Chapter 3 The Commission
Clara Caldwell was not what Mercy had expected from the correspondence.
The letters had been precise — specific measurements, specific fabrics, the curtain dimensions to the quarter-inch, the dress requirements laid out with the organized clarity of a woman who knew what she wanted and could describe it.
Mercy had expected, from this evidence, a formal person.
Someone who ran the household with the same precision she applied to her correspondence.
What she found was a woman who was precise and warm in equal measure, which was rarer than either alone.
Clara Caldwell met her at the gate and showed her inside with the directness of someone who did not waste time on social preamble and the warmth of someone who was genuinely glad you had come, and within ten minutes Mercy had coffee and a chair by the fire and a small girl of eight named Nora who was examining Mercy's carpetbag with the focused interest of a child who considers it her right to know about everything in her immediate vicinity.
"Nora," Clara said, "the bag is Miss Alcott's."
"I know," Nora said, not looking up. "I'm looking, not touching. Looking is allowed."
"It is," Mercy agreed. "I have scissors in the outer pocket and pins in the inner one and a measuring tape that goes to sixty inches. The carpetbag is older than you are."
Nora looked up at her with the assessing attention of a child who was deciding something. "How old are you?" she asked.
"Nora," Clara said.
"It's all right," Mercy said. "I'm thirty. The carpetbag is from when I was nineteen. It's been to eleven states and two territories and it shows."
"I'm going to travel when I'm grown," Nora said. "I'm going to see the San Juans. Papa says on very clear days you can see them from the hill east of the barn."
"The San Juans are worth seeing," Mercy said. "I haven't seen them yet myself. This is my first time in Colorado."
Nora sat down across from her with the settled purpose of someone who has found an interesting person and intends to make the most of the opportunity. "What have you seen?" she asked.
Mercy told her. Ohio, of course, and the train journey west, and the particular quality of the Kansas plains which were beautiful in the way of things that had nothing to hide and therefore showed you everything, and the way the mountains had appeared on the horizon two days outside of Denver like a rumor becoming true.
Nora listened with the complete attention that Mercy had noticed in children who were accustomed to being listened to by adults — children who had learned that attention was reciprocal because they had received it and knew what it felt like.
Clara came back from wherever she had gone and looked at the two of them — Nora leaning forward, Mercy talking, the fire warm between them — and something in her face settled into a specific kind of satisfaction.
"Let me show you the fabric I've chosen," Clara said. "And then I want to hear what you think."
* * *
The commission was good work.
Mercy had done good work before — had done excellent work, had built a reputation on the quality and precision of what she produced — but good work in a good setting with a good client was its own specific pleasure, the pleasure of a musician playing a well-made instrument in good acoustics.
The fabric Clara had chosen was a deep green wool for the curtains — substantial enough for the Colorado winter, with the slight texture of good cloth rather than the flat surface of the cheap kind — and a navy linen for the dress, which would be a day dress, practical but well-made, the kind of thing a woman wore when she wanted to look like herself on a normal day rather than performing an occasion.
Good choices. Confident choices. The choices of someone who knew what suited them.
They worked through the morning, Clara standing patiently while Mercy measured and noted, the two of them talking in the way of women engaged in productive work together — not continuously, not with the social anxiety of silence that needed filling, but periodically, when something worth saying arose.
Clara asked about the journey from Ohio.
Mercy asked about the ranch. Clara told her about the previous December — the stage arrival, the blizzard, the ceremony — with the particular economy of someone who was giving you the outline rather than the full account, the trust implied being: you can ask for more if you want it.
Mercy did not ask for more. She received the outline and appreciated it.
"The sheriff met your stage," Clara said, at some point. Not quite a question.
"He did," Mercy said. "He was riding out to check the road. The stage had a wheel difficulty."
"Nathaniel Horne," Clara said. "He's been the sheriff here for eight years. He's — " She paused, in the way of someone choosing a word carefully. "He's very capable."
Mercy noted the pause. "But?" she said.
Clara looked at her. "I didn't say but."
