Chapter 99

July finally asks Clara whether she would marry him, and gets a fingerful of cake batter instead of an answer. When baby Martin falls dangerously ill she sits up alone with him all night; the next morning she tells July, furious and shivering in the cold, that if she loses one more child it will ruin her and her girls, and that if he wants to marry her he should come and sit. She tells him to ask again in a year — he deserves to suffer for one. Then Dish Boggett arrives through a January blizzard with news that Augustus is dead. Clara hires him and he proves twice the hand July is, which July can only endure. Lorena goes silent with grief, speaking only to Betsey. Clara tells her plainly that Gus was relieved when she married Bob, that he would never have stayed for either of them, and that Dish's love is doomed. Come spring, Dish stays on to help with the colts.

The Nebraska household assembles into the novel's real ending: a woman who won't remarry, a man who must wait a year, a girl in mute grief. Clara's rule — come and sit when I'm frightened — is the small, unheroic standard against which every man in the book is measured.