When I hear people say my father’s not a gambling man, I always feel like laughing. Pa isn’t a betting man, or much of a card-player, but gambling—oh, he gambles, and no, he hasn’t always won, though he’s treated as a modern Midas by far too many people. (When your golden touch is only a metaphor, the drawback isn’t always obvious. In our case, it’s been the number of strangers who decide to hate us for no other reason than that we’ve turned luck and sweat and foresight into a well-run ranch.)

Pa’s first big gamble was leaving the sea and going into business with the man he hoped would become his father-in-law. It paid off well enough, though my grandfather may have been more liability than asset. The second gamble—well, most people don’t call it a gamble at all; they say my father was “following his dream.” True enough, but the jealous men who now call us those “high and mighty Cartwrights” would have despised the drifter my father’s first attempt to “follow his dream” made out of him. I’ll never know quite how that happened; I only have dim memories I’m sure come as much from the few stories he tells us as from my own observations. Those memories, and a great dislike of being cold. But when we met Mama—my first stepmother—gamblers would say our luck turned.

Mama truly was no gambler. It wasn’t that she disapproved of taking risks, or thought playing cards was sinful. Mama simply lived her life discovering the best thing to be done, and doing it joyfully. Making sick children and angry men healthy again came high on her list of “best things,” and Pa and I both benefitted. By the time Pa and Mama married they both knew the worth of what they had—and almost at once, with Mama’s encouragement, Pa rolled the dice again, double or nothing. Would he have done it if he had known what the cost would be?  I don’t know, but I doubt Mama would have loved a man who let caution keep him from his heart’s desire.

Whatever Pa’s regrets, he went on gambling; he gambled that there was a living to be made on the eastern slopes of the Sierras, that he could live in peace with the Indians already there, that fur-trading and timber could become the foundation of a profitable ranch. He backed up all those gambles with a lot of hard work—his, mine, and plenty of others’—and people looking back seem to have forgotten how long the odds really were against us. By the time he set off to New Orleans with a fine load of furs and a message for Jean de Marigny’s widow, he’d made as secure a life for us all as was possible. So, of course, my father met Marie de Marigny and gambled with his largest stake of all. Maybe not double or nothing this time, but very nearly so. By then I was old enough to recognize that he had  risked not just his own happiness, but also mine and Hoss’, and still young enough to resent that. Exactly the right age, as it turned out, to resent Marie the most.

What I wasn’t old enough to understand, at least for a long time, was that even though Marie had worked in a gambling house and could play more card games than Pa had ever heard of, she was no more a gambler than Mama. She had a cold, hard eye for the odds and never bet against them—except once. Pa may have laid all his worldly goods on the line for her, but Marie was Catholic by birth and training, and she was staking her soul on him and his. The “his” being, for the most part, entirely unknown to her. It was years before I realized that the wilderness of Nevada, the jumble of buildings in which we lived, and most of all the two freshly scrubbed boys waiting for their father must have come as even more of a shock to Marie than she did to me.

Hoss, of course, loved her the moment she smiled at him, and despite her awkwardness around us I could see she loved him too. Young as he was he showed her how much beauty there was in our wilderness. He would say, wide-eyed and smiling, “Adam take Mama to lake?” and I would wince at his use of that title but go out and saddle the horses. If I said nothing to her except what politeness demanded, Hoss talked enough for us both, or so I thought. Pa appeared satisfied as well; at least, when I called Marie “mère M’rie,” he let it pass. Marie smiled a lot and said little more to me than I did to her. Never having seen the inside of a gaming house, it didn’t occur to me that she had of necessity learned to smile convincingly no matter how she actually felt.

Then came the day, a few months later, when I finally made her cry. I’d been perfectly polite to her all through dinner, and every one of my polite comments was something I knew would bother her for reasons Pa wouldn’t understand. I meant to get a reaction from her—something besides that patient, lying smile. By now I was sure she cared for me as little as I did for her, and I was after proof. Sometime near the end of the meal one of my barbs caught Pa’s attention. His brows came together and he gave me one of his “looks” as he told me to go check on the horses in the barn.

I took my time. Marie didn’t like it when he punished me (which did nothing to make me think better of her) and I knew I was safer staying away from Pa for a little while. When I came quietly back into the house they’d moved over by the fireplace, where I couldn’t see them very well. She was speaking French, which she only did when she was very upset, and Pa was making soft soothing noises, and holding her in his arms, I was sure. He had no business doing that to anyone but Mama. My Mama—Hoss’ mother. Not this imposter.

Finally she was calm enough to speak in English again. “Oh, Ben, it’ll never be right…he doesn’t have to love me, and he minds me very well, cheri, but I want to love him—he’s yours and you love him so—and he makes me so cold and cruel instead….”

“Because that’s how he is to you,” Pa growled. “Well, I can stop that, at least.”

I felt ashamed of myself, trying to fool Pa that way; I had to admit I’d earned this talking-to. Marie didn’t seem to agree, though. “You can’t punish him for not loving me, cheri, or even for reminding me I promised to visit the Milfords tomorrow.” She didn’t sound angry, as I’d expected, only tired.

“I thought you liked Cora Milford,” Pa said in surprise.

I could almost hear that meaningless smile reappearing on Marie’s face. “I do—but she doesn’t like me. She says I’m a dance-hall hussy.”

“With Cora, that doesn’t mean she dislikes you,” Pa reassured her. “You should hear what she calls Enos.” Marie gave a rather doubtful chuckle, but Pa went on more seriously, “Who told you she said that? Adam?”

“Of course not!” Marie snapped back. “It was Hoss—”

Yes, I admitted to myself, because I told him to ask you what it meant. And I knew it wasn’t nice.

“He thought she had the two of us confused,” Marie finished. By now I suspected her smile had grown honest. Hoss could always make her happy; she’d patted and kissed him even while he was  repeating Cora’s insult to her. I felt ashamed of myself about that, too, as I thought it all over again.

Pa was not smiling, that was certain. “I’ll wager Adam was still behind it somehow. So sharp he’ll cut himself, that boy is sometimes.”

“He doesn’t have to love me,” Marie said again, sounding more tired than before. “But, Ben, how can you love me if I never love your son?”

“Never is a long time,” Pa said gently. “He’s as loving in his way as Hoss, and once you find that out you’ll love him very much.” He turned around and looked straight at me, so directly I realized he knew exactly where I was and what I was doing. I edged back to the door, opened it from the inside and closed it again quite noisily. Marie looked up, eyes only slightly red, and smiled, and this time I made myself smile back.