Introduction

Thirty years of browbeating from rancher Bud Smalls has penned his wife, Leah, into emotional isolation. Now Bud is gone and Leah owns the ranch, but there is no help forthcoming from Bud's brothers who want to force her out and take the ranch for themselves. When their attempt to humiliate her instead becomes her opportunity to succeed, Leah begins to find her way back to herself and learns how much she can gain by opening her heart. The Widow Smalls is just one of the stories in this collection by the WILLA Award winning author of Unbroken, Jamie Lisa Forbes, who writes about the hardships of making a living from the land with an understanding that comes from first-hand experience. Her deftly drawn characters include star-crossed lovers, a young rancher facing his first test of moral courage, an inscrutable ranch hand claiming an impressive relative, a father making one last grasp for his daughter's love and a child's struggle to make sense of the world around her. Each will pull readers into the middle of their stories and keep them turning the pages.

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Excerpt

I.

The thud of gravel battering the coffin made her jump. Leah glanced back at the Hanson boy to see if he’d noticed. She was embarrassed by her reaction—the squeamishness of it. After all, she’d been watching the backhoe ever since the mourners had dribbled away. The boy had warned her. He’d suggested she might want to follow the others, but she’d brushed him off. She would be just fine, thank you.

The boy shifted from one foot to the other, pretending that he hadn’t noticed. Unblemished by life, or death, he aspired to decorum as he stood with his hands crossed in front of him. Like all the boys in this town, his neck and face were sunburned above the collar. She was certain he was suppressing a smirk.

The backhoe reached for another load. It wasn’t the sound that had startled her, but the reality coming to roost, the weight of the earth showering down on her husband of thirty years. If she’d gone first, Bud wouldn’t have fretted. He had buried innumerable animal carcasses this way. Yet for her, the sound was a shove into a blurry future.

The boy coughed loudly. Maybe he did have something in his throat, but Leah heard it as another prod to shoo her back down the path to where her brothers-in-law waited. He wanted to pack this canopy up and get on to his father’s next job. Old man Hanson understood that a combined excavation and funeral business would pinch sensitivities, even among the practical in Thistle, Wyoming, so the businesses were listed separately in the phone book. But the Hansons always looked harried at funerals. The rituals of death siphoned off precious equipment time.

Leah took her handkerchief out of her purse. She wasn’t crying, she hadn’t cried from the moment she’d seen Bud lying inert. Widows clutched handkerchiefs, didn’t they? Didn’t they lean on their childrens’ arms as they were led away?

Leah had no children. But she needed something to clutch in order to shift her from this spot where her knees were stiffening and her feet swelling. She brought the handkerchief to her face and inhaled her perfume, Gabriella. She could picture Gabriella on her TV screen, flouncing her volumes of hair on a beach far away from Thistle. Inhaling the scent was a comfort, a comfort to know that Gabriella was out there, untouched.

She turned to the Hanson boy and said, “Sorry. Sorry I’ve taken so much of your time.”

He looked relieved. “Don’t you worry, Ms. Smalls. You take care of yourself.”

She stepped out from under the canopy into sunlight so intense that she winced. There’d been no spring this year, unless you could call a couple of rain-filled potholes spring. They had rocketed straight from the last blizzard into dry heat so unrelenting it had already withered her petunias. Once they’d flopped over in defeat, she had stopped watering them, but she’d left them in their pots. Revive or not, they were damn well going to stay there until Labor Day.

Now, with Bud’s passing, she had a good excuse for not removing them. If curious neighbors trekked out on the pretense of paying their respects, they wouldn’t depart clucking about her neglect. “Poor Leah”—that’s what’d they say—“so overcome she can’t pull up her dead petunias.”

Leah looked down the path to the dirt parking lot below. Now her eyes did tear at the light bouncing off the roof of Merle’s emerald Lincoln. Merle fanned himself with his cowboy hat. Grady stood, feet apart, with his hands in his pockets. She knew they were fuming. Her dilly-dallying was keeping them from their loop of ranch chores, chores that the Smalls brothers, Bud included, had never tired of prattling about. They could entertain themselves for hours over how to clean a ditch.

More importantly, she was keeping them from the platters of food their wives had prepared back at Merle’s house. The rest of the funeral party would be lingering there over the deviled eggs, waiting to fulfill their obligation to squeeze her hand and murmur phrases fresh from the insides of sympathy cards. As she squeezed her eyes shut, she could picture the entire group as a line-up of life-size condolence cards.

She tried to smile and wave to Merle and Grady—the “boys” as their mother had called them even at the tail end of her dotage. They didn’t wave back. Her heels skidded on the gravel as she inched down the path. She understood why the town fathers had planted the community graveyard up over the hill. That way the passersby—cursing as they braked from eighty miles an hour to thirty—would see signs of life in Thistle instead of death. But it was another matter as to why generations of mourners were forced to scramble up and down a goat path. There’s a message: death, as well as life, has to be a challenge in Thistle.

Neither Grady nor Merle stirred to help her. She could pitch head long down this path and wind up at their feet with her panty-hose ripped and they wouldn’t budge.

Just then Grady called out, “D’ya need some help?”

“I’m all right.” She turned her hip to them and side-stepped down the hill. Beyond the parking lot, Thistle’s buildings hunkered along its main street. She watched its traffic light switch over and over again through the turtle-crawl of her descent. Beyond the town ran the railroad tracks guaranteed to make memories of Thistle no more than a sneeze.

Now she needed her handkerchief because of the sweat trickling down her face. The scent had evaporated. She called back down to the boys apologetically. “If it’d been me, Bud never would have made it down this hill in his cowboy boots.”

Grady answered while Merle fanned himself. “You’re right. He’d a croaked right there, instead of in the bedroom. You’re gonna make it.”

In the last few feet, Grady held out his hand as she stepped down to him. She grasped it and squeezed—just a reflex—but he squeezed back. Then he dropped her hand abruptly so he could reach for the soda can on the car hood and spit his tobacco wad.

“Let’s go,” said Merle, “it’s as hot as hell out here.”

The “boys” got in the front. The heated leather seared the back of Leah’s thighs and she tugged at her skirt, trying to stretch it down. She felt choked by the abrupt strangeness of everything. Bud was not beside her anymore to do all the talking. Merle, who had always listened to Bud with a tortured expression, as if Bud was standing on his toe, was now the eldest. He was going to be the leader of the family. Where was she going to be? In the back seat.

She wiped her face again. “You’re right, Merle. It’s really hot.”

Merle glanced at her in the rearview mirror before swinging out onto the highway. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Should Roy Carlton (“Ramona Dietz”) get as much reader sympathy as Leah Smalls (“The Widow Smalls”)? Why or why not?

2. Child characters appear in 3 stories, “Lincoln’s Nephew,” “His Mild Yoke” and “The Good War.” How are the children changed by what happens to them? Or are they changed at all?

3. Are these stories separate stories? Or are they all perspectives on a larger theme?

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