Chapter 2 Mercy Alcott of Columbus, Ohio
Mercy Alcott had been a seamstress for eleven years, and in eleven years she had learned that the act of measuring someone for a garment told you more about them than most conversations did.
You learned their posture — whether they held themselves against the world or open to it, whether their shoulders carried invisible weights.
You learned their relationship with their own body — the ones who sucked in air when you measured their waist, the ones who stood with the proud ease of people who had made their peace with what they were.
You learned their patience, their stillness, their capacity to simply be present in one place for five minutes without requiring the place to do something.
In eleven years of measuring, she had taken the measurements of three hundred women and perhaps a hundred men, and she had learned something from every one of them, and she had been appropriately discreet about all of it.
She had also learned, from eleven years of traveling to her clients when her clients could not come to her, that the road had its own kind of instruction.
You learned things on the road that you did not learn in a fitting room.
You learned what you were made of when the stage wheel came off and the temperature dropped and the storm was on the horizon and you had two choices: panic, or find a comfortable log and read your Bible and trust that the driver and the sensible-looking sheriff who had just arrived would sort the wheel between them.
Mercy Alcott had never panicked in her life.
She attributed this to three things: a faith that had been tested enough times to be structural rather than decorative, a mother who had told her at the age of eight that most things that looked like emergencies were actually inconveniences in dramatic clothing, and eleven years of travel in all conditions to clients who needed their garments delivered on time.
She had been born in Columbus, Ohio, thirty years ago, the third of six children in a family that was large and warm and not particularly prosperous, the family of a Methodist minister who had believed that the word of God and the care of a community were the same vocation expressed in different registers.
Her father had been the kind of man who was present — always, reliably, in the full sense — and she had grown up understanding that this was the most important quality a person could have, and that it was rarer than it appeared.
She had become a seamstress because she was good with her hands and because cloth was honest — it was what it was, no more and no less, and the work it required was the work of paying attention, which was work she was constitutionally suited for.
She had developed a small business in Columbus and then a larger one and then, when her mother died and her siblings were settled and the question of what to do next had presented itself with the particular clarity of a question that can no longer be deferred, she had made a decision that her father would have recognized as characteristic.
She had followed an opportunity. A letter from a former client who had moved to Colorado and needed work done and knew other women who needed work done.
A description of a valley in the mountains that sounded, in the client's somewhat hyperbolic prose, like a place where things were real and clear and worth the difficulty of reaching them.
She had packed two trunks — one of tools and materials, one of the personal items she could not leave behind, which were fewer than she had expected — and she had gotten on a series of trains and stages that had taken her progressively further from everything familiar and closer to something she could not yet name but was becoming increasingly certain she was moving toward.
The stage to Pinecrest had gone sideways.
This was, in her experience, the way most things went — not the way you planned them, but sideways, into something adjacent to the plan, which turned out to be more interesting than the plan would have been.
The wheel had come off. The sheriff had appeared.
And the sheriff had turned out to be, in the brief hour between the wheel repair and the stage arriving in Pinecrest, considerably more interesting than his apparent simplicity suggested.
She had said most situations are less dire than they appear if you wait a moment before deciding what to think of them, and he had looked at her with the look of a man who had never considered this possibility and was not sure what to do with it.
She had thought: there is something sealed off in that man. Something that was open once and isn't now. She had thought this and then she had thought: that is none of your business, Mercy, and you have curtains to deliver.
But she had thought it.
* * *
Pinecrest in December was everything her client's letter had described and several things it hadn't.
The mountains — which the letter had referred to as "rather impressive" with the characteristic understatement of a woman from Ohio who had not wanted to sound as though she had been entirely overwhelmed — were not rather impressive.
They were completely overwhelming, in the specific way of things that were so much larger than the scale you were accustomed to that your brain initially refused to process them correctly, kept trying to fit them into the framework of familiar hills and repeatedly failing.
She had stood outside the stage office on the main street of Pinecrest, her carpetbag in her hand and her trunk being unloaded, and she had looked at the mountains and she had felt something she rarely felt, which was small.
Not in a frightening way. In a clarifying way.
The way that being small relative to something enormous could clarify: you are not, the mountains said, the center of anything in particular.
This is larger than you and older than you and will be here after you, and this is not a threat but a fact, and facts, Mercy Alcott, were what you built on.
She had breathed the mountain air and thought: yes. This is the right place.
The sheriff had not left when the stage arrived.
He had ridden behind them into town, which she understood was standard procedure when you had escorted a stage through a potential road difficulty, and he had helped her find the boarding house — Mrs. Connelly's, clean and warm, two dollars a week, run by a woman whose opinion of most things was delivered at full volume and whose cooking was excellent — and he had arranged for her trunk to be stored until she could arrange a ride out to the Caldwell ranch.
He had done all of this with the efficient brevity of a man who was performing a function and intended to complete it and then be elsewhere. He did not make conversation. He made arrangements, which was different.
"Thank you," she said, when the trunk was stored and the arrangements were complete and he had taken a step toward his horse.
"Part of the job," he said, without turning back.
She looked at the back of his coat — at the set of his shoulders, the particular quality of his stillness, the way he moved as though the space around him required managing rather than simply occupying.
She thought: that man has been closed off for a very long time. She thought: I wonder what happened.
She thought: none of your business, Mercy.
She went inside Mrs. Connelly's and unpacked her carpetbag and looked out the window at the mountains turning violet in the early December dark, and she opened her Bible to the Psalms and read until supper, and she thought about the commission and the curtains and the fitting and the drive out to the Caldwell ranch in the morning.
She thought, briefly, about the sheriff.
Then she thought about supper, which Mrs. Connelly was announcing from the direction of the kitchen in terms that suggested it was ready and that delay would be taken as a personal insult, and she went down.
* * *
In the morning the sheriff was in the street when she came out of Mrs. Connelly's.
Not waiting for her — she did not assume this.
He was speaking to a man she did not know about something that involved a pointing at the general direction of the north road, the conversation of two men dealing with a practical matter.
But he looked up when she came out, and for a moment their eyes met with the brief, specific quality of two people who had encountered each other the day before and had not yet determined what to do with the encounter.
She nodded. He nodded back. She continued to the livery, where she had arranged the previous evening for a wagon and a driver to take her to the Caldwell ranch.
She had been in Pinecrest for fourteen hours and she had thought about the sheriff more than twice, which was two more times than she had allotted. She made a note of this, not with alarm but with the interest of a person who noticed her own patterns and found them informative.
The driver was a boy of sixteen with the competent, weather-wise manner of a ranch-country young man who had been handling horses since before he could reliably read.
He loaded her trunk with the ease of someone for whom this was entirely ordinary and they set off on the south road toward the Caldwell property.
The world was magnificent. She was not going to stop noticing this simply because she had noticed it before.
The mountains were doing something different in the morning light than they had done in the evening — the colors were entirely other, the same peaks producing a completely different experience of themselves, which she supposed was the point.
You could look at them every morning and they would be new every morning, and this was the kind of inexhaustibility that she associated with things worth paying attention to.
She thought about this all the way to the Caldwell ranch, where a woman with a direct gaze and a schoolteacher's bearing came to the gate and said: "Miss Alcott? I'm Clara Caldwell. Come in out of the cold."
Mercy came in out of the cold and looked at the ranch house with its mountains behind it and the smoke from the chimney and the sense of a life that was entirely inhabited, and she thought: yes. This is the kind of place I came here for.
She had not known, getting off the stage, that she was also coming toward something else. But the road, as she had often observed, had its own ideas about what you needed.