I bought cornmeal and salt on credit. Martha Pell wrote my name in a ledger and told me the debt would come due in spring. I walked the 3 miles back to the cabin with the supplies in my carpetbag and the weight of her certainty on my shoulders. Everyone in Mercy Crossing knew that Silas Ren had been crazy. Everyone knew that his land was worthless. Everyone knew that a 16-year-old orphan girl with no family and no skills and no money was not going to survive a winter in a cabin that was falling down at the base of a cliff.
I knew it too. That was the worst part. I knew they were probably right. But I had the journals and I had nothing to lose.
The first 2 weeks in that cabin nearly killed me. I do not say that for dramatic effect. I mean it literally. The cornmeal ran out faster than I expected because I was burning more fuel than I had, and burning fuel made me hungry, and being hungry made me burn more fuel. The spring ran thin in the cold and I had to walk farther each day to find water that was not filmed with ice. The stove’s cracked plate leaked smoke into the cabin until my throat was raw and my eyes streamed constantly. I lost weight I did not have to lose. My dresses hung on me like sacks. My hands cracked and bled from the cold and the water and the constant work of hauling wood and cooking food and stuffing rags into gaps that the wind found anyway. I woke at night shivering so hard my teeth hurt.
1 morning I walked halfway to the road. I stood there in the frozen mud, looking at the track that led back to Union, back to the relief house, back to Mrs. Vale’s pinched face and the dormitory beds and the girls who had laughed when the lawyer read the will. I could go back. I could tell them the place was uninhabitable. I could admit that Silas Ren had left me nothing but a slow way to die. Mrs. Vale would take me in. She would have to. And she would spend the rest of my time there reminding me that she had been right, that the inheritance was a cruel joke, that I had been a fool to believe a box of wind could be anything but what it sounded like.
