Chapter 18 Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve in Pinecrest was, by the third year of Clara Caldwell's residence in the valley, something of an established institution.
Mercy had been recruited to help make the honey cakes, which was not sewing but which was the kind of thing that happened in small communities where skills were shared across whatever boundary the city had imposed between them.
She had spent the afternoon at the Caldwell ranch with Clara and Nora and the concentrated business of honey cake production, which turned out to be more technical than the name implied and which Clara managed with the organized efficiency she brought to everything.
Nora supervised. She had opinions about the quantity of honey, which she felt was a variable that could be pushed in an optimistic direction, and about the configuration of the cakes on the pan, and about the correct timing of the oven.
Clara accommodated her where accommodation was reasonable and held her position where it was not, and the negotiation of this was conducted with the easy authority of a mother who had been doing it for eight years and who had learned that Nora's opinions were often right and should be considered seriously even when they were not ultimately adopted.
Mercy watched this and thought about how a family worked — the specific, evolved grammar of a particular family, the way certain things were said and certain things were understood and the whole system had a quality of something built over time rather than established by policy.
She thought: this is what she wanted. This kind of family. Built, over time. Something that had earned its particular grammar rather than been assigned one.
She thought: I have been more precise about what I was looking for than I realized.
* * *
The Christmas Eve service was what Christmas Eve services were in Pinecrest, which was everything.
Reverend Hobart at his full capacity, the candles managed with the specific caution of a man who had burned his coat three years ago and had not forgiven himself for it but had learned from it.
The congregation filling the church to its useful capacity.
The Caldwells in the second pew — Clara and Elias and Nora, who was this year once again the angel, for the fourth consecutive year, with a costume that Mercy had spent three evenings improving, adding a border of small silver stars along the hem that she had achieved with a thread she had been saving for something right and had found the right thing.
Nathaniel was in the front pew.
Not the back, where he had been for eight years. The front, where he had sat on that Tuesday morning when he had gone to see Hobart, and where he had apparently decided to remain.
Mercy sat beside him.
This had not been discussed. She had come in and he had been there, in the front, and there had been space beside him, and she had sat in it, and neither of them had made any remark about this, because some things were better simply done than remarked upon.
Hobart preached about the shepherds. About the people who were in the field keeping watch in the dark, who were not the important people, not the ones the world would have expected to receive the news, not the theologians or the kings, but the people in the field in the dark who were simply doing their job and had their attention open in the right direction.
"The shepherds," Hobart said, "were not extraordinary.
They were people who were paying attention.
And what they were paying attention to was the dark, which is where the light arrived.
" He looked out over the congregation. "This is the instruction, if we're looking for one.
Pay attention to the dark. Not with fear.
With readiness. The light comes where the attention is ready to receive it. "
Mercy sat beside Nathaniel in the front pew of Pinecrest Community Church on Christmas Eve, 1884, and thought about paying attention to the dark and being ready to receive what came.
She thought about the dark under the Colorado stars on the night they had walked home from the Caldwell ranch, the dark in which she had put her arm through his and they had walked.
She thought about the dark inside a man who had been sealed off for twenty years and was opening and what the opening was producing, which was both the difficult things and the good things and frequently both at once.
She thought: the light comes where the attention is ready.
She thought: I have been ready. I have been keeping watch in the field, paying attention in the direction the light was going to come from, and now here it is, sitting beside me in the front pew wearing a dark coat and singing hymns for the second time in twenty-one years.
She could hear him singing. Not loudly — that was not his way. But clearly, with the quality of someone who was doing it because they meant it.
The pageant. Nora appeared from behind the altar with the other children, and her silver-hemmed costume caught the candlelight in exactly the way Mercy had intended it to catch it, and Nora's face when she found them in the front pew — when she found Nathaniel in the front pew, which was news — was the face of a child confirming a prediction.
Nora said her lines. Fear not. She said them directly, without performance, in the voice of a child who meant them.
Beside Mercy, Nathaniel was very still.
She did not look at him. Some things were private even in a full church. But she was aware, in the specific way she was always aware of him now, that the stillness was not the old managed stillness. It was the stillness of someone receiving something.
She thought: fear not. Twenty-one years of something like fear. And now this.
