Chapter 14
The nights had been the worst of it, back in July.
Cole rode the district all day and came into Red Willow after dark to sit with Ashworth.
Clara knew it because Ashworth had told her so himself — that her husband came in off the road at dusk and took the chair beside his bed and was gone again before the old man woke.
Forty feet up the road from his own front door. He never once came home.
Then in August the Danby work took him too far to ride back at all, and the nights stopped, and she found she liked it better. A husband forty miles east was a plain fact. A husband forty feet up the road was something else.
So she had August to herself, and there was too much of it.
She kept the singing school, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the empty church, and those four hours held.
She kept the front row where it had always been, and did not move the children up into the gap at her right hand, where a little girl used to stand on her foot to eat gingerbread and would not sing a note.
Deacon Vane found her outside the store on a Tuesday.
He was not a warm man and did not try to be one.
He said the board had met. He said the matter of the young ones' singing had come up, and been settled, and that it had been settled in her name — not the pastor's wife's, in the abstract, to be handed on to whoever came after, but Clara Reeve's, by the vote, as a thing the town wished her to go on doing because she did it well and it wanted it done.
"That's all," he said. "Thought you'd want it from the board and not the back fence."
She thanked him. He touched his hat and went in for his nails.
Clara stood on the store step a while with the thing she had married a man to keep now simply given to her, freely, by the men who had meant to take it away.
Nathan drove Lydia in on the Wednesday, because she was too big to walk it now and too restless to stay put.
He carried the basket to the door and stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands while Clara set out the cups. Lydia lowered herself into the good chair with both hands and a great sigh, and said that if this child took after its father it would come out silent and mend the fence on its way.
She had her good dress on for the drive, and their mother's brooch at the collar of it.
Clara had seen that brooch at her mother's throat, and after that on Helen, for as long as she could remember Helen at all.
Then one day Helen was not wearing it. Nobody in that house had ever said a word about it.
"Sit down, Nathan," she said.
"I'll see to the horse."
"The horse is fine." Lydia settled her hands on the front of her dress. "I've been thinking. If it's a girl, we might call her for Mother."
The little kitchen went very quiet.
Clara looked at the brooch at her sister's collar.
Nathan looked at the floor. Then he said the horse wanted seeing to, and put his hat on, and went out, and they heard him in the yard doing nothing at all to a horse that wanted nothing done to it.
Lydia watched the door a moment.
"I've stopped making it easy for him," she said. "You may as well know it before we go on."
Then she looked at the table.
"You set one plate," she said.
Clara looked down. Her hands had done it without her — one plate, one cup, one knife squared to it, as she had eaten every night since July. "Cole's on the road," she said lightly. "There's no sense cooking for a man who's forty miles east."
"Mm." Lydia let that sit. Then, plain, in the voice she had used on Clara since Clara was small enough to carry: "You don't have to do that in this house, you know.
Lay the one plate and tell yourself you never wanted the second.
Not with me in the room." She held Clara's eye until Clara had to look away from it.
"I raised you. I know the bright voice. I invented half of it, teaching it to you so you'd get through Mother. "
Clara said nothing. She got down a second plate and set it at the other end, for Lydia, and did not call it anything at all.
Then she sat down across from her sister. "Has he built the cradle?"
Lydia's hands stopped in her lap.
Outside, a cart went by on the road. "No," Lydia said.
"Lyddie."
"He's built every other thing in that house.
" She was looking at the table. "I asked him in June.
Lightly. Whether he'd want to make a start on it.
And he said there was time yet." Her mouth moved.
"He said it flat. The same voice he uses for the weather.
And I let him say it, and I have gone on letting him these two months, because if I make him put it into words I don't know what happens to him. "
"What do you think happens."
"I don't know. I think he goes back to being the man who couldn't tell me anything at all.
" She put her hand flat and spread on the front of her dress.
"I told him, before we married — if something's wrong I'll say so, and can you do the same.
And he said he'd try." Her chin came up.
Her eyes were wet, and she was Lydia, so she was furious about it.
"He is trying. He's trying so hard he can't speak.
And I'm handling him, Clara. I'm handling him exactly as I handled Father, and I promised myself I would never spend another year of my life doing that. "
She dragged her wrist across her eyes.
"So there's the two of us," Lydia said, "setting the one plate."
Clara had nothing bright to say to that, and for once did not go looking.
Out in the yard Nathan had stopped pretending about the horse and was standing at its head with his hand on its nose, not moving.
