Chapter 7
They had rules, though nobody had written them down.
He rose first and lit the stove. By the time Clara came out the kitchen was warm, the coffee was on, and he was gone to the church or the study with a cup.
She made the breakfast. He thanked her for it, the same words each morning, and meant them each morning, and that was somehow harder to sit across from than if he had not.
They ate at the two ends of the table and passed what wanted passing, and when the quiet got too wide one of them remarked on the weather.
May gave them plenty of weather to work with.
On the third morning he said the eggs were good, and she said they were Lydia's hens, and he said he had not had a fresh egg since January.
She heard herself start in on Bess and the barn and the whole business of the Holt place — and stopped, because it was more words than the careful little room could hold.
He waited, to see if there was more. There was always more; there had never in her life not been more.
She said only that the coffee wanted grinding finer.
He said he would see to it, and got up, and went.
The second bedroom was at the end of the short hall.
Neither of them spoke of it, and its door stayed shut.
The first night she stood in the little room a while with her candle, listening to him move about below — until she understood she had better not make a habit of it.
Then she got into the cold bed and blew out the light.
Mornings she was careful. He was careful.
They were the two most careful people in Nebraska, she thought, buttering his bread and setting it nearer his plate and taking her hand back before he could think she meant anything by it.
It was exhausting, being so careful. She had never in her life worked so hard at doing so little.
The evenings were the longest of it. After supper he took his cup to the study, and the door did not quite close.
She sat in the front room with her mending and the lamp, and heard his pen start and stop.
She could have gone in. A wife would have gone in — carried her sewing through, sat by while he worked, there and not talking.
Clara did not. The arrangement did not come with that chair.
She sat on her own side of the door he had left ajar and listened to a man think, and told herself she was resting her eyes.
After the loft it was a mansion, and after the Ferris parlor it was hers, or half hers, which was more of a house than she had ever had a claim on.
She did the breakfast things. She scrubbed a floor a bachelor preacher had been calling clean for a year. By ten she had run out of house.
An idle Clara went looking for things to set right. She knew that much about herself.
She started on the front room, because the study door was shut and the front room was not.
The parsonage had been furnished by the congregation out of what nobody wanted, and it looked it: a good chair and a bad one, a settle with a scorched arm, a shelf of books leaning three ways.
She squared the chairs to the stove. She beat the settle cushion in the yard till it gave up a year of dust. Then she stood back and looked at the shelf and could not leave it so.
There were more books than the shelf wanted.
Sermons and commentaries and a broken run of some quarterly, and among them, surprising, a Pilgrim's Progress and a book of birds and a fat blue novel with the spine gone soft.
She took them all down and dusted each one.
And because the sizes ran every which way and it hurt her eye, she put them back so the colors flowed — the browns together, then the greens, then the blues climbing to the one red hymnbook at the end.
She was pleased with it the whole afternoon.
The next morning the shelf was back as it had been.
The books were not leaning — he had kept them squared and straight — but the colors were broken up, the browns scattered in among the greens, and it took her a moment of real bafflement before she saw that he had put them in an order of his own.
Commentaries together, and the sermons, and the histories, and the two or three kept only for reading.
Propped against the hymnbook was a card, in a plain hand:
By subject. The index is inside the front cover of the Cruden. Mrs. R. will find the birds under Natural History.
Clara stood holding the card. Then she laughed, alone in the front room, a short surprised sound, and put the card in her apron pocket, and did not put the colors back.
She lasted four days.
On the fifth she did the browns and greens again, worse this time and on purpose, the red hymnbook dead center where it could do the most damage.
The morning after, the shelf was by subject again, and there was a second card — The hymnbook is not a color.
It is a hymnbook. — and she laughed out loud, and wrote underneath it, A shelf should be looked at.
She left the card propped where he would find it.
She had not felt so much herself since the wedding.
The shelf was only a game. The study stopped being one.
She walked out to the Holt place on the Saturday, because the cottage had got too careful to sit in and because she wanted her sister.
Lydia was well along now and showing it, and pleased with herself, and put Clara straight to work shelling peas.
Nathan came in at noon with his hat off and his ears going red, and ate, and said about nine words, most of them about the weather.
He had built the new step since Clara last came.
He had built the shelf over the stove, and the rack for Lydia's boots, and a low chair with a back angled just so, because Lydia's spine ached in the evenings and he had noticed and said nothing and built the chair.
He had not begun the cradle.
Clara looked for it. A man who could say a thing with a bootrack would have a cradle standing half-made in the corner by now, the wood laid out, the pegs cut. There was nothing. There was not a scrap of pine in that house meant for it.
"Nathan's not started the cradle," she said, when he had gone back out.
Lydia's hands went on with the peas. "He's a hundred things to do before harvest."
"He built you a chair for your back."
"So he did." A pea went in the bowl. Another. "There's time yet. It's not wanted till September."
She said it easily. She said it a shade too quickly. Clara had been laying that exact brightness over things her whole life and knew every stitch of it, and she heard her sister do it, and said nothing.
Because there was a door off the kitchen, and it was the door of the room where they slept, and it was the room where Nathan's first wife had died, and the baby with her. Nobody in that house said so. Nobody had ever needed to.
Clara went out at three. Nathan walked her to the gate, and there he stopped and looked back at his own house — at the window of that room — with something on his plain face she could not read and did not like.
"She's keeping well," Clara said. "Isn't she."
