Chapter 17 What Opens
Christmas was eight days away and Mercy had work to do.
The workroom in Mrs. Connelly's parlor had been cleared and organized over the previous three days with Mercy's characteristic efficiency — she had a system for workrooms, developed over eleven years of setting them up in temporary locations, a system that prioritized the things she reached for most often and placed them in the positions her hands had learned to find without looking.
The dress form in the northeast corner for the light.
The cutting table against the south wall where she could walk around it.
The drawer system for threads organized by color and weight.
The pin cushion exactly where the pin cushion always was.
She had two new commissions in addition to the Caldwell work.
Helen Granger, who had examined the navy dress on Clara with the assessing eye of a woman who had strong opinions about cloth and construction, had appeared at Mrs. Connelly's the day after with a request for a winter coat lining and a party dress for her eldest daughter.
And Mrs. Pearce, who had been telling people for years that she was meaning to have something proper made, had finally decided that the something proper was a green wool that she had been keeping in a drawer for six years waiting for the right seamstress.
"You waited six years?" Mercy said.
"I wanted it done right," Mrs. Pearce said. "The wrong seamstress would have ruined the cloth."
Mercy looked at the green wool, which was good — a deep, honest green, the green of old pine trees, with a slight texture that would take structure without resisting. "The cloth is worth waiting for," she said.
"I know it," Mrs. Pearce said, with the satisfaction of someone who has kept faith with a decision across six years.
She worked through the mornings on the Granger coat lining and the Pearce dress and through the afternoons on the final adjustments to Clara's dress that Clara had requested, small things but Clara was specific about small things and Mercy respected this.
She worked with the focused pleasure of someone doing the thing they were made for in a space that was becoming hers, and the workroom took on the particular character of inhabited workrooms — the smell of cloth and the faint metallic smell of pins and the specific quality of the light that she had known would be good and was.
In the evenings she and Nathaniel walked.
This had become their thing — not planned on any given day, but expected, the way things became expected when they were right.
He appeared at Mrs. Connelly's at seven most evenings, or she went to his office at seven if she could see through the window that he was still there, and they walked.
The cold was serious now, consistently below freezing, but the air was dry and clean and the stars were the best argument she had encountered for being outdoors in December.
They talked on the walks in the way she had discovered they talked best — in motion, without the face-to-face quality that made some things harder, the words coming more easily when there was also the rhythm of the walking.
He told her things. Not catalogued confessions — he was not a man for catalogued confessions, and she would not have wanted them even if he were.
The things he told her were the specific things that arrived when he was no longer managing them: the specific quality of the Pennsylvania farm in autumn, which he had not thought about for twenty years and which was coming back with the particular vividness of things long stored.
His father, who had been quiet in the way Nathaniel was quiet but warmer, less sealed, with the warmth of a man who had not been to war.
The horse he had had at sixteen, before the war, a bay mare with a white star on her forehead who had died while he was away and whose death he had been told by letter in 1864 and had not, he realized with some surprise, ever properly grieved, because grief in 1864 was a luxury that circumstances did not permit.
"You're grieving now," she said, one evening, walking.
"Yes," he said. "In a general way. Things that I put in a drawer are coming back out."
"The drawer Hobart described," she said.
"Yes. I am finding that the drawer is — fuller than I remembered. I put things in over twenty years and I am now discovering what was in there." He was quiet for a moment. "It's not as bad as I expected."
"No," she said. "Usually not. The contents of the drawer are always more manageable in the open than behind the door."
"You've done this," he said.
"Yes," she said. "When my mother died. And my father. You process or you store, and if you store long enough it becomes — impacted. You have to go back in and find it. But it's always findable."
He walked beside her in the cold evening and thought about impacted grief and the process of going back in to find it, which was, he was discovering, not the emergency he had feared but simply the work of a man doing what he should have done twenty years ago and finding it was still available.
The grace of it — the fact that it was still available — was something he had not expected.
He told her this.
She looked at him with the full attention. "Of course it's still available," she said. "The things that matter don't expire. That's what makes them the things that matter."
He thought about Thomas Ely, who had been dead for twenty-one years and who was still, clearly, present in a way that mattered.
He thought about his father and the farm and the bay mare with the white star.
He thought about prayer, which he had not been doing exactly but had been doing approximately — talking to the mountains in the mornings the way he had always walked to the mountains and which he was beginning to understand was the same thing that Mercy did with her early mornings and her Bible.
Not so different, finally. Not as far from the room as he had believed.
"I'm going to go back to church," he said. "Properly. Sit in the front."
"You already sat in the front," she said.
"Once," he said. "I'm going to do it every week."
She looked at the stars. "Yes," she said. "I think you should."
He thought: Thomas would say this is the thing. This right here. The walking and the talking and the stars and the woman beside him who looked at situations before deciding what to think of them.
He thought: he would be right.
* * *
The day before Christmas Eve he went to the Caldwell ranch.
This was not an official visit, and it was not the first unofficial visit in recent weeks — he had become a more regular visitor to the Caldwell kitchen than he had been in eight years, which Clara had absorbed without comment and Elias had absorbed with the specific courtesy of a man who was glad of a thing and did not require to express this at length.
Nora had absorbed it with active satisfaction.
She had taken to providing him with running commentary on various topics whenever he was present, which was the honor she reserved for people she had decided were worth her full conversational attention.
She told him about the animal intelligence research and its conclusions.
She told him about fractions and about long division, which she was working through with the focused determination of someone who found the process interesting even when it was difficult.
She told him about Columbine the horse and about the mules Henry and Anne and about Clem's continuing objection to the mule names, which she described as a principled stand that she respected while disagreeing with.
Today she told him something different.
"Miss Alcott is going to stay," she said. She said it with the matter-of-fact quality of reporting established information.
"I know," he said.
"She told me," Nora said. "In the workroom at Mrs. Connelly's. She said she was going to make curtains and dresses and that the valley had been without a proper seamstress for too long."
"That's true," he said.
"She also said," Nora said, looking at him with the full-eyes quality, "that there were other reasons. She didn't say what they were. She didn't have to."
He looked at this eight-year-old and thought, not for the first time, that Nora Caldwell was going to be formidable at any age.
"No," he said. "She didn't."
"I'm glad you came here," Nora said. "To Pinecrest. Eight years ago."
"That's kind of you," he said.
"It's not kind," she said. "It's accurate.
You're good for the county and I think you're going to be good for something else as well, and I'm glad both those things are happening in the same place.
" She turned her horse over in her hands.
"Mama used to say that people arrived where they were supposed to arrive, eventually, if they kept moving.
She said staying still was the only way to miss the destination. "
Nathaniel looked at the carved horse in Nora's hands, named for a woman he had never met and who had apparently been thinking about the same things he was only beginning to think about.
"Your mother sounds like she was a very wise woman," he said.
"She was," Nora said. "Miss Alcott is wise too. Different kind of wise, but it's good to have more than one kind around." She looked up at him. "You're going to need both kinds."
He looked at her. "Am I."
"Yes," she said, with the serenity of someone who has done the math. "Clara is the kind that helps you organize. Miss Alcott is the kind that helps you open. You are going to need both."
He was quiet for a moment. "When did you arrive at that conclusion?" he said.
"October," Nora said. "When Miss Alcott's first letter came about the commission. I read the handwriting. It was very specific handwriting."
He looked at her.
"Handwriting tells you things," she said.