Chapter 19 Christmas Morning
She woke on Christmas morning to the specific quality of Christmas morning, which she had known since she was a child in Columbus and which had not changed in thirty years.
It was not the light — the light in December was the same light it had been the day before.
It was not the cold — that was the same cold.
It was something in the quality of the day itself, the way certain days had a different quality from the days around them, the way Sundays felt different from Mondays regardless of weather or circumstance.
Christmas morning felt like Christmas morning.
She had never been able to explain this more precisely than that.
She lay in the narrow bed in Mrs. Connelly's boarding house — her boarding house now, in the sense of a place that had accepted her and adjusted to include her, with the workroom on the ground floor and the monthly rate and the specific knowledge of the stove's December moods — and she looked at the ceiling in the particular gray-gold of Christmas morning light and thought about what had happened on the step outside.
She was engaged.
She tested this thought the way you tested the quality of a fabric: held it up, applied a slight pressure, assessed the response.
The thought held up. It did not produce the feeling she had feared might accompany a decision made on the basis of nineteen days of acquaintance, which was the feeling of having moved too fast, of having applied insufficient scrutiny, of having been carried by momentum into something that required more deliberation.
It produced the opposite. It produced the feeling she associated with decisions that were correct: the specific, quiet rightness of a thing that has found its proper place.
She got up. She dressed. She opened her Bible to the Psalms, which was where she went on mornings that required the largest frameworks, and she read for twenty minutes in the Christmas morning light. Then she put the Bible on the bedside table and went downstairs.
Mrs. Connelly was in the kitchen, making something that smelled like Christmas.
"Merry Christmas," Mercy said.
"Merry Christmas," Mrs. Connelly said. "You look like someone who slept well."
"I slept very well," Mercy said.
Mrs. Connelly looked at her with the comprehensive observation of a woman who had been running a boarding house for fifteen years and had developed the ability to read the people in it. "The sheriff walked you home," she said.
"Yes," Mercy said.
"Anything I should know?" Mrs. Connelly said.
Mercy sat down at the kitchen table. "We're engaged," she said.
Mrs. Connelly set down the spoon she was holding and looked at Mercy with an expression that was warm and direct and entirely characteristic. "Good," she said. Then: "When?"
"After Christmas," Mercy said. "When the road is clear for Reverend Hobart."
Mrs. Connelly picked up the spoon. "I'll need to find another boarder for the room," she said. "Or not. Depending on the arrangement."
"I'll keep the workroom," Mercy said. "The living arrangement is to be determined."
"His house is three rooms," Mrs. Connelly said. "Plain but sound. He'll want you to make it less plain. He just won't know to ask."
Mercy thought about a three-room house that was scrupulously clean and probably contained nothing decorative whatsoever, which was the house of a man who had been living for function for twenty years. She thought about what function-plus-inhabited looked like. She thought about curtains.
"I expect I'll manage that," she said.
* * *
Nathaniel appeared at Mrs. Connelly's at ten o'clock with a gift under his arm, which Mrs. Connelly announced with the satisfaction of someone who had been waiting to see what he would do.
The gift was a length of cloth.
Not wrapped — he had wrapped it in brown paper tied with string, in the plain functional way of a man whose gift-wrapping instincts were practical rather than decorative, but inside the paper was a length of cloth that was a deep, specific red-gold the color of the Colorado peaks at sunset, the color that happened in the mountains at the hour before dark when the light did the thing it only did here.
Mercy held it in her hands and looked at it.
"I asked Mrs. Pearce," he said. "She said bring fabric and I said I don't know what kind and she said the red-gold from McKinley's, it's been there six months and it's for someone specific."
Mercy looked up at him. "Mrs. Pearce said it was for someone specific?"
"She said she'd been keeping it for the right person," he said. "I told her what I was looking for and she said that's the one."
Mercy thought about Mrs. Pearce keeping six-year-old green wool for the right seamstress and this red-gold for the right person, and about the specific quality of small communities where the right things were held for the right people because someone was paying attention.
"It's beautiful," she said.
"I know very little about fabric," he said. "But it looked like something you would use well."
She looked at the cloth in her hands. It did look like something she would use well. It looked like a dress, or a shawl, or the lining of something significant, or all three — the cloth was good enough to do several things with and she would think about the right one.
