Part 1
Eleven cotton socks hung over Ida Rourke's stove to dry, and not one of them was whole.
She counted the holes while the coffee boiled. Twenty-three. It was January 22, 1887, on the Judith River in Montana Territory, and the snow around the cook shack had not melted since November.
Out in the coulees, the cattle were dying. Every man on the Lodgepole ranch knew it, and nobody said it at supper.
Ida set out the beans and biscuits and waited until all eleven hands had their plates. Then she wiped her palms on her apron.
"After supper, any man who wants to keep his toes can bring his hands back here," she said. "I'll teach him to knit."
The laughter started at the far end of the table and rolled toward her.
"Knit?" Dutch Henning said. "Ma'am, I can't sew on a button."
"Then you'll start on something bigger than a button."
More laughter. Toby Shaw, seventeen and the youngest hand on the place, laughed loudest, because the older men were laughing.
At the head of the table, Cal Brewster did not laugh. The foreman set down his fork and looked at Ida like a horse he had not made up his mind about.
"Mrs. Rourke," he said, "these men rope cattle."
"They rope them in cotton socks you could pass a biscuit through."
"They'll get wool at the store when the trail opens."
"The trail hasn't opened since Christmas."
Cal stood. His new boots gave a dry squeak on the planks. He had bought them in Miles City in October, high in the heel and a size too snug, and he still walked in them like the floor was hot.
"Six men ride out to the line camps Friday," he said. "I need them rested. Not sitting up with a sewing circle."
He took his hat off the nail and left. Cold air rolled across the floor behind him and found Ida's ankles.
Her daughter washed. Ida dried, then sat down by the stove with her needles.
She did not need to look at them. Her mother had taught her on a porch in east Texas when she was six, and fifty-eight years later Ida could turn a heel in the dark. Some nights she did.
The sock on her needles was gray wool and bigger than any other in her basket. One thread of blue ran around the top of the cuff.
"Who's that one for?" Nell asked. "It would fit a mule."
"Somebody with big feet."
"Mama."
"You're dripping on my yarn."
Nell was thirty-one and did sums faster than the company bookkeeper. She counted the basket with her lips moving.
"Nine socks done," she said. "Eleven men. Two pairs each, if Daddy's rule holds."
Dan Rourke had cooked off a chuckwagon from the Nueces River to the Yellowstone. His rule for cold was two pairs of wool socks and boots big enough to hold them both. "Wool forgives," he used to say. "Cotton doesn't."
"Forty-four socks," Nell said. "Six days. You knit one a night when your hands behave."
Ida's knuckles had begun to swell that winter. She flexed them once under the yarn, where Nell could not see.
"They'll come," she said.
"They laughed at you."
"They laughed at your daddy's coffee too. For about a week."
They did not come.
Ida did not ask again. She had asked once, in front of eleven men, and she had been raised to believe once was enough. Saturday went by, then Sunday, then Monday. She knit at night and kept her mouth shut, and every morning there were more holes on the stove rail.
On Tuesday at noon, Toby Shaw rode in from the north line camp, and he could not get down off his horse.
Dutch carried him into the cook shack. The boy smelled of wet leather and cold iron. His boots would not come off, so Ida cut them. Under the boots were cotton socks, frozen stiff as bark.
She kept him away from the stove, the way Dan had taught her, and worked slow. Toby never said a word. Boys his age always talked.
A doctor came by sleigh on Wednesday. By Wednesday night, Toby Shaw had two fewer toes on his left foot.
Ida did not sleep. She sat by the stove with the big gray sock in her lap and did not knit a stitch. She had asked once. Then she had waited for them to come to her, like a proud old woman, and the whole time Toby had been riding in cotton.
At nine o'clock someone knocked.
It was Dutch Henning, hat in his hands, snow on his shoulders. Behind him stood four more men. Behind them, four more were coming across the yard.
"Ma'am," Dutch said. "Is the offer still good?"
She had four sets of steel needles. Nell cut more from serviceberry shoots and scraped them smooth with a paring knife. By ten o'clock, nine cowboys sat around the long table with yarn in their fists.
The cook shack smelled of lamp oil and wet wool. The only sound was the wind and the small, uneven click of needles held by men who had only ever held reins.
The boys knit the legs, plain and straight. Ida turned every heel herself.
Near midnight Cal Brewster stood in the doorway with the cold coming in around him.
"That's company lamp oil," he said.
"Take it out of my wages."
Cal looked at the men, and the men looked at their yarn.
"Every hour these boys sit up with needles is an hour a cow dies in a coulee," he said. "The company counts cows, Mrs. Rourke. It doesn't count socks."
He shut the door. Nobody laughed this time.
They knit Wednesday night and Thursday night. By Friday morning there were thirty-eight socks on the rail and the big gray pair was gone from Ida's basket.
Before breakfast she went to the barn for the cream, the way she did every morning. Cal's saddle hung on its peg by the door, the saddlebags already packed for the ride. Ida stood beside it a minute with her hands tucked under her arms before she carried the cream back to the house.
At seven, the sky in the north turned the color of a stove lid.
The wind came at nine. By ten, Ida could not see the barn from the cook shack window. Rafe and Billy were still at the far camp, twenty miles out, and they had never received a pair of wool socks.
Cal saddled his gray horse in the storm.
"Take these," Ida said, and held out a pair from the rail.
"I've ridden eleven winters in cotton," Cal said. "I'll ride one more."
He was gone before she could argue.
By dark, the little thermometer on the cook shack wall had run out of numbers. The wind sounded like a train that never finished passing.
At ten o'clock, something struck the door, low and heavy, the way a man falls against wood when his legs quit.