Chapter 4 #2
They sang the hour out. He never spoke once, and sang everything, and when she handed round the gingerbread he took his piece and ate it in the pew in small deliberate bites, making it last, while Tom Ott interrogated him about the spitting.
She walked him home as promised, into the low sun, the boy full of the afternoon and telling her which of the Ott boys could be whipped by which. He was still going when he stopped.
There was a woman at the gate ahead of them, straight-backed in good black, waiting.
Clara felt the boy change beside her before she understood why — the chatter gone, the shoulders coming up, a child folding himself smaller — and then she knew this must be the grandmother, and that she had been watched up the whole length of the street.
She knew the face from church, if not the voice. It was a face read out from the front whenever the collection had covered anything, silver at the temples, and it had never once been turned her way until now.
The woman said nothing at all. She held the gate open, and Willie went through it and up the walk with his chin down and his shoulders up around his ears, and the door closed behind him, and only then did she turn to Clara.
"Miss Crowell." Her voice was perfectly level. "You're the sister from Kansas."
"I am. Mrs. Pritchard, the fault is mine — I found him at your fence and I asked him in to the singing. He has the truest?—"
"I know what he has." It came out fast, and her voice broke on it, just for a word, before she had it back.
Her hand had shut hard on the gate picket.
"You have been in this county a month. You do not know this family, you do not know its affairs, and you helped yourself to my grandson off my own fence and walked him down the street for the town to look at. "
"They looked because he sang. Ma'am, they'd be glad?—"
"I don't require you to tell me what this town is glad of.
My money has kept its church roof over your singing school.
" She drew a breath and settled her shoulders, and when she spoke again her voice was cold and even.
"If his mother wants him schooled or churched or sung at, she may say so to me.
Until then you will leave him at his own fence. Good evening to you."
She went up the walk, not hurrying, not looking back, and the white curtains hung still in the front windows, and the door closed behind her softly, without any slam to it at all.
Clara stood in the road a long moment. The low sun lay along the ruts, and back toward the churchyard the killdeer went on calling, over and over, to nobody.
Then she turned for the Holt place. It was a long walk out, and she made it without once catching herself humming.
Humming was what her feet did when the rest of her was easy. Her feet were quiet the whole way.
At supper she told it lightly, making a small comedy of her own trespass, and Lydia did not laugh.
"Her son died," Lydia said. "Willie's father.
The widow and the boy live with her, and she keeps them close, and nobody's business is why.
Her money is half of why that church is standing.
" She passed the bread. "You weren't wrong to want the boy singing.
You may have been wrong to do it in an afternoon. "
"Both of those can't be true."
"Most days both of those are true," Lydia said, and Nathan looked up at Lydia a moment, and went back to his plate, and said nothing at all.
The nosebleed came the next Tuesday. Tom Ott and his brother shoved for the end of the bench, and Tom went off it and caught the floor with his face, and then there was blood — a shocking amount of it, bright on the boards — and a girl screaming, and the whole room up off the benches at once and pressing in to see.
Clara had him off the floor before the screaming had properly started.
She sat him on the step and tipped his head forward, and laid the cold key from the door flat against the back of his neck, and pinched the bridge of his nose in her handkerchief and held it.
Over his head the room was still coming apart.
She told them to sing the verse again, louder — said it easily, in the voice a body uses for the ordinary next thing — and after a moment, for want of anything else to do with the fright, they sang.
She held on and counted through the verse. By the third time round, the bleeding had given up.
She became aware of a woman in the doorway. Mrs. Calder, from the boardinghouse — gray, square, a basket on her arm — stood watching, her head on one side.
"I heard the commotion from the store." She came and had a look at Tom's nose without asking anyone's leave, turned his chin with two fingers, and let it go.
"He'll do. It's not broke, only knocked.
" She looked at Clara then, up and down, frank as a woman pricing a horse.
"It's a nosebleed. I'd not have crossed the street for it.
" A beat. "But you'd the whole roomful of them singing while you did it, and not one of them screaming.
That I'd have crossed the street to see. "
"Somebody had to hold his head," Clara said. "And the rest of them do better with something to do."
"Hm." Mrs. Calder shifted the basket on her arm.
"I've lint to roll Thursday mornings and only the two hands, and a boarder who believes conversation is among the services I provide.
Come by before your school and roll some.
I'll show you what a clean rag is worth.
" She was out the door before Clara had said yes, having evidently heard it anyway.
Thursday morning the boardinghouse kitchen smelled of bread and scorched starch, and Clara sat rolling lint at the big table while Mrs. Calder talked — about her hens, who had gone off laying out of what she diagnosed as spite; about the Henderson sow, at large again and last seen expressing views in Ott's wheat; about nothing at all.
In the parlor an elderly man slept upright in a chair with his spectacles down his nose.
"Mr. Frederickson," Mrs. Calder said, following her glance.
"A guest since December. I have given up wondering.
" She took the rolled lint from Clara's side of the table, checked it, and set it in the basket without comment.
"Tighter. A loose one comes apart the minute you go to use it, and then you're one-handed over somebody who can't spare you the second hand.
" She took another rag from the pile. "There's one midwife in this county and one doctor the far side of the river, and the river doesn't consult either of us.
Steady hands I can teach. What I can't teach is the one who keeps her head when the room's coming apart, and I use her wherever I find her.
" She pushed the batch across. "Roll them like you mean it. "
Clara rolled the next one tighter. Mrs. Calder took it without a word, and set it in the basket with the others. The kitchen was warm. Outside the window the street went about its morning. Clara bent her head over the rolling, and for once she had nothing she needed to say.
That night she climbed to the loft with her candle. The crocuses on the sill had gone over at last, the purple ones papery, the yellow one holding.
Two dresses hung on the pegs, and under them the trunk still half-packed, the way it had sat since March, all the weeks she had told herself she was only stopping a while.
She looked at it a while. Then she opened it and took out a third dress, and shook the fold-creases from it, and hung it beside the other two, and did not let herself make anything of the doing of it.
Then she blew out the candle and went to bed.