Chapter 5
He had not preached all winter, and that Sunday he preached.
It was the second Sunday in April, and the church was full, because the road had dried and people came who did not come in the mud.
All the weeks Clara had been coming, the old man had sat in his chair by the chancel and let Cole carry the reading and most of the morning.
This Sunday he got himself up to the pulpit instead, and took the rail in both hands, and would not be talked out of it.
Clara could see he would not — could see it in how carefully Cole sat in the front pew, not turning his head, still as a man sits beside someone he has promised not to fuss over.
His voice had been thin all through the reading.
He took his text and got a few sentences into it — something about the lilies of the field, and the folly of laying up stores against a winter that was God's business and not theirs.
Then he stopped. He put one hand flat on the pulpit rail.
He looked out over the church like a man who had lost his place, and then like a man who had lost the church itself, and then his knees went.
Cole was up before the old man came down. He got an arm behind him and took the weight and lowered him onto the step of the chancel, not fast, the way you set down something you are afraid of breaking. There was a great scrape of pews as the front rows stood.
"Give him air," Cole said, not loud, and the room did what he said before it thought about it.
Clara was three pews back, and on her feet with the rest and halfway to the aisle before she had decided to move.
Then she saw she would not be wanted. Mrs. Calder was already coming up the side aisle, square and unhurried, her hand going out for the old man's wrist. Clara made herself stop, and take hold of the end of the pew instead, and watch a woman who knew exactly what she was doing do it.
There was a lesson in the watching, and she took it without wanting to.
"He's here," Calder said, to Cole, low. "He's just gone gray on us. Get the window up."
Somebody got the window up, and the cold air came in over all of them.
Ashworth's eyes came half open. They found Cole's face above him, and he said something Clara could not hear, four feet off.
Cole said, "No. Not yet." The old man's mouth went on working at a word he hadn't the breath for.
It was an argument he was trying to start, Clara saw, and couldn't.
They carried him to the boardinghouse on a pew cushion, four men and Calder walking beside with her hand on his chest, and the congregation came out into the churchyard and stood about in the thin sun not knowing what to do with themselves.
Nobody would go home. It was dinnertime and cold and there was nothing any of them could do, and still they lingered in twos and threes, none willing to be the first to leave.
Mrs. Garrett had brought out the coffee she kept for after service and was pressing it on people who did not want it. It was the only useful thing in front of her, and she did it hard.
A man Clara did not know was telling another man that he'd said all winter the old minister was doing too much.
He had said it to his wife not a fortnight past, he said.
The other man nodded and did not listen.
Neither of them had anything to say; they only wanted not to stand there in the cold with nothing said.
Willie Pritchard was at the fence with a stick, not let past it, watching the boardinghouse door.
He did not die. By evening the word had gone round that it was his heart, that it had been his heart a long time, that Calder had him propped up in her best back room and had sent a boy across the ford for the doctor and did not much expect the doctor to tell her anything she had not already worked out.
Monday she could not sit still at the Holt place, so she filled a basket and walked it in to the boardinghouse. Calder met her at the kitchen door and took it and did not let her past.
"He's sleeping. Sleep's the best of what I've got to give him." She looked tired in a way Clara had not seen on her. "You can sit in my kitchen if you want to be useful. There's a deal of people going to want feeding this week and only the one of me."
So Clara sat in the kitchen and shelled a bowl of dried beans she was fairly sure Calder had found for her to do, and listened to the house. Men came and went in the front room in low voices. Twice she heard Cole's, level and short, and did not hear the words.
It was in the front hall, past the middle of the afternoon, that she heard the other thing.
Two of the deacons had come out of the sickroom and stopped by the door to put their hats on.
She knew one of them by sight — Vane, a heavy man who farmed north of town and read the notices at meeting.
The other she did not know. They spoke the way men speak when they believe the matter is settled and the talking is only tidying.
"—can't be helped now," Vane was saying. "The Conference'll want it decided before he's cold, and better it should be. A church can't sit a season with no man in the pulpit."
"Reeve's carried it all winter."
"Reeve's carried it. Nobody's saying he hasn't.
" A pause; a hat being settled. "Mrs. Pritchard's people favor the other.
Her nephew's man — married, older, a wife already keeping a manse.
That counts for more than a body likes to say, in a call.
A single man in a parsonage is half a man to a board. They want a household."
"Reeve could marry."
Vane made a sound that was almost a laugh, the sound a practical man makes at a thing that is not his to arrange.
"Reeve could grow wings. Well. It'll be as the Conference says.
" And then, in the same breath, moving on to the next item of tidying, with no more weight on it than the rest: "Somebody wants to take the young ones' singing off the Crowell girl before it gets to be a fixture.
That's a thing for the new man's wife, when there's a wife.
It's church work; it wants a church hand on it, not a visitor's. "
"She's made a nice thing of it."
"She has. And she'll be gone home by autumn, they say, and then where's your singing. No. Church work to a church wife. It'll settle itself when the man's settled."
They put their hats on and went out, and the door let in a wedge of cold and shut it out again.
Clara sat with the bowl in her lap. There had been nothing cruel in it.
Vane had not been thinking of her at all.
He had said it the way Mrs. Ferris said the green wears, over her head, on the way to the next thing.
Her hand went to her apron pocket, where the key was — the old iron key that had been warm from Cole's hand the morning he gave it to her, that she had been so foolishly pleased to be trusted with.
