficult widow woman. Jake should have kept his pistol handier, and not resorted to a buffalo gun. Benny Johnson should have been paying attention to his dentistry and not walking around in the street in the middle of the day. July shouldn't have married Elmira if she was going to run off, and of course Elmira certainly had no business geting on the whiskey boat.
In all of it no one had given much consideration to him, least of all the townspeople of Fort Smith. Peach Johnson and Charlie Barnes, in particular, had done their best to see that he had to leave.
But if the townspeople of Fort Smith had not considered him, the same couldn't be said for Louisa Brooks, who was giving him a good deal more consideration than he was accustomed to.
'I was never a big meat eater,' she said. 'Living off corn bread keeps you feeling light on your feet.'
Roscoe didn't feel light on his feet, though. Both his legs pained him from where the root had struck them. He choked down the last of the corn bread and took another swallow on two of the cool well water.
'You ain't a bad-looking feller,' Louisa said. 'Jim was prone to warts. Had 'em on his hands and on his neck both. So far as I can see you don't have a wart on you.'
'No, don't believe so,' Roscoe admitted.
'Well, that's all the supper,' Louisa said. 'What about my proposition?'
'I can't,' Roscoe said, putting it as politely as he knew how. 'If I don't keep on till I find July 1 might lose my job.'
Louisa looked exasperated. 'You're a fine guest,' she said. 'I tell you what, let's give it a tryout. You ain't had enough experience of women to know whether you like the married life or not. It might suit you to a T. If it did, you wouldn't have to do risky work like being a deputy.'
It was true that being a deputy had become almost intolerably risky-Roscoe had to grant that. But judging from July's experience, marriage had its risks too.
'I don't favor mustaches much,' Louisa said. 'But then life's a matter of give and take.'
They had eaten the corn bread right out of the pan, so there were no dishes to wash. Louisa got up and threw a few crumbs out the door to her chickens, who rushed at them greedily, two of them coming right into the cabin.
'Don't you eat them chickens?' Roscoe asked, thinking how much better the corn bread would have tasted if there had been a chicken to go with it.
'No, I just keep 'em to control the bugs,' Louisa said. 'I ate enough chicken in Alabama to last me a lifetime.'
Roscoe felt plenty nervous. The question of sleeping arrangements could not be postponed much longer. He had looked forward briefly to sleeping in the cabin, where he would feel secure from snakes and wild pigs, but that hope was dashed. He hadn't spent a night alone with a woman in his whole life and didn't plan to start with Louisa, who stood in the doorway drinking a dipper of water. She squished a swallow or two around in her mouth and spat it out the door. Then she put the dipper back in the bucket and leaned over Roscoe, so close he nearly tipped over backward in his chair out of surprise.
'Roscoe, you've went to waste long enough,' she said. 'Let's give it a tryout.'
'Well, I wouldn't know how to try,' Roscoe said. 'I've been a bachelor all my life.'
Louisa straightened up. 'Men are about as worthless a race of people as I've ever encountered,' she said. 'Look at the situation a minute. You're running off to catch a sheriff you probably can't find, who's in the most dangerous state in the union, and if you do find him he'll just go off and try to find a wife that don't want to live with him anyway. You'll probably get scalped before it's all over, or hung, or a Mexican will get you with a pigsticker. And it'll all be to try and mend something that won't mend anyway. Now I own a section of land here and I'm a healthy woman. I'm willing to take you, although you've got no experience either at farming or matrimony. You'd be useful to me, whereas you won't be a bit of use to that sheriff or that town you work for either. I'll teach you how to handle an ax and a mule team, and guarantee you all the corn bread you can eat. We might even have some peas to go with it later in the year. I can cook peas. Plus I've got one of the few feather mattresses in this part of the country, so it'd be easy sleeping. And now you're scared to try. If that ain't cowardice, I don't know what is.'
Roscoe had never expected to hear such a speech, and he had no idea how to reply to it. Louisa's approach to marriage didn't seem to resemble any that he had observed, though it was true he had not spent much time studying the approaches to matrimony. Still, he had only ridden into Louisa's field an hour before sundown, and it was not yet much more than an hour after dark. Her proposal seemed hasty to him by any standards.
'Well, we ain't much acquainted,' he said. 'How do you know we'd get along?'
'I don't,' Louisa said. 'That's why I offered just to give it a tryout. If you don't like it you can leave, and if I can't
