Chapter 12
After Willie Pritchard, there were no more.
The sickness had gone out of the town as quietly as it came, and by the time the boy was up and mending it was over.
Clara had not had an idle hour in a month, and now she did not know what to do with the ones that came at her, loose and shapeless.
She cleaned a kitchen that was already clean.
More than once that week she caught herself stopped in the middle of a room with a rag in her hand and no notion how long she had stood there.
And there was Cole at his end of the table, morning and night, whom somewhere in the long month she had stopped being able to look at plainly.
They put the pews back down the side of the church on a Sunday, the men of the town.
Nobody made a speech. They just carried the benches in and set them straight.
Willie Pritchard stood at the front, thin and pale and let out at last, and sang the doxology in a voice gone rough from what his throat had been through.
From the third pew Clara felt the room turn toward her — one face and then another, without meaning to — and then turn away again, because there was nothing to say and everything was already said.
The letter from the Conference came on the twice-weekly train, in with a seed catalogue and a bill.
It only set down what the town had settled on its own weeks back — people had brought their dead and their troubles to Cole's door all through the sickness, and stopped pretending the question was open, and Pritchard's people had gone quiet.
The call had been his long before the seal went on it.
Cole read it standing at the kitchen table with his hat still on. Clara watched his face and knew before he spoke. It had gone still — the blank, careful stillness that in him meant something had landed and he did not know where to set it down.
"The call's mine," he said. "They've confirmed it. The board wrote it up and the Conference has set its seal on it." He laid the paper down on the table, squared it to the edge, as he squared everything. "It's done."
There it was, then — everything the bargain had been struck to buy, delivered on one sheet between a seed catalogue and a bill.
His post secure, her singing school safe, the return ticket in the trunk gone dead.
Every line they had drawn up on the church roof in April, ruled off and settled in their favor.
And the two of them stood in the kitchen on opposite sides of the squared paper and could not look at each other.
Somewhere in the boiled linen and the traded shifts and the coat over her shoulders in the dark, the account had quietly stopped being an account. Whatever stood between them now was not a debt, and it had no name either of them was willing to say aloud.
"That's good," Clara said. "That's what we wanted." She heard her own voice put a brightness on it, out of habit, and heard how flat it fell.
Cole looked at the paper and not at her. "It's what we wanted," he agreed, and it came out of him as flat as it had come out of her.
He put the letter in the drawer with the other papers and went out to see to something in the yard. She wiped down a table that did not need wiping.
She was at the Holt place on the Tuesday, up to her elbows in the preserving kettle, when Nathan came in and said it.
He said it as he said everything, standing, with his hat in his hand, as though he had been rehearsing on the walk up from the barn and meant to get through it before it got away from him.
"I've spoke for the front room at the boardinghouse," he said. "For September. Mrs. Calder's room, the one off the kitchen. You'd be under her roof when it comes, and the doctor's not twenty minutes from her door."
Lydia set down the spoon.
Clara went on stirring and wished, with her whole heart, to be anywhere else in Nebraska.
"You've spoke for it," Lydia said.
"I have."
"When."
Nathan turned his hat around. "May."
The kitchen went very quiet. Out in the yard a hen said something to another hen. Clara kept her eyes in the kettle and stirred.
"May," Lydia said. "You have known since May that you meant to move me out of this house to bear my own child. And it is July, Nathan, and you are telling me now."
"I meant to tell you."
"When?"
He did not answer that.
Lydia put both hands flat on the table and pushed herself up, slow, the way she had to now. "I'll not go."
"Lyddie—"
"I'll not be carried into town like a parcel and put in a boarding room among strangers because—" She stopped. She stopped so hard that Clara heard her teeth come together. "Give me a reason. A true one. Say the reason out loud, in this kitchen, and if it's a good one I'll pack my box tonight."
Nathan stood with his hat in his hands.
"The ford's bad in September," he said. "If the rains come early, Calder's the wrong side of it half the week. Two hours to fetch her, if she can cross at all. It's not sense, you out here."
"That's true," Lydia said. "That's a true thing. Now say the other one."
He looked at the floor. His ears had gone red.
He was a big man, and he stood in his own kitchen like a boy in a doorway, and he did not say it.
Clara had talked a hundred rooms out of their silences.
She had never in her life let a quiet grow to this size.
She sat there with a spoon in her hand and could not make her mouth work.
"You bought me a ticket once," Lydia said.
Nathan's head came up.
"In Mrs. Calder's parlor. Christmas week.
You had it in your coat before you ever came in the door, and you put it on the table between us and told me to go back to Kansas, because you had settled it with yourself somewhere in a morning and decided I would be better off without you.
" Her voice had not risen at all. "You never asked me.
You settled it on your own and you handed me the paper. "
"Lyddie."
"I tore it up. Four pieces. They fell on the table by the tea." She stood there with her hands on the table. "And when it was done you looked at me and said you had never wanted me to take it."
He did not answer.