Lydia watched him through the window a while. Then she put her hand into her apron pocket and brought out a packet, small and flat and tied with thread, the paper gone soft at the corners with carrying.
Clara knew it at once. She had put it into her sister's hands in the wash-house in March, with the sheets steaming around them, five months and a lifetime ago.
"You never opened it."
"No."
"Lyddie, it's August."
"I know what month it is." Lydia turned it over once.
Her thumb went to the soft corner and stayed there.
"I have been alone with it every day since you gave it to me.
In this pocket. I have taken it out and put it back more times than I could tell you.
" She was very still. Clara had been reading her sister's face since before she could read anything else, and she read it now: a woman who had grieved a living brother for years, feeling the thread twitch in her hand, not yet daring to pull on it.
"Helen wouldn't say what it was."
"Helen didn't have to." Lydia's voice had gone down to nothing. "I knew the hand on the wrapper. I have known it since the day it came."
She sat holding the packet.
"Say it," Clara said. And then, because her sister could not, and because there was nobody else in the room to do it: "Thomas."
Nobody at that table had said his name in years. It went out into the little kitchen and did not break anything.
Lydia let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since spring, and pulled the thread, and opened it.
One sheet folded round another. The outer was short — six lines, no more, in a square graceless hand that pressed too hard into the paper.
Clara read it upside down across the table and had the shape of it before she had the words.
It gave a street and a number in Denver.
It did not say sorry anywhere. Near the bottom it said something nearer to I did not know how.
The inner sheet was a hymn.
He had written it out from memory, all the verses, in the same heavy hand.
He had two lines in the wrong order and one word wrong in the third verse.
Clara had spent the summer teaching that hymn to the children in the empty church, Tuesday and Thursday, and she knew exactly which word it was, and how their mother used to sing it in the kitchen — and that Thomas had been a boy the last time he heard her sing anything at all.
Lydia laid her hand flat on the page. She did not cry.
"He wrote to Helen," she said.
"He'd never have written to Father."
"No." Lydia's thumb moved over the paper.
"And Helen couldn't answer him, could she.
So she sent him on to me — and I have carried him about in an apron since March and never once looked.
" Her mouth moved, not quite into a smile.
"The three of us, going the long way round.
And you the only one who did the plain thing and handed it over. "
The clock ticked. Out in the yard the horse shifted its feet.
"Give me that address," Clara said. "When you've done with it."
Lydia looked up.
"I'm going to write to him."
Calder was sent for across the river on the last Saturday in August.
A rider came down from the Vosses' on the far bank at first light. A hard birth, two days at it already, and the woman failing. There was nobody else in the county who could go, and the Voss woman would die without her, and so Calder packed her bag.
She stopped at the cottage on her way to the ford. The doctor was out that way too, she said — gone to a man's smashed leg at the sawmill, and like to be a week at it. So it would be the two of them across the water together, her and the doctor both, and the river between them and home.
"And the Reverend?" Clara said.
"Frederickson has the chair of a night. He's no earthly use and he knows it, and he has not missed one night since the Reverend took to that room." Calder pulled her glove on. "Mrs. Brennan's in my kitchen. They know where I've gone."
Nathan had come in that morning to set Clara's gatepost straight. The gatepost did not want setting straight. He was still standing over it with both hands on the top of it.
"Both of us the wrong side of the water," Calder said, swinging up.
"Isn't that always the way. But your sister's a month off yet if she's a day, and first babies take their sweet time about it — a week, sometimes two, once they've made up their minds to come.
I'll be back and dry before she's more than started.
" She looked down at Clara. "Keep her off her feet.
Send if her back starts up. I'll not be far. "
Nathan looked up from the post.
"How long," he said. "To fetch you back. If it came early."
Calder gathered her reins. "It'll not come early."
"How long."
She looked down at him a moment. "Two hours, if the ford's kind to you." Her voice gentled, which Clara had never once heard it do. "Nathan Holt. She is a month off, and there is nothing wrong with her, and I have never lost a woman I got to in time."
Nathan nodded. He went back to the post that did not need setting.
Then she rode down to the ford and put her horse across. The water came up past its knees and no higher. She went up the far bank and out of sight.
Clara stood at the cottage door that evening and watched the light go, and did not like the color of it.
The sky had gone a low, held green over the western fields, the green that meant weather somewhere upriver making up its mind.
The river had been rising all week off rains she had not seen fall.
It ran fuller than she had known it, quick and brown and loud in the dusk.
But Lydia was a month off. Calder had said so. First babies took their time.
The town slept that night as if there were all the time in the world.