Chapter 18
The second morning found her at Lydia's stove, turning eggs nobody had asked her to make.
Her hands did it without her. Behind her, propped up on every pillow in the house, Lydia was going on about being kept flat like an invalid, and how the bread would not make itself, and whether Clara meant to let the whole place fall down around a woman who'd only had a baby.
Clara turned the eggs and let her talk. She had not put a hand to her sister's belly since the morning after the birth.
On the third day a horse came into the yard before she knew whose it was — Calder, over at last on the dropped ford.
She was in the doorway with her breath stopped in her chest before the woman had crossed to the bed.
Two blunt fingers went to the baby's wrist; the gray head tipped to one side after something nobody else in the room could hear.
The waiting stretched on until she thought she could not bear it.
Then the grunt came, and the breath she had been holding went out of her with it, and her knees loosened where she stood.
Mother and baby would do, Calder said; she might take herself home and stop hovering before she wore a track in the floor.
The road home came heavy under the wheels, the mud to the hubs, the ditches still full.
Inside, the house was exactly as cold as they had left it — the stove dead, the air shut and still, a fine film of dust come down over everything in the days they had been gone.
The dust she meant to deal with. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed to take her boots off, and lay back for a moment in her traveling dress, and went under like a stone.
When she surfaced the pump was going in the yard and the light at the window was the wrong light for morning.
The kitchen was warm when she came out — the fire going, the water on, him at the stove with two cups set out on the shelf.
He had done it without looking at her, and she took hers from beside his without a word, and they stood a moment in the little kitchen not knowing quite what to do with a morning that had no sick child in it and no river between anybody.
"Reckon Nathan's slept yet," he said, to the coffee.
"Not while there's a thing in that house left to see to."
"No." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Nor will Mrs. Garrett have left Lydia one dish to wash in her own kitchen."
She caught herself smiling into her cup, and did not stop, and did not say anything, and neither did he.
The Tuesday morning he answered the Conference, she was at the stove.
Behind her she heard the drawer, and the chair, and then the pen — steady, unhurried, with no more arguing left in it.
She did not turn round, but kept her back to him and her hands busy, and listened to her whole future being settled in ink at the table behind her.
"There," he said, when the letter was folded and directed. "They'll have my answer by Friday."
"What did you tell them?"
"That the call finds me willing." He squared the letter to the edge of the table. "And that the parsonage is in good order."
The rest of the afternoon she watched go by after he carried the letter to the depot himself, and no Cole came back up the road.
The light was nearly gone before she heard the gate.
He ate what she put in front of him at his far end of the table and gave her almost nothing.
When she had cleared it he went into the study and shut the door.
She sat with the closed door and could not read one line of what was behind it.
Clara lit the lamp and took up the darning — real darning now, a heel gone through, her own husband's sock. She was three stitches into it when the study door opened, and Cole came out with the Bible in his two hands.
She knew the book — she had sat across from it on a train once, in his hand, not packed but carried, while everything else he owned rode in the carpetbag — the tooled leather worn soft at the corners and gone shiny along the spine from use.
It had no business out of the study at that hour. She put the needle down.
He stopped at the end of the table. He did not sit. He put his thumb in at a worn place, not searching for it, and then took it out again, and did not open the book.
"I had a text for this," he said. "I had three.
I was the whole afternoon at the church walking them up and down, and they are good texts, and I am not going to use them.
" He turned the book over once in his hands.
"A text is a place a man can stand and say a thing without it costing him anything. I have stood there long enough."
Clara sat still and let the quiet alone.
"The letter went off today," he said. "Everything the bargain was struck to buy is bought and delivered." He stopped, and stood there, and did not go on with that one.
"My father—" he said, and stopped again.
She waited.
He began again, lower. "My father kept an account of us.
Out loud. What the calling had cost him, and what we had cost him keeping at it — the moves, and the winters, and my mother's health.
He reckoned it up at his own table with us sitting by, and I learned my figures listening.
" His thumb moved on the worn corner of the leather.
"I told you on the train I'd never hand myself the same hostages. You'll remember it."
"I remember it."
"It was the account talking. I believed the sum.
I thought a wife was a debt, and children were debts, and the kindest thing a man could do was keep the ledger shut on all of it.
" He was looking at the book now and not at her.
"Then you came into this house on a bargain.
Everything counted out beforehand, fair on both sides, so that nothing could ever come to be owing.
We were very careful about it. And somewhere in it?—"
He stopped there. This stop was longer than the others.
There he stood at the end of his own table — he who could fill a church with no note in front of him — hunting for words and not finding them, and everything in her that had spent a lifetime smoothing hard moments over wanted to reach in and hand him the easy one.
She kept her hands in her lap and let him hunt. She had handed him doors enough.
When he went on, his voice had come down to almost nothing, and it did not shake.
"You were given to me. I did not earn you, and I do not owe for you, and there is no figure in any book that touches what you are in this house. Given, Clara. That is the word my father never said at his table, and I have been all day coming to it at mine."
Her heart was going hard under her ribs. She did not move, but sat with her hands in her lap and let the word be in the room. Nobody had ever said it to her, either, in her own family's house.
He set the book down on the table and took his hands off it.
"I would like us to be married. In earnest, out loud, in front of people. Ashworth told us the day we came to him honest he'd marry us again — said he'd stand up for that one. I'd like to take him up on it."
Clara found she was on her feet, without having decided to stand.
"Yes," she said. It came out of her plain and level, and she let it stand while the stove ticked. "Not a Thursday. The singing school has me Thursdays."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Not a Thursday," he agreed.
Then he took the book up off the table and held it out to her in both hands, and she took it in both of hers, because there was no other way to take it. The leather was warm from his holding it. She opened the front cover.
On the flyleaf, in ink so new it still had its shine, in his own hand:
Received, not demanded.
There were three words and nothing else, no name under them and no date.
Twice she read them. When she looked up he was watching her read, and his face had the blank, careful stillness on it, and then it did not. She closed the cover and laid her hand flat on it, over the soft worn corner, and left it there a while.
When she sat down again he did not go back to his own end.
He carried his chair round and set it by hers, close enough that she could feel the cold of the outdoors still coming off his sleeve.
There they stayed while the lamp burned low.
It wanted trimming and got it, and neither of them moved to go anywhere.
Late on she asked what the three texts had been.
He told her, and they were good ones, and she said he could keep them for Sundays.