"You gave me a thing you did not want me to take." Lydia's chin came up. "And here you stand in July, doing it again, and this time the ticket is a room at the boardinghouse."
The hat had stopped turning in his hands.
"I'll be in the barn," Nathan said, and went.
The screen door clapped. Lydia lowered herself back into the chair and sat looking at the table.
"Well," she said at last. "Aren't you going to make it light?"
Clara said nothing.
"I'm sorry." Lydia pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. "That was a rotten thing to say to you. You've been making things light for me since you were four years old and I have never once thanked you for it."
"Lyddie, if he's afraid?—"
"Of course he's afraid." Lydia took her hands down.
Her face was wet and perfectly steady. "He is so afraid he has not slept in that room since May.
He has spoken for a room in town and told me nothing.
He is going to spend this whole summer getting further and further off from me, out of pure love, and if I let him do it he will be standing in the barn when it comes and he will never come back in the house again.
" She looked at the door Nathan had gone out of.
"It took that man nine years to come down out of that loft.
I'll not sit in this kitchen and watch him climb back up it. "
Her hand went up to her hair. The comb was in it, as it was every day of her life now — the old silver one, the flowers worn smooth, bought for a woman whose hair he had never seen.
"He bought me this before he had ever laid eyes on me," Lydia said. "He told me he wanted me to have something that wasn't practical." Her hand came down. "He has not made me one useless thing since February. Since the day I told him. He builds me chairs."
"Then go to town," Clara said. "If it frightens him so."
"And say what by it? That he's right? That this house takes women?
" Lydia's mouth twisted. "That the bed I sleep in is where his wife died and his child died and there's a curse on the boards?
He'd never sleep in it again as long as he lived.
I'd have agreed with the worst thing he believes.
" She put her hand on the front of her dress and left it there.
"No. He can sleep in the loft till Judgment if he must. I'll have this baby in my own bed, in my own house, and he can come in the room or he can stand in the yard, and whichever he does I'll know what I married. "
The kettle was catching. Clara pulled it off the fire.
She walked home in the long light with her sleeves still up, turning it over.
Lydia would not hand Nathan an easy way out of the room, and Nathan would not come into it, and the two of them would fight it to a finish in their own bed with the truth said plain.
Her own house was quieter than that. Her own house had a table laid every evening for two, at the two far ends of it, and not one hard true word ever spoken across it.
It was a gray evening, the kind that could not decide to rain.
The supper was cleared and the lamp lit.
Outside the window the light was going out of a sky that had never properly come on all day, and there was no sick child to sit up with, no linen to boil, no shift to trade — nothing in the evening that had to be done, and no work in it to stand between the two of them.
He was mending the strap of his satchel by the lamp. She had a stocking she was pretending to darn. Neither of them had said anything in a quarter of an hour. It was not the wary silence of April. This one had nothing held up in it at all.
Once he asked, low, whether the lamp was in her eyes.
She said no. That was all they said for the better part of an hour, and it was more than either of them had risked in days.
She kept her head bent over the stocking.
She was aware of him the entire time, a warmth across the small room she could not stop feeling, and she darned the same three stitches over and over and mended nothing at all.
She got up to trim the lamp, because the wick wanted it, and because sitting still had become more than she could manage. He rose at the same moment, to set the mended satchel by the door, and they met in the small space by the lamp, closer than they needed to be, and stopped.
She looked up at him. He was looking down at her, straight on, with none of the careful angle. There was nothing bright to say and nothing careful to say, no work to turn to, no rule left to hide behind. Whatever distance they had kept between them all those weeks was simply gone.
She could not have said who moved. His hand came up to the side of her face, and hers was already at the front of his shirt — both in the same breath, neither of them deciding it, as everything had come to them that summer.
Then there was no space left between them at all, and he kissed her, or she kissed him, and which it was did not matter, because it was the truest thing either of them had done since the day they married under a lie.
It was not a careful kiss and it was not a small one.
There was no pretending it away afterward, no laughing it off, no filing it under anything but what it was.
For a moment there was nothing but the warm plain fact of it — his hand in her hair, the mended satchel dropped and forgotten on the floor.
And then he pulled back.
She felt it before she understood it — the stillness coming back into him, even as his hand stayed warm against her cheek.
He stepped away from her. He picked up the satchel he had dropped and did not look at her.
His breath was not steady, and neither was hers.
And she watched the grave, careful stranger she had married come back into his face and close it like a shutter.
"I have to see to the horse," he said, which was not a thing that needed doing at that hour, and took his hat, and went out into the gray evening that had finally, quietly, begun to rain.
Clara stood in the front room with her hand at her own mouth and the lamp still wanting trimming, and did not go after him. She had run from enough hard things herself to know it when she saw it.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight she did not go bright and she did not go busy.
She sat down where she was, in the emptied-out room, and put her fingers against her lips where his mouth had been, and let herself feel the full plain weight of it — no story laid over it, no joke, nothing to make it smaller — for as long as the rain kept coming down.