"Thank you," she said. "I have something for you as well."
She went to the workroom and came back with it.
A pair of gloves, which she had made over the previous week in the evenings, from leather she had sourced from McKinley's — good leather, thick but supple, the kind that would last in hard use and improve with the use.
She had sewn them with the same thread she used for everything important, the strong thread that was the backbone of good construction.
She had embroidered the inside of each cuff with a small star — not decorative but structural, the kind of star that was a reinforcement as well as a marking, that said: these gloves are for someone specific, and the star is the reminder.
He turned them over in his hands.
"The stars," he said.
"Inside," she said. "So only you see them."
He looked at the gloves for a long moment. She watched him look at them and thought: there is a man who has been given something that was made for him specifically, and he is understanding this, and the understanding is landing.
"Mercy," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"I am going to be very glad," he said, "for the rest of my life, that the stage wheel came off on the first of December."
She felt the warmth of this — the specific warmth of a man who was not generally given to expressions of this kind and was making an exception because the thing was true and he had decided to say true things.
"So am I," she said.
Mrs. Connelly appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Christmas dinner is at noon," she said. "If you're both going to be standing in my hallway looking at each other, you can come into the kitchen and look at each other there where it's warm."
They came into the kitchen, where it was warm, and Christmas dinner was at noon, and it was the first of the Christmases they would have together, and it was good.
* * *
In the afternoon they went to the Caldwell ranch.
Clara had invited them — both of them, with the specific social management that was characteristic, the invitation that said: you are together and you should be together here with us on Christmas afternoon.
They drove out in the wagon Mercy had arranged, with the red-gold cloth packed in its paper in her carpetbag and the gloves on his hands, and the mountains were doing their Christmas afternoon version of the extraordinary thing they always did, the low December sun hitting the peaks in the specific way that made the snow look like it was lit from within.
Nora came running to the gate when they arrived.
She looked at the two of them on the wagon with the comprehensive assessment that was her particular talent, and her face went through several things very quickly, and arrived at the expression of a person whose prediction has been precisely confirmed.
"You're engaged," she said.
Mercy looked at Nathaniel. He looked at her. They looked at Nora.
"Yes," Mercy said.
Nora took a breath. She looked like someone who had been holding something carefully for a long time and was now setting it down. "Good," she said. "I told Clem you would be by January. I was wrong about the timing but right about the direction."
"When did you tell Clem?" Mercy said.
"October," Nora said. "When I read your handwriting."
Nathaniel looked at the eight-year-old. She looked back at him with Ruth's eyes — the measuring, present eyes that had, apparently, been measuring correctly since October.
"Nora," he said.
"Yes?"
"Thank you," he said. Not for the prediction. She would understand what it was for.
She did. "You're welcome," she said, and opened the gate.
They came in out of the cold, into the kitchen that smelled of the Christmas dinner Clara had been making and of wood smoke and the lavender in the walls and the pine tree that was in the sitting room, and Elias shook Nathaniel's hand with the brief, firm warmth of a man who was genuinely glad and did not require to say so at length, and Clara looked at them both and said: "We're glad," and that was sufficient.
They spent the afternoon in the kitchen and the sitting room, all of them, with the particular warmth of a Christmas afternoon in a household that was entirely inhabited, and Nora showed Mercy the alphabet cards that Clara had made for her birthday, and Nathaniel and Elias talked about the south pasture and the spring herd expansion and the fence line that was always needing attention, and Clara and Mercy talked about the workroom and the Pearce commission and what could be done with red-gold cloth.
Clem appeared for supper, as he always appeared, and looked at the assembled group with the patient satisfaction of a man who had watched things develop over a long time and was glad to see them concluded. He did not say anything about any of it. He did not need to.
"The mules are settling into their names," he said, instead. This was addressed to Nora.
Nora looked at him with the expression of someone receiving capitulation with appropriate grace. "I thought they would," she said.
Clem ate his supper and said nothing more about it, and the kitchen was warm, and outside the Colorado winter was doing its Colorado winter thing, which was to be enormous and cold and full of stars, and inside the house there was the warmth of people who had chosen to be together and were glad of the choice.