The supper after the service was warm and full and the honey cakes were distributed and acclaimed and Clara accepted this with the grace of someone who knew the work that had gone into them and felt it was properly acknowledged.
Nathaniel was there — not at the edge, not in the corner, not the man she had first noticed maintaining professional distance from everything personal.
He was at the table, in the middle of the thing, talking to Elias about something with the ease of two men who have established a footing and were comfortable on it, and occasionally looking across the room to where Mercy was talking to Helen Granger about the Granger coat, and the looking had in it the specific quality that she had been watching develop over nineteen days.
She caught his eye once.
He nodded, once, the small definite nod of a man who is telling you he knows you are there and is glad of it.
She nodded back.
* * *
They walked home from the church supper through the Christmas Eve dark.
All of them together for part of it — the Caldwells going south toward the ranch, Nathaniel and Mercy going north toward the main street of Pinecrest — and then the Caldwells turning south and the two of them continuing north, Nora calling from the wagon as it pulled away: "Merry Christmas, Sheriff!
Merry Christmas, Miss Alcott!" with the clarity that carried in the cold air.
They called back. The wagon receded. The street was quiet.
The stars were what stars were in this valley — the full version, the unmediated version, the version that made you understand what the word astronomical meant and why it had been chosen.
"She said merry Christmas, Miss Alcott," Nathaniel said.
"Yes," Mercy said.
"Not Mrs. Anything," he said.
She looked at him. "Not yet," she said.
He stopped walking.
She stopped beside him.
"Mercy," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"I have been thinking about this carefully," he said, in the tone of a man who thinks about things carefully and who takes the accuracy of his statements seriously.
"I have been thinking about it since approximately the fourth day, which was when I asked you to the first supper and was surprised to find myself doing it.
I have been thinking about it since the stars on the night at the Caldwell ranch and since the church and since the walking and since — all of it.
" He turned to face her. "I want to ask you something. "
She looked at him. The December dark was around them and the stars were doing everything and the mountains were enormous and present and the cold was the kind that was real rather than punishing, the specific cold of a good December night in Colorado.
"Ask," she said.
"Will you marry me," he said. It came out flat and plain, the way true things came out of him, without arrangement.
"I am aware that we have known each other for nineteen days and that this is a short time by any reasonable accounting.
I am also aware that I am forty-two years old and have been managing a closed life for twenty years and am not, perhaps, the most obvious prospect for a woman who is looking for the right place and the right person.
But I think — " He stopped. He breathed.
"I think you are the right person. I have thought this for approximately fifteen of the nineteen days and I am not uncertain about it.
And I want to ask before you leave and the asking becomes something I have to do differently.
" He paused. "That is the case I have. I have made better cases in court. "
Mercy Alcott stood on the main street of Pinecrest, Colorado, on Christmas Eve, 1884, under a sky full of stars, and looked at a man who had been sealed off for twenty years and who had opened, specifically and irreversibly, in the direction of her, and who had just made the least eloquent marriage proposal she had ever received, which was also the most honest one.
She thought about the right place. She thought about the right person.
"Yes," she said.
He looked at her.
"Yes," she said again, because it was worth saying twice. "You are not the most obvious prospect. You are the right one. There is a difference, and the difference is everything." She held his gaze. "Yes, Nathaniel. I'll marry you."
He breathed. Something in his face — the last of the managed quality, the final layer of the twenty-year defense — came down, and what was underneath it was not dramatic, not the revelatory expression of novels, but simply: him.
Nathaniel Horne at forty-two, in the full specific version, with the full eyes and the quiet voice and the horse named Absalom and the front pew and the hymn sung quietly after twenty-one years.
"Good," he said. The same word she had used. She recognized this and felt the warmth of it.
He kissed her. Not tentative — he was not a tentative man when he had decided something. Brief and warm and specific, the kiss of a man who had made a decision and was expressing it.
When he stepped back, the mountains were still there. The stars were still doing everything.
"Reverend Hobart," she said.
"After Christmas," he said. "When the road is clear."
"After Christmas," she agreed.
She took his arm — the way she had taken it on the night they walked home from the Caldwell ranch, the claiming gesture, the one that said: we are walking together and I intend this to be known — and they walked to Mrs. Connelly's in the Christmas Eve dark.