"There was a pause where a but usually lives," Mercy said pleasantly.
Something in Clara's face moved — appreciation, possibly.
"He's capable and he keeps everyone at a considerable distance," she said.
"He's been in Pinecrest for eight years and I've been here for one and I know approximately the same things about him that people who have been here for eight years know, which is his professional history and his competence and nothing else. "
Mercy pinned the seam she had been working on. "The war does that to some men," she said.
Clara looked at her. "How do you know it was the war?"
"I don't," Mercy said. "But men who are sealed off the way you're describing — who have been sealed off for some time — are usually sealed off for a reason that arrived at a specific moment rather than accumulated gradually. And his age and the quality of it suggest the war. I could be wrong."
"You could be," Clara said. "But you probably aren't." She was quiet for a moment. "He's been kind to me — to us. He came to the ceremony, when we married. He helps when there's trouble on the road. But there's something behind the capable that no one reaches."
"Some people prefer it that way," Mercy said.
"Yes," Clara said. "And some people think they prefer it and discover otherwise."
Mercy pinned another seam and thought about a man on a gray horse who had looked at her from thirty feet away and had the expression of someone encountering something he didn't know what to do with. She thought about sealed-off places and what it took to reach them.
She thought: none of your business, Mercy.
She thought this, as she had been thinking it for eighteen hours, and it remained approximately as effective as the previous times.
* * *
She stayed at the ranch for lunch, which Elias Caldwell produced from the kitchen with the focused competence of a man who had been cooking for himself and his family for two years and had developed opinions about it.
Elias Caldwell was not what the commission correspondence had implied either.
The letters about the commission had all come from Clara, which had suggested a household where Clara was the visible one, the public-facing one, and Elias was the background.
She had arrived to find a man who was quiet but present in the way of a fixed point — not dramatic, not performing any version of himself, simply there, specifically and completely, in the way of things that have found their right place and settled into it.
He shook her hand when they were introduced with the brief, firm shake of a man for whom a handshake was a statement of respect and not a social ritual, and he looked at her with the level gray eyes of someone who was assessing her competence rather than her appearance, and he said: "Clara tells me you've come a long way.
Glad you made it before the weather turned.
" And then he went back to what he had been doing.
Mercy had liked him immediately. He reminded her of her father.
At lunch the family was complete — Elias and Clara and Nora, with the old ranch hand Clem who came for meals and who regarded Mercy with the quiet assessment of someone who had seen a great many people pass through and had developed efficient methods of evaluation.
He passed the bread without being asked.
He told her, when she asked about the valley, that it had good winters and better summers and that the people who stayed were the ones who understood that difficult and worthwhile were not opposites.
"That's a good principle," Mercy said.
"It applies to most things," he said, and went back to his soup.
After lunch, Clara walked her to the wagon that would take her back to Pinecrest. The cold was coming on in the afternoon way of December in the mountains — not dramatically, but with the steady authority of something that had made up its mind.
"I'll need three more sessions to finish the fitting," Mercy said. "If that works with your schedule."
"Perfectly," Clara said. "Come any day. Nora will be glad of the company."
"Nora is remarkable," Mercy said.
"She is," Clara said. "She'll have asked you seventeen questions by the end of the first session and remembered the answers to all of them by the second."
"That's exactly right," Mercy said. "She already has."
Clara smiled — a specific, warm smile that had Nora in it and Elias in it and the life she was living in it, the smile of someone who was in the right place and knew it.
Mercy recognized this because she had been looking for this quality in herself for several years and had not yet found it, and recognizing it in someone else produced in her a feeling that was partly admiration and partly the particular longing of someone who knows what they want and has not yet found it.
She rode back to Pinecrest in the cold afternoon and thought about the right place and the right life and what it felt like to be in both simultaneously.
She thought about a sheriff on a gray horse.
"Mercy Alcott," she said to herself, quietly, so the driver wouldn't hear, "none of your business."
The driver, who had not been listening, said nothing.
The mountains observed.