Chapter 9 What Nathaniel Knows
He had been a sheriff for twenty years and a soldier for four before that, and in twenty-four years of the kind of work that required you to assess people quickly and accurately, he had developed a quality of attention that he applied without thinking about applying it.
He knew, within minutes of meeting someone, whether they were dangerous or harmless, honest or dishonest, frightened or confident, and which of those states was the natural one and which was performed.
He knew this from the way they held their hands and from the specific quality of their eye contact and from the register of their voice when they were saying something true versus something managed.
He had been wrong occasionally — no one who claimed to be infallible at this was being honest — but he had been right often enough, over twenty-four years, that he trusted the assessment.
He knew Mercy Alcott was honest. This had been evident from the first moment, from the sitting on the log with the Bible and the serene expression while the stage wheel came off.
People who were performing serenity gave themselves away in the eyes — the eyes were always slightly more alarmed than the face was trying to be.
Mercy's eyes were calm. She was actually, genuinely calm, the way people were calm when they had decided something durable about the nature of situations and did not need to revise the decision each time a new situation arrived.
He knew she was capable. This was also immediate — the precise description she had given him of the robbery, the absence of excess in the description, the way she had measured and reported exactly what was needed and nothing more.
Capable people used the right tool for the job.
She used words the way he suspected she used scissors: precisely, purposefully, with no unnecessary cuts.
He knew she was not afraid of him. This was unusual and he was aware of it.
Most people were slightly afraid of him, or if not afraid then at a respectful remove, the remove that said: this man is the law and has authority and I will keep some distance.
Mercy kept no distance. She occupied whatever space the conversation required and treated him as a person in that space rather than a function.
What he did not know, and what was the thing that had been occupying his thinking in the nights since the first supper, was what to do with any of this.
He had not had to decide what to do with a person in twenty years.
He had had to decide what to do with situations — the robbery, the drunk, the dispute over water rights, the man in 1879 who had threatened his neighbor with a shotgun over a fence line and who Nathaniel had talked down from the porch with the focused, patient attention of someone who understood that most dramatic situations were really simple situations wearing drama as a disguise. He was very good at situations.
He was not good at persons. He had become less good at persons over twenty years of treating them primarily as elements in situations, and he was aware of this with the clear-eyed self-assessment that was one of his actual qualities.
The question — Mercy's question, the one she had asked him on the step and told him she was not asking for an immediate answer — sat with him through the days after the second supper. Whether the feeling had stopped or whether he had closed the door on the room it was in.
He had been thinking about this for three days and he had arrived, with the same methodical approach he brought to all problems, at a preliminary conclusion.
The door was closed. He had closed it. He remembered closing it — not in a single act, not dramatically, but over a period of months after the war, a succession of small closings each of which was individually reasonable and which in aggregate had produced a man who was very far from the room and had been for a very long time.
The question was whether it could be opened.
The further question — the one he was less certain about — was whether he wanted to open it.
He had been safe, on this side of the door.
Safe was not the same as good, and it was not the same as full, and it was not, as Mercy had said in a different context about a different thing, the same as sufficient.
But it was safe. And he had chosen safety for twenty years and had made something reasonable of it, and the reasonable something was not nothing.
He sat at his desk at midnight on the ninth day and looked at the paperwork he was not doing and thought about a woman who carried a Bible in her carpetbag and looked at situations before deciding what to think of them and asked questions she said she was not asking for the answer to and was the calmest person he had encountered since 1863.
He thought: she has something I had and lost and am not certain I know how to find.
He thought: I have been trying not to think this for nine days.
He thought: she'll be gone in a week. The commission will be finished. She'll go back to Columbus or wherever the next thing takes her and Pinecrest will be Pinecrest and I will be what I am.
He thought: that is the safe version.
He was very tired, at midnight on the ninth day, of the safe version.
* * *
In the morning he went to the Caldwell ranch.
Not for any official purpose — there was nothing official in the direction of the Caldwell ranch that morning.
He went because Clara Caldwell had the quality that Mercy had described as her father having, the quality of someone who had found their right place and therefore saw the world clearly from it, and he wanted to ask her something.
He found her in the kitchen, at the table with a ledger and a pencil, doing what he suspected Clara Caldwell did with ledgers, which was making them tell the truth more efficiently than they had been.
She looked up when he came in. She did not look surprised. He had the sense that Clara Caldwell was rarely surprised.
"Nathaniel," she said. "Coffee?"
"Please," he said. He sat down across from her.
She poured the coffee and set it in front of him and sat back down and waited, in the way of a person who has correctly identified that someone has come with something to say and is giving them the room to say it.
"Mercy Alcott," he said.
"Yes," Clara said.
"What do you know about her?" he asked.
Clara looked at him with the expression that he had seen her use on Elias when Elias was asking a question he already knew the answer to and was looking for permission to believe it. "What do you know about her?" she said.
He looked at his coffee. "That she's honest and capable and not afraid of anything I've seen. That she's been looking for the right place for three years. That she prays in a way that isn't theoretical." He paused. "That she asked me a question four days ago that I am still sitting with."
"What question?" Clara said.
"Whether the feeling stopped or whether I closed the door on the room it was in," he said.
Clara was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That's a very good question."
"Yes," he said.
"What have you concluded?" she said.
"That the door is closed," he said. "That I closed it. That this was a choice and not a fate."
"And?"
"And I don't know what comes next," he said.
He said it with the same flat directness he applied to everything, the same quality of stating-a-fact, but there was something underneath it that was different from the professional register.
Something less managed. "I don't know what opening a closed door looks like after twenty years. I don't know if I remember how."
Clara looked at him for a long moment. "You came here to ask me how," she said.
"I suppose I did," he said.
She looked at the mountains through the kitchen window. She was quiet for a moment in the way of someone not finding words but choosing them.
"You don't open it," she said. "You stand next to it for long enough that the closed stops feeling like the natural state.
And then one day you find it's ajar and you didn't notice when that happened.
" She looked at him. "You can't force it.
The people who try to force it — to decide they're going to feel something and then feel it — produce a performance, not the thing.
The thing arrives when you've stopped defending against it. "
He looked at the table. "I've been defending against it for twenty years," he said.
"I know," she said. "You're very good at it." She said this without criticism. Just accurately. "The question is whether you want to be."
He drank his coffee. He looked at the mountains.
"No," he said. "I don't. Not anymore."
Clara nodded. The nod of someone receiving a conclusion they had anticipated and were glad to hear.
"Then stop defending," she said. "See what happens."