Then three times.
Her father owed more than the farm could produce in two good years.
The bank wanted payment by spring.
He had no payment.
Blackwood knew it.
That was why the men at the tavern had found his desperation funny.
Clara had not been there when the bet began, but by the following afternoon half the town had repeated the story.
A cattle buyer had laughed that Bennett would marry his daughter to a bear if the bear agreed to take over her keep.
Someone else had said even a bear had standards.
Then another man, already drunk, pointed through the window toward Elias Thorne, who had been loading a sack of salt into a wagon.
“Ask the deaf fellow.”
The room exploded.
Elias was thirty-four.
He lived eleven miles into the mountains on a ranch inherited from an uncle.
He was tall enough that most doorframes seemed designed to inconvenience him, with thick dark hair, a full beard, and the broad, scarred hands of a man who spent more time repairing fences than speaking to people.
Not that Elias spoke much.
He had been deaf since childhood.
Completely deaf in the left ear, almost completely in the right.
His voice, when he used it, was rough and uneven because he could not hear himself properly.
Most of the time he communicated with a small notepad carried inside his coat.
The town had decided years earlier that silence meant stupidity.
Distance became savagery.
Solitude became menace.
By the time Clara was old enough to understand gossip, Elias had already become the mountain monster mothers used when children wandered too far from home.
The truth was that almost nobody bothered speaking to him long enough to know anything.
The drunken men thought that made him ideal.
Fifty dollars if Elias would marry Bennett’s daughter.
The banker’s junior clerk wrote the amount on a scrap of paper and slapped it onto the table.
Clara’s father should have walked out.
Instead he sat there.
And according to three different versions, he stared at the fifty-dollar bill for a very long time.
Fifty dollars would not save the farm.
But the bank president had been drinking with them.
He reportedly smiled and said that if Bennett could find another household to take responsibility for Clara before spring, perhaps the bank could be “patient” about the remaining debt.
That was how a joke became an arrangement.
Two days later Elias appeared at their door.
Clara remembered every detail.
Snow melting across his shoulders.
Leather gloves in one hand.
Notepad in the other.
Her father let him inside.
Nobody asked Clara to join them.
She listened from the kitchen doorway.