"She is," Nathan said. And then, after so long that she had stopped waiting: "Mary kept well."
He opened the gate for her, and he did not say another word.
Clara walked home with that sitting cold in her chest, and thought about the things he had built. The step, the shelf, the bootrack, the chair for her sister's aching back. Every last one of them useful. A man could tell himself he was only being sensible, making those.
Nathan Holt had once bought a silver comb for a woman whose face he had never seen, because he wanted her to own a thing that was no use to anybody. Lydia had written it to Kansas in her first letter, and Clara had read it out at the table and teased her about it for a month.
A cradle was no use to anybody either. Not until there was a living child to lay in it.
The study door was shut because he was out, not because it was locked; nothing in that house was locked.
She had a cloth in her hand and a good reason on her lips if anyone came, and neither was the true one.
It was the one room she had not had, and it was filthy in the particular way of a room a man works in and defends — papers in drifts, a cold cup gone to a ring, the desk under such a weight of matter that she could not think how he found anything in it.
So she found things in it. She sorted the drifts into stacks that made sense — letters here, the church's business there, the half-written pages she took for sermons squared in a pile of their own, the pens gathered in the cup with the ink wiped off them.
She carried the fouled cup to the kitchen.
When she finished, the desk was a desk again, and she was proud of it.
He came in at dusk. She heard him stop in the study doorway, and she came to see, drying her hands, ready to be thanked.
He was not looking at the desk like a man about to thank anyone.
"Where's the Dunmore letter," he said.
"I don't?—"
"It was here. Top left, opened, under the inkstand. Old Dunmore's died, and his people are coming forty miles for the burial, and that letter has the day and the hour of it. I answer them tonight, and it was here."
"It'll be with the letters. I put the letters—" She went to the stack, sure of herself. It was not on top. It was not second. She was turning them over faster now, while he stood in the door and watched her turn them, and the sureness went out of her hand.
"I filed them by the date on them," she said.
"The date on Dunmore's is a year old. He wrote it across the back of an old bill, because paper's dear at his place." He did not raise his voice. She could have borne it better raised. "So it's at the bottom, under a twelvemonth of paper, because you filed the sheet and not the matter."
She found it at the bottom. She held it out, and he took it and read it once and set it on the cleared desk. The silence went on too long.
"I was earning my keep." Her voice came out smaller than she meant and she brought it back up.
"That was the bargain. I earn my keep twice over — I said it on the roof and you heard me say it.
I have scrubbed a floor you'd forgotten the color of, and I set this room to rights, and you're angry at me for the one thing in it that was worth doing. "
"You're right about the keep." He said it plainly, and it stopped her, because she had braced against being soothed and this was not soothing. "You said it, and I heard it, and it was fair. You've earned your keep and gone past it. I'll not pretend otherwise."
"Then—"
"And the room did want cleaning. I'll grant you the dust; I'd stopped seeing it.
" He set the Dunmore letter square with the edge of the desk.
"But there's cleaning a room and there's taking a man's work to pieces because you can't sit quiet beside it.
My letters, my week, the order they're kept in — you undid all of it to have something for your hands, and now a grieving family waits a day longer than it should, because the useful thing wasn't yours to do. "
"I'd have found the letter if you'd only?—"
"You found it at the bottom of a stack, under a year of paper.
In my order I'd have had my hand on it without looking.
That's what an order is for." He looked at her then, straight on, no polite angle to it, the way he had on the train.
"You want work. I know you want it; it's the truest thing about you, and it's no fault in you at all.
But it can't be my work. You'll have to find your own. "
He gave her the point and took one back, and stood in the doorway waiting to see what she would do with it.
Nobody had ever done that. They managed her, or they agreed with her, or they went quiet and waited for the bright thing to come and cover the whole thing over.
He had argued with her like a person whose reasons were worth the trouble of answering, and she stood in the wreck of his desk with no idea what to do with her face.
"You'll get to the burial easier with help," she said at last, to the letter and not to him. "It's Thursday, and it's a long way to Dunmore's. The Otts live out on that same road — if you asked, they'd carry you in their wagon and you'd not have to ride your own horse the whole way and back."
Something moved in his face. She had surprised him — she had learned the roads, and the neighbors, without his knowing she had.
"I would, at that," he said.
She went and finished the supper. They ate at the two ends of the table and passed what wanted passing.
And she kept waiting for the old need to come up — to brighten the quiet, to fill it with the goat and the Confederate note and poor invented Aunt Gertrude until nobody need sit in it.
It did not come. They sat in it, and it was only quiet, and that was all.
He sat and answered the Dunmore letter at the desk she had cleared, in the order she had broken, and neither of them said any more about it.
The lamp was still going in the study when she took her candle down the short hall to her own door.
She did not put the study back to his order. It was his to put right, and he did, over the next days, drift by drift, and she watched the working chaos come back and kept her hands off it.
And the shelf in the front room she left in his order, by subject, the birds under Natural History.
When a thin book came for her on the singing of parts — sent for out of a catalogue, with her own money, the first thing she had bought since Kansas — she did not set it among the colors that were gone.
She looked it up in the index inside the Cruden, and found where it belonged, and put it there, and said nothing about it.
He found it. She knew he found it, because two mornings on there was a line added to the card in the front cover of the Cruden, in the plain hand:
Music. One vol.
And under it, after a space, as though he had thought about whether to write it:
A beginning.
Find your own, he had said. The book was the first thing that was.
She kept that card too.