Chapter 5
Mrs. Purdy gave her notice on a Tuesday, at seