Chapter 10 The Campfire and the Stars
The third supper was at the ranch.
This was Clara's doing — she had invited both of them, separately, with the specific social management of a woman who had concluded that the hotel dining room was a fine setting for two people establishing whether they had anything to say to each other, and that the ranch kitchen was a better setting for two people who had established this and needed somewhere warmer and less public to continue.
Mercy had accepted. Nathaniel had accepted.
Elias, who had been informed of the arrangement over supper the previous evening, had said "All right" and then, after a pause, had said "Horne's a good man" in the specific tone that meant he had formed this opinion from evidence and stood behind it and was offering it as relevant information.
Clara had said "I know" and passed the bread.
Nora had said "He has full eyes" and been told that this was not necessarily the kind of observation to share with someone as soon as you met them, and had revised her plan accordingly.
The supper was in the kitchen, which was the room that was most entirely itself at the Caldwell ranch — warm from the stove, smelling of the food that had been made in it and the wood smoke and the faint lavender that Clara had said lived in the walls, the room that had accumulated the evidence of a family going about its life.
Nathaniel had been in this kitchen once before, on the first Christmas, and he had felt then what he felt again now: the specific warmth of a place that was inhabited by people who were glad to be in it.
Mercy arrived first, on the wagon from town that she had arranged, with a jar of honey from Mrs. Pearce that she had brought as a contribution and which Nora received with the solemnity of someone accepting a diplomatic gift.
Nathaniel arrived on Absalom ten minutes later and was immediately studied by Nora with the completeness of her surveillance, which she moderated by keeping her observations interior and her questions to a level her mother had described, during the ride to the ranch from school that afternoon, as civilized.
"Sheriff Horne," Nora said. "Miss Alcott is already here."
"I see that," Nathaniel said.
"She brought honey," Nora said.
"That was thoughtful," he said.
Nora regarded him with the measuring attention. "Your horse is named Absalom," she said. "That's from the Bible. Absalom was David's son who had remarkable hair."
"Yes," Nathaniel said. "My horse also has opinions about authority."
Nora looked at the horse. "That seems fair," she said, and led him inside.
The supper was good food and the conversation that happened between people who were comfortable enough to be themselves and who had enough in common to find the being themselves interesting.
Clara and Mercy talked about fabric and about Ohio and about the way Columbus compared to Pinecrest in December, which was entirely different climates producing entirely different experiences of December.
Elias and Nathaniel talked about the county in the way of two men who understood each other's work without requiring explanation.
Nora asked questions that were, for Nora, restrained, and received answers that were mostly honest, and made notes in the interior record she kept of everything she considered significant.
After supper, while Clara and Mercy were in the kitchen with the dishes and Elias had gone to the barn, Nora looked at Nathaniel across the kitchen table.
"Are you glad you came?" she asked.
He considered this. He could have given the social answer. He gave the honest one. "Yes," he said. "More than I expected to be."
"Miss Alcott is good company," Nora said.
"She is," he said.
"She's also looking for the right place," Nora said. "She said so herself. The right place to be."
He looked at the eight-year-old across the table. "Did she?"
"In so many words," Nora said. "I think Pinecrest might be it. I think she thinks so too, though she hasn't decided yet." She looked at him with the full-attention expression. "Pinecrest would be better if you were fully in it."
Nathaniel looked at the table. "You're eight years old," he said.
"I'm eight years old and I have been paying attention for eight years," Nora said. "Those are not mutually exclusive."
He looked at her. The quality of her directness — unhurried, unafraid, simply offering what she saw — was so much her own thing that he found himself unsure how to deflect it. He was very good at deflecting things. He found he did not want to deflect this.
"No," he said. "They're not."
* * *
After the supper, in the dark of the December evening, Mercy said she would like to see the stars.
They went out — both of them, at Clara's suggestion that the star-watching was better away from the house lights, which was a suggestion that contained an element of social choreography that Mercy appreciated and that she suspected Nathaniel also noticed.
The sky was extraordinary. She had seen the Colorado stars from Mrs. Connelly's window but not from outside, not from the open air of a ranch with no neighboring lights in any direction, and the difference between the framed version and the full version was the difference between a description of the ocean and the ocean.
"Oh," she said.
"Yes," he said. He had seen this sky ten thousand times and she heard in his voice the same quality she heard in Clara Caldwell's voice when she talked about the mountains: the voice of someone who had never stopped seeing it.
They stood in the dark. The cold was the kind of cold that was clarifying rather than punishing — thin and dry and specific, each breath a distinct event. The mountains were invisible in the dark but present, the way things that were large enough were always present even when they couldn't be seen.
"Tell me something," she said.
"What kind of something?" he said.
"Something you haven't told anyone," she said. "I told you one of those, at the first supper. The thing about looking for the right place. I had not told that to anyone."
He was quiet for a long time. She waited. She was very good at waiting for him now, after ten days.
"I had a friend at Gettysburg," he said.
"Thomas Ely. We had been in the same company since 1862.
He was from Vermont. He was — " He paused.
"He was the kind of person who made other people better by being in the room.
Not dramatically. Just by the quality of his attention and his refusal to be petty about anything. "
"What happened to him?" she said.
"He died on the first day," Nathaniel said.
"Before the charge. Before the part I think of as the bad part.
A stray shot, very early. Fast. He was there and then he wasn't." He looked at the stars.
"I have thought about him almost every day for twenty years.
Not with grief, exactly. With the particular feeling of someone who was shown what a person could be and has not managed to replicate it. "
Mercy looked at the stars. She thought about a man from Vermont who made other people better by being in the room.
"What was his quality?" she said. "The one you haven't managed to replicate."
"He was open," Nathaniel said. "Not naive — he was not naive, he had seen too much by 1863 for naive. But he remained open to the possibility that things could be better than they were. He never closed off that possibility."
"You closed it off," she said.
"Yes," he said. "After Gettysburg. I concluded that the evidence suggested things could not be significantly better than they were and I stopped expecting them to be."
She turned and looked at him. In the starlight his face was the face she had been learning for ten days — the contained quality of it, the fullness of the eyes, the particular quality of a man who was in the act of saying something he had not said before and was finding the saying of it different from the holding of it.
"Nathaniel," she said. She used his name and watched him register the use of it.
"Yes," he said.
"Things can be better than they are," she said.
"I want to be very clear about that. I am not speaking theoretically.
I am speaking from evidence. My own evidence, gathered over thirty years of paying attention.
" She held his gaze. "Things can be significantly better than they are. For you specifically."
He looked at her. The starlight was doing something particular to his face — the usual management had come down in the cold and the dark, the way management often came down when the normal contexts that required it were not present.
"You sound certain," he said.
"I am certain," she said. "I don't say things I'm not certain of. You know that about me by now."
He was quiet for a long moment. The cold moved between them. The stars burned overhead in their extravagant thousands.
"I know that about you," he said, finally.
"Good," she said. "Then believe it."
They stood in the dark for a while longer, not touching, not speaking, but close, in the particular way that close had a different meaning in the dark under a very large sky than it did anywhere else.
Clara was right about the stars. They were better from outside.