Chapter 8
The singing school lost three children the second week of May, and by the end of it there was no mistaking why.
She had eight the Tuesday before. She had seven this Tuesday.
The Ott boys still came, loud as ever, and Sally Henderson, and the little Garrett girl who held her skirt and would not sing.
But the Ross boy had stopped some days back without a word, his seat empty in the back row, and the sound thinner for it.
She was giving the note when Mrs. Vane came for her two. She was a narrow woman in good gray, and she stood in the door until the verse ended, and then she said, pleasant as anything, that she'd come to fetch the children — they'd be stopping now, there was a deal to do at home this time of year.
"Of course," Clara said. "The garden won't wait."
"It won't." Mrs. Vane looked at her, then round at the rest of them, and something in her face was deciding whether to say the rest of it.
She said it. "My husband sits the board, Mrs. Reeve.
It's an awkward thing, a board wife, sending her young to be taught by — well.
By the very matter the board's got to weigh.
You'll see how it is. No offense meant."
"None taken," Clara said, bright as a bell, and meant to leave it there, and could not. "Though it's only hymns, Mrs. Vane. I'd not thought a child could catch anything off a hymn but the tune."
Mrs. Vane's mouth thinned. She gathered her two and went. Clara turned back to the five that were left and gave the note again, higher than she meant, so it came out sharp, and had to laugh at herself and give it over.
They sang the hour out, the five of them, a smaller sound and a stubborner one, the ones left making up the difference between them.
She handed round the gingerbread. Freddy Ott asked again, around a mouthful, whether they might learn a song with a wolf in it, and she told him again there were no wolves in the hymnal, and he said there ought to be, and she could not argue it.
The little Garrett girl, who had held Clara's skirt and not sung a note since March, took her piece and stood on Clara's foot to eat it, which Clara had learned was the Garrett girl's entire opinion of her, and freely given.
Then she sent them home, and swept a floor that did not need it, and locked the door, lifting on the turn as she had learned to.
She did not sing on the walk home. She had noticed lately that she could tell how a day had gone by whether she sang on the way back, and she put the fact away with the others and did not look at it.
Cole was at the churchyard fence when she came out, mending the gate that had hung crooked since the thaw. He had seen Mrs. Vane go. She knew it by the careful manner in which he did not ask.
"Five today," she said, sparing him the asking. "I'm told it's the season. Gardens." She gave it to him lightly — Mrs. Vane, the board wife, her own retort about the hymn — and made a small comedy of her sharp tongue, tipping it up at the end so it landed as a story and not a wound.
He did not laugh. He looked at her steadily, seeing straight through it, and she felt her bright face going on with nothing to do.
"You needn't do that with me," he said. "I saw it."
"Do what?"
But he had gone back to the gate, and did not say what. She stood there a moment, then went in and started the supper louder than it needed doing.
She took a crock of soup to the boardinghouse on Thursday, because Ashworth ate almost nothing, and Calder thought he might eat for a visitor when he wouldn't for her.
He was up against his pillows, the window cracked, a gray horse blanket over his knees, and gray himself. He waved the soup off and then took it, to be let alone about it, and held the cup without drinking.
"You'll have heard," he said. "Or you will."
"Heard what."
"Pritchard's people have written the Conference.
" He said it to the window, dry, with the breath rationed.
"That the district wants a settled man. The word they chose was hasty.
A hasty marriage bespeaks a hasty judgment, they wrote, and a pulpit is no place for it.
They put your wedding in the letter, Mrs. Reeve. By its date. As the argument."
Clara sat very still with the soup between them.
"So the thing I married him to spare him," she said, "is the thing they'll pull him down with."
"That's the shape of it." He turned the cup a quarter in his hands.
"They've not won it. The Conference won't move for a letter, and it won't move at all while there's a minister of record who won't step aside — and I won't. I've told them I'll see the summer out.
My heart may hold another opinion, but nobody's asked it.
" He drank, at last, a swallow, to stop her looking at him like that.
"The call stays open as long as I do. It's all I've got to give the two of you, and I'm spending it on purpose. See it isn't wasted."
She did not know what to answer, so she fussed the blanket instead, and he let her. When she sat back he was watching her with something that was almost amusement and almost not.
"You've a thing you want to ask me," he said. "You've wanted to since you walked in. Ask it."
She had not known it showed. "His father," she said. "You knew his father."
"I rode the passes with Amos Reeve nine years before that boy was born.
" Ashworth looked at the cracked window a while.
"He married a girl named Ruth out of a sod church on the Solomon.
A good girl. Younger than him." The breath ran out.
He waited on more. "I stood up at that wedding and thought, there's a man saved from himself. "
Clara waited. She had learned to wait for a child with a true note in him who needed the room to find it.
"I was as wrong as I have ever been about anything."
He gave the cup another quarter-turn and did not drink out of it.
"He'd ridden that circuit ten years single and called it the best life a man could want. His own road. Nobody to answer to." The window rattled in its frame. "Then he married, and had the boy, and the two after, and somewhere in there he decided they'd taken it from him."
"Taken what?"
"The road." Ashworth's hand moved on the blanket.
"He kept a running account of it. He'd say it out in front of them, at a cold camp with the rain coming through.
I gave up everything for you, this is what you've cost me, and look at me now, nothing to show.
" The hand went still. "As though they'd run up a debt in his name that he'd never agreed to. "
The soup had gone cold between them. Clara did not touch it.
"But he chose the wife," Ashworth said. "He chose every child.
