Chapter 9 #2
She stood there until she was sure of it. Then she turned and walked back toward town, and it was the longest half-mile she had ever walked. It would have been easier to go on to Lydia. But she was the danger now, and she was the only one who could keep Lydia clear of it.
That night she wrote a note and gave it to a well child to leave on the Holt gatepost — on the post, not in a hand:
Don't come to town, and don't let Nathan come.
I am well and I mean to stay well, but I am in the sickrooms morning to night and you are not to be near me until it is over.
Kiss the baby you're carrying, for me, since I can't. I love you past saying — which I'd not have set down if I weren't afraid.
Don't keep it. Burn it after, and we'll say I never wrote it.
The answer came the next morning, and not in words. A basket sat on the church step — bread still warm under the cloth, a crock of soup, a paper twist of horehound drops for the children's throats.
Clara came out with it in her hands and saw Nathan away down at the road, holding his horse, well clear of the churchyard.
He had carried it up and set it on the step and gone back down again rather than knock.
When he saw her he raised one hand, and held it up a moment, and then he got on his horse and rode home to his wife.
They had done as she asked and stayed away. They had found the one way left to come anyhow. Clara stood on the step with the warm cloth in her hand, and then she carried it in, because there were throats it was meant for and no time to stand in a doorway and cry.
That first night she kept watch at the church so that Calder could sleep.
The Purcell boy was six, a solemn scrap from a claim east of town, and he had the membrane bad and the fright worse.
His mother could not stay. She had three more children at home and a husband down with it himself, and she had knelt by the pallet as long as she dared and then gone back to the ones she could still do something for.
Half the county was making that same choice in doorways that June, and no one should have to make it anywhere.
So it was Clara in the chair by his pallet through the small hours. The steam-kettle hissed. The lamp was turned low. Down the length of the church the other pallets lay quiet or restless by turns, and Calder slept sitting up in the vestry with her boots still on.
The boy did not sleep. He lay with his chin lifted to chase the easier inch of air, the trick they all found without being taught it.
His eyes went to the dark of the rafters and would not shut.
Every little while his hand crept out from the blanket and felt for the edge of the pallet, to be sure of where the world stopped.
She did what she had always done. She talked.
She told him about Bess and her opinions of the world, and about a goat in Kansas that had eaten a lady's hat clean off her head one Sunday, ribbon and silk rose and all.
She kept it bright and easy, as she had talked a hundred rooms out of their silences, because a room with talking in it was a room where nobody had to sit in the fear.
The boy watched her with his hot eyes and did not smile, and somewhere in the middle of the goat she understood that she was not doing it for him.
He was too sick to be cheered, and too young to pretend to be for her sake.
The bright talk did nothing for him. He did not want the goat.
He wanted only not to be left alone with the thing in his throat — and the goat was Clara filling the silence, as she had always filled it, so that she would not have to sit in the fear beside him.
She stopped talking.
It was harder than the road had been. She made herself stop, and sit, and stay in the quiet with the fear still in it and nothing laid over it.
She took the boy's hot hand in both of hers and said nothing at all.
His eyes came to her face and held there, and she held his hand and his look and gave him the one thing she had spent her whole life learning not to give anybody — her plain self, sitting still in a hard hour with nothing pretty in her hands.
He slept, after a while. His breath came easier toward morning.
She did not know whether it was anything she had done or only the steam and the hour, and it did not matter to her which.
She sat in the gray light with his hand in hers and did not sing and did not talk, and was more use in that chair than she had been in any bright room in her life.
Calder came at first light to spell her. She looked at the boy, and at his breathing, and last at Clara.
"He'll do, I think." She lowered herself into the chair. "You've a look about you."
"I'm only tired."
"That's not the tired look." Calder reached for the boy's wrist, and then, not raising her eyes: "You stopped talking.
I heard it stop, from the hall. Good. Some of them you talk to.
This kind you don't, and you can't be told which is which, you can only learn it, and it costs you every time you learn it again.
Go and sleep two hours. There'll be more of them by noon. "
Clara walked back through the waking town.
Cole was at the church door with the night's water buckets, gray-faced, unshaven, three nights short of sleep, and he looked at her and did not ask about the Purcell boy.
He had stopped needing to ask; her face told it first, and hers would have told him at the gate if it had been bad.
"Better," she said.
He nodded. For a moment neither of them had anything to do with their hands, which had not happened in days, and they stood in the early light not quite looking at each other, too tired to keep up the last of the distance between them.
"Sleep," he said. "I have the morning."
She went in and slept without dreaming, and was back by noon.