My name is Daniel Whitfield. I was thirty-one that June, and my entire world slept behind one thin cabin door on a Wyoming ranch too far from town. Four little children. One tired father. And a road that stretched fifteen miles before it reached a doctor.
I pressed my hand against my chest and tried to stand. My knees folded. I landed beside the horse with enough force to knock the breath from my lungs. The yard tilted, righted itself, and tilted again.
I had buried their mother. I would not make my children bury me.
It was an easy vow to make. Keeping it would prove considerably harder.
Nearly a year earlier, cholera had come into the valley. Six months before that morning, it took Susannah. I could still remember how she’d sat beneath our cottonwood on the last evening she felt strong, her red hair unpinned, a mending basket at her feet, telling me that children would one day climb that tree despite everything we said. She had laughed at my expression and laid a hand on my cheek.
“Promise you’ll let them be children, Daniel. Even when it’s inconvenient.”
“Especially when it’s inconvenient,” I’d answered, because back then I believed I could promise her anything.
I remembered the fever. The washbasin that never stayed full. The terrible, helpless hours when no treatment in the county seemed to matter. Afterward, I dug her grave under that same cottonwood, where its roots could hold the earth steady in the spring rains. There were days when I could stand beside it and say her name. Other days I hurried past, ashamed of how much I wanted to be angry with her for leaving.