He chose to keep riding when he might have settled to a town church and slept dry.
" He was a while getting the next of it.
"He picked that life himself and then billed it to them, year on year, till the mother wore out under the reckoning and the boy grew up knowing to the penny what his own father counted him. "
"And nobody ever told him."
"It took Amos thirty years," Ashworth said, "and I never found the word that would reach him."
I won't hand myself the same hostages, Cole had said, on a train, in another life.
The word same had snagged her that night, and she had not been able to say same as whose.
Here was the answer, in a boardinghouse back room with an old man rationing his breath.
The same hostages his father had counted, year on year, at a cold camp in the rain.
"He doesn't know I've told you," Ashworth said.
"He'd not thank me for it. But he married you, and you married him blind, and it seemed to me you'd earned the right to know what you married.
" He set the cup down. "He is not his father, Mrs. Reeve.
He has spent every year of his life making sure of it — so sure that he has near walled himself up doing it, and I am too old and too near done to watch a second Reeve do that and hold my tongue.
" He stopped himself there, before it could become a sermon.
"Fuss the blanket again. It sat warmer the first way. "
She fussed the blanket. She did not trust her voice to do anything else.
The Kansas letters came the same afternoon, two of them folded in the one envelope.
Her father's was four lines. He was glad she was settled.
A minister was a steady thing to be married to, steadier than a shop, and he'd always said so, which he had not.
He hoped the man was good to her. He remained her affectionate father, and had signed his whole name, as he signed a note at the bank.
Clara read it twice and waited for the old disappointment, and found beneath it that four stiff lines from a man who went to the window when the westbound was due were four more than she'd have wagered on. He had reached the only way he knew how.
Helen's was longer and said the thing straight, as Helen could only ever do on paper: that she was glad a girl who gave so much had come to a house of her own to give it in — and that she had cried a little writing it and was not ashamed to say so.
And nowhere in either page — she went back through both to be sure — was there a word about October.
No ticket. No through-cars, no coming home before the weather turned, no Elliot in no hurry.
The date that had weighed on her since the loft in March was simply gone, lifted out without a word, like a plate taken from someone who has finished.
Nobody had told her she might stay. They had only stopped telling her to come back, which in the Crowell family was the same thing, said as the Crowells said everything, by not saying it.
She put both letters in the table drawer with the others and stood in the front room a while.
The house was quiet. It was hers now past arguing — no date beneath it, no return ticket in the trunk, the trunk itself empty in the corner.
She had wanted exactly this. She stood in the middle of exactly this and could not have said, had anyone asked, why her eyes stung.
Nobody asked.
She walked out to the Holt place the next afternoon with nothing to carry and no errand to give, and Lydia saw through that at once and had the grace not to say so.
They sat on the step in the sun. Clara had come out meaning to tell her all of it — the Vane children taken out of the singing, the letter gone up to the Conference with her wedding in it, the sentence about the flighty Crowell girl she had heard through the shelves at the store and was not meant to hear. She got as far as the hens.
Because her sister was tired in a way the baby did not account for.
Clara went in for water. And the ladder to the loft was down.
It had always been up, folded flat to the ceiling, every time she had been in that house.
Nathan kept it up because Lydia's skirts caught on the rungs.
It was down now, and at the top of it there were quilts on the loft floor, folded square and neat, and a candle-end, and his good coat hanging from a nail — hung where a man hangs a coat he means to put his hand on in the morning.
Clara stood at the foot of the ladder with the dipper in her hand.
Lydia had told her about the loft, once, quietly, the winter she married. Nathan had slept up there the whole nine years since Mary. He could not sleep in the room below. Coming down out of that loft was near enough the last thing he did before the wedding.
He had gone back up.
She filled the dipper and carried it out into the sun and put it in her sister's hands and sat down on the step again and looked at the yard.
"How long has he been sleeping in the loft."
Lydia drank. She took her time over it. "Since I started to show."
"Does he say why?"
"He says I sleep badly now and he'd not be disturbing me." Lydia turned the dipper round in her hands. "He does not lie to me. That's a thing about Nathan. He only ever tells you something true that isn't the reason."
Clara could have said: my husband and I keep to two ends of a table, and there is a line drawn down the middle of that cottage, and neither of us will be the one to say it out loud.
"It'll be warm up there, this time of year," she said.
"It is." Lydia looked at the barn. "He'll come down."
The sun moved along the step, and the two of them sat in it, and neither of them said one true thing the whole afternoon.
That evening the study door stood open.
It had been standing open more of late, though neither of them had said a word about it, any more than they said a word about the second bedroom.
She came through with the mending out of habit, meaning to carry it to the front room, and then did not carry it to the front room.
She sat in the hard chair at the cold end of his desk, in the working chaos he kept and defended, and threaded her needle.
He glanced up. For a moment she thought he would say something about the chair, the arrangement, the line down the middle of the house they had drawn in April and had been rubbing out ever since without a word. His eyes went to her, and to the mending, and back to his page.
The pen started. Stopped. Started.
"The elder Vane boy can carry a tune," he said, to his paper, not to her. "I've heard him at the back of the church. It's a pity to lose him."
"It is."
"Get him back if you can. Not for the board. For the singing." He turned a page. "The board can go hang."
It was the nearest thing to profanity she had heard out of him, and the warmest thing he had ever said to her.
She bent her head over the mending so he would not see what her face was doing.
Neither of them said anything more, and they sat on in the study by the one lamp until it wanted trimming, and neither of them named the rule they were breaking, because there was no pretending any longer that it was still there.