Epilogue Six Months Later · June 1885
The house had curtains now.
This was the first thing that most people noticed when they visited, though they did not always register that they were noticing it, because the effect was not ostentatious — the curtains were not decorative in the showy sense, not the elaborate confections of valance and fringe that fashion sometimes demanded.
They were good fabric, well-made, hung correctly, doing what curtains did when they were done right: making the light in a room different from the light outside it, warmer and more specific, the light of a place that has been inhabited rather than merely occupied.
Mercy had made them in February, in the workroom at what was now his house as well as her workroom, from a deep red cloth that she had found in McKinley's and that was, she had decided, right for the windows of a house that had been three plain rooms and was becoming something more than three plain rooms.
The house had changed in other ways. There was a bookshelf where there had been wall.
There were two chairs by the stove instead of one.
There was a quilt on the bed that she had made in the evenings, from the pieces she had accumulated over years of work — the good remnants, the ones that were too good to discard — assembled into something that was a record of her professional life, all the good cloth in it, all the history.
There was also, on the shelf beside the Bible, a photograph.
Not a daguerreotype — they had sat for a proper photograph in April, at the traveling photographer who came through the valley.
The two of them, standing in the front of the house with the mountains behind.
She was in the navy dress she had made for herself, the blue-black wool.
He was in his good coat. They were not looking at the camera but at each other, which had not been planned and which the photographer had caught because it was happening and he had been paying attention.
It was a good photograph. She had put it on the shelf because she wanted it where she could see it, not for vanity, but because it said something true about the two of them and she found that looking at true things was restorative.
* * *
The workroom occupied the front room of the house, which had been the room with the least-good light and had turned out to have the best light when the south window was unobstructed, which it had been since the juniper that had grown in front of it was cut back in January.
She had more work than she had expected.
The valley needed a seamstress and had been without one and was making up for the deficit with enthusiasm.
She had three active commissions in June — the Granger daughter's second dress, a set of boys' school shirts for the youngest Pearce family, and a commission from a new family who had come to the valley in the spring and who needed curtains and a parlor set of covers.
She was building a waiting list, which was the sign of a business that was right for its place.
She worked four mornings a week and took Tuesdays and Thursdays for the ranch visits that were becoming their own kind of commission — the ongoing relationship with the Caldwell household, which was simultaneously professional and personal in the specific way that happened when you were part of a community that was also your community.
Clara had become the closest thing to a sister she had had since leaving Ohio.
Not identical — Clara was more organized, more systematic, brought a schoolteacher's precision to everything including friendship.
Mercy brought a different kind of precision, the seamstress's kind, the kind that was about fit and proportion and the specific relationship between a material and the person it was for.
They argued about some things and agreed about most things and found each other's company improving.
Nora had become — she was not sure what the word was.
Not a daughter, Nora had a mother in the specific sense that Mercy would not claim.
But something like a daughter-in-spirit, the child of the family she had joined, the person whose specific quality of attention she returned with her own specific quality of attention, and who reminded her regularly, by means of the theological observations that were her primary mode of expression, of what the important things were.
* * *
Nathaniel was not the same man he had been in December.
This was not entirely accurate — he was the same man in the ways that mattered, in the foundation of him, the honesty and the competence and the specific quality of attention he brought to the things he cared about.
But the surface had changed, or rather the surface was closer to the interior than it had been, the gap between the managed version and the actual version narrowing month by month.
He sat in the front pew now, every Sunday.
He prayed in the mornings — not in any formal way, not with the elaborate ritual of some men's prayer, but with the straightforward quality he brought to everything, the conversation of a man who had decided someone was listening and was talking accordingly.
He talked to Hobart on occasional Tuesday mornings in the church, which Hobart received with the satisfaction of a man watching a long project arrive at its intended conclusion.
He laughed more. This was the thing she noticed most, because it was the thing that had been most completely absent before — not the sound of laughter, which he had produced occasionally with the controlled quality of someone allowing themselves a carefully bounded response, but actual laughter, the unmanaged kind, the kind that arrived when something was genuinely funny and the person encountering it was present enough to be genuinely affected by it.
