Chapter 13 What Thomas Ely Would Have Said
He told her about Thomas Ely on the thirteenth day.
Not the outline — he had given her the outline under the stars.
The full version. The version that included the specific things: the particular way Thomas laughed, which was sudden and genuine and without the social modifications that most laughs had.
The way he had of noticing things that other people missed — the mud swallow building her nest in the tent peg, the child's toy left in the road outside a farmhouse they passed in Virginia, things that mattered to no one strategically but that Thomas noticed and mentioned because he found them interesting and he found things interesting.
The way he had talked about God. Not with the defensive quality of someone who needs their faith to be correct because the alternative is frightening, but with the easy confidence of someone who has a relationship with someone real and is not uncertain about the reality.
Thomas had not preached. He had simply referred to God the way you referred to someone you knew — as a fact of the landscape.
"He would have said," Nathaniel told her, "when I came to the conclusion I came to after Gettysburg — he would have said: that's a reasonable conclusion from the evidence, Nat, but you're leaving out the presence. The way you leave someone out of a picture by focusing on the frame."
They were walking. This had become the morning habit of the last three days — Mercy, between the end of her commission work and the beginning of whatever came next, had free mornings, and he had managed his schedule in a way that produced free mornings also, and they had begun to use them for walking, which was a context that both of them found useful for conversation.
Movement, he had discovered, made certain things easier to say than stillness did.
"You're still leaving out the presence," Mercy said.
"I'm beginning to think so," he said.
"Not beginning," she said. "You've been thinking so for some time. Otherwise the door wouldn't have been worth mentioning."
He walked. She walked beside him. The main street of Pinecrest was empty in the early morning, the mountains doing their morning presentation, the cold specific and thin.
"Thomas would have liked you," he said.
She looked at him. "How would he have known me?"
"He would have known you in two minutes," Nathaniel said.
"He knew people quickly. He said — he used to say that people were either open or closed, and that if you met them when they were open you could know them very fast and if you met them when they were closed you might never know them at all, no matter how long you tried. "
"Which category was I?" she said.
"Open," he said, immediately.
"And you?" she said.
He was quiet for a moment. "Closed, when he knew me," he said. "He knew me anyway. He was patient about it. He said — " Nathaniel stopped. He was looking at the mountains. "He said I would open eventually. He said it was going to take the right conditions and I should not try to force it."
"He said that to you," Mercy said. "In 1863."
"Yes."
"And the conditions," she said. "Twenty years later."
He turned and looked at her. There was nothing managed in the look.
"Yes," he said. "The conditions."
They walked to the end of the main street and stood for a moment looking north toward the pass, where the road ran up into the mountains and disappeared around a bend that was the last visible point before the altitude changed everything.
She had come over that road eleven days ago, on the stage with the wheel problem, and she had sat on a log and read her Bible and thought: most situations are less dire than they appear if you wait a moment before deciding what to think of them.
She thought: I was right about that. And I did not know, sitting on that log, that the moment I was waiting before deciding about was going to be considerably more significant than a stage wheel.
"I want to ask you something," Nathaniel said.
"Ask," she said.
"The commission is done," he said. "The Denver thing. Are you going?"
She looked at the pass. At the road that went up into the mountains and over and down to Denver and eventually east to Columbus and everything she had come from.
"I don't know yet," she said. "I have more information than I did when I arrived. I'm processing it."
"What information?" he said.
"Pinecrest," she said. "The Caldwells. The school and Mrs. Pearce's bees and the fact that the valley needs a seamstress and does not currently have a permanent one." She paused. "You."
He was very still.
"The information that I need to process," she said, "is whether the sum of those things is what I've been looking for or whether it's what I've been looking for with a piece still missing."
"What piece?" he said.
She turned and looked at him directly. "Whether you are going to keep opening or whether you're going to go back behind the door," she said. "I need to know which one, because one of them is what I came here for and one of them is not."
He held her gaze. He was the stillest she had seen him, and she had seen him quite still.
"I'm not going back," he said.
"You don't know what it's going to cost," she said. Not a challenge. An honest caution. "Opening up after twenty years is not a small thing."
"I know," he said.
"It's going to be uncomfortable," she said. "Things that have been sealed come out in all directions when the seal breaks. I've watched this happen. It is not tidy."
"I know," he said again.
"And you still — " she said.
"Mercy," he said. He said her name with the same quality he had said it at the fourth supper — as a complete sentence, as a statement of the fact of her. "I've been managing for twenty years. I am not uncertain about whether this is better than that."
She breathed.
"All right," she said.
"All right," he said.
They walked back toward town in the morning light, and the mountains were doing their extraordinary thing, and the cold was the clarifying kind, and Thomas Ely, who had died on the first day at Gettysburg in 1863, would have had something to say about all of it.
Nathaniel thought he knew what it would have been.
He thought Thomas would have said: about time, Nat. About time.