It lay cold against her hip now. She would keep it until they had a wife to give it to, and the wife did not exist yet, and the school was already spoken for over her head.
Calder came in from the front and found her sitting.
"You're not talking," Calder said. "That's a new thing in you."
"I ran out of beans," Clara said, and started shelling again.
Calder looked at her a moment longer. Then she put the kettle on, and left her to the beans, and asked her nothing more.
The lamp was lit and the stew was down and Nathan was reaching for the bread, and Clara got in ahead of the quiet before it could open.
"You should have seen the whole church stand up at once," she said.
"Every last pew. Like somebody'd pulled them all on one string.
" She buttered as she talked, quick, giving her hands the work.
"And one of the older women halfway to the door before anyone'd said a word, so certain she was needed, and not one earthly thing for her to do when she got there. "
Nathan almost smiled, and that was enough to keep her going, so she got the rest of it out — Ashworth's gray face, the window going up, the cold coming in over all of them, Calder's hand at his wrist — and shaped each piece as it came so it could be sat with over a plate, took the fright off it, left the shape.
The school sat at the edge of the table the whole time.
She could feel exactly where it was, the way you feel a hot stove without looking.
They mean to take it and give it to a wife who does not exist. She talked past it.
She reached for the salt she did not need and asked Nathan had the ford dropped, and got him going on the water, and while he talked she was already lining up the next thing, and the next, so there would be no gap anywhere for it to get in.
Across the table Lydia was not eating much. She had put her fork down some while back and was watching her sister the way you watch a person carry too full a cup across a room.
"Clara," she said.
"There's more stew. Nathan, give me your plate?—"
"Clara."
Clara stopped.
When the plates were cleared Nathan got up, and took his coat off the peg, and said the near cow wanted looking at — which Clara had not heard was ailing, and did not think was.
He lit the lantern at the stove and went out with it into the dark, and left the two of them the kitchen.
It was the most he had said all evening, and not a word of it true, and Clara knew exactly what it was for.
She was grateful to him, and did not say so, because he had arranged things carefully so she would not have to.
"It's been a hard week," Lydia said, when he had gone. "And you've been cheerful at this table every night of it. You're at your brightest when something's wrong. You always were. You did it the whole winter Mother died — talked the paint off the walls, so nobody had to sit in it."
Clara looked at her sister across the table. It was the truest thing anyone had said to her since Kansas, and Lydia had said it plainly, folding a dishtowel, not making a moment of it.
"They're taking the school," Clara said. "Not now. When the new man comes. It's to be his wife's, when he has one." She heard her own voice do the bright thing even now, tipping it up at the end, making it small. "Which is sensible. It's church work. It wants a church hand."
Lydia put the dishtowel down.
"It doesn't want any such thing," she said. "It wants the person who built it. But that's not how a board thinks, and you know it isn't." She sat down across from Clara. "I'm sorry. It was yours. It was the first thing out here that was."
"It's a children's singing school. I oughtn't to mind so much."
"You ought to mind exactly as much as you do," Lydia said. "Don't let them talk you out of the size of it. That's the oldest trick there is."
She got up and put the dishtowel over the rail to dry, and stood a moment at the window with her back to the room, one hand at the small of it the way she had taken to standing lately, looking out at the dark where Nathan's lantern was.
"I answered an advertisement," she said, not turning round.
"You know that. A man I'd never met, six hundred miles off, because there was no room left for me in our father's house.
I told myself it was sensible. I told myself I'd be useful to somebody, which was more than I was there.
" She was quiet a moment. "I had it worked out to the last particular, Clara, and not one particular of it is how things went.
So I've stopped trusting the worked-out kind of thing.
" She turned round. "That's all I'll say.
I won't manage you. God knows you've had enough of that. "
Nathan's lantern crossed the yard, going to the barn and not yet coming back, and the two sisters sat in the kitchen a while and did not say anything else.
The letter came Thursday, on the twice-weekly train, in Helen's hand.
Clara read it in the loft with the candle, sitting on the edge of the bed as she had sat to read Lydia's letter back in March, in another house, a lifetime ago.
Helen wrote as Helen always wrote — the peas were in, the roses had blackspot, Mrs. Ferris had a new bonnet the whole town was tired of hearing described.
And then, near the end, in the same even voice, the thing the letter had been sent to carry:
Your father says to tell you the ticket is good through October, but the through-cars stop after the fifteenth and the local after is a misery, so plan to come before, the second week if the baby's come by then.
He doesn't say it but he counts the days, Clara.
He goes to the window when the westbound's due. Come home before the weather turns.
Clara read it twice. Then she folded it along its old creases and sat with it in her lap.
There was the date, then. The second week of October, before the through-cars stopped.
Home by fall had been a loose thing, a season, a thing you could argue with.
This was a date, and her father at the window when the westbound was due.
You could not argue with a man at a window.
She had spent her whole life not arguing with that man.
She looked at the loft — the two dresses on the pegs, and the third she had hung beside them without letting herself say why. The trunk still half-packed underneath.
She put the letter in the trunk, on top of the packing, and blew out the candle.
Below her Lydia and Nathan were talking, low, one and then the other, the sound coming up through the floor.
She lay and listened to it a long time, the ticket good through October and the school not hers and the two even voices going back and forth beneath her, and after a while the voices stopped and she was still awake.