Nora could produce this most reliably, with her specific observations about the intelligence of county residents across species.
Mercy could produce it by saying the precise true thing about a situation in the way that she sometimes said the precise true thing, with the particular dry quality that was simply how her mind worked.
He had told her, in April, that she was the funniest person he had known since Thomas Ely, which she had understood as the specific compliment it was.
He told her about Thomas more now. Not as grief — the grief had done what it needed to do in the winter months, arriving and being processed and becoming bearable in the way that Mercy had told him things became bearable when you went back to find them.
He told her about Thomas as someone he had known, the way you told someone about a person who had mattered and who deserved to be told about.
She listened. She had never met Thomas Ely of Vermont and felt she had known him for years.
* * *
In June the valley was the version of itself that Nora had described when she named her horse: the columbine blue of it, the vivid, grateful green of the high summer grass, the snow retreated to the upper reaches of the peaks, the creek running high and clear and cold.
They walked along the creek on a Saturday morning in June, the two of them, with Absalom tethered at the ranch while they went on foot, because walking was still their primary means of saying the things that needed saying, and on foot was how they had said most of the important things and they saw no reason to change.
"There," Mercy said.
The columbine. The bend in the creek where Clara had found them in early June, and where Mercy was finding them now for the first time, in the pocket of bank that caught the morning sun and held it, the blue-and-yellow flowers on their delicate stems, thirty of them or more, nodding in the light June air.
"Colorado's flower," Nathaniel said.
"Nora said that's what the state looks like when it's itself," Mercy said. "She was right."
He looked at the flowers and then at her and then at the mountains above the creek, which were themselves in the June version: green and specific and enormous. "She usually is," he said.
Mercy crouched down and looked at the columbine at close range.
The petals were the particular blue that was neither blue nor purple but exactly between, and the centers were a yellow that was neither gold nor butter but exactly between, and the whole thing was the kind of thing that made you understand that precision was not cold — that the most precisely right thing was also the most beautiful, that specificity and beauty were not in tension but the same thing expressed in different registers.
She thought about that. About specificity and beauty.
About the specific man standing behind her and what he had looked like in December, and what he looked like now, and how the two things were the same person in the way the columbine in December, dormant and invisible under the snow, was the same flower as the one she was looking at now.
She stood. She turned.
He was looking at her with the open face — the full-eyes expression that Nora had named and that Mercy had watched develop and that was simply, now, how he looked. Not a special expression, not the face of a particular moment. Just his face.
"I want to tell you something," she said.
"Tell me," he said.
"I am in the right place," she said. "I've been looking for it for three years and longer than that if I'm honest. And I found it.
Not just the geography — the geography is extraordinary, but I've been in extraordinary places that weren't right.
The right place is this: you and Pinecrest and the workroom and the Caldwells and Nora's observations and Mrs. Connelly's stove and Mrs. Pearce's bees and Hobart's front-pew theory.
" She looked at him. "You specifically. You are the reason the rest of it is the right place rather than a very good place. I want you to know that."
He stood in the June morning by the columbine-blue creek with the mountains above and looked at her the way she had been telling him from the beginning that she wanted to be looked at: specifically. As the particular person she was rather than the category of person she occupied.
"I know," he said. "The same is true for me. I want you to know that as well."
"I do," she said.
"Good," he said.
They stood by the creek in the June light, and the columbine was blue and the mountains were themselves and the right place was entirely, completely, specifically right, and there was nothing left to say except that it was good and that they both knew it, and they walked back toward the ranch hand in hand in the Colorado June morning, which was everything Colorado June could be.
Which was, by any reckoning, more than enough.
～ The End ～
The Lawman's Christmas Gift · A Prairie Christmas Series, Book Two
Continue with:
Book Three — A Homestead for Holly
Book Four — The Doctor's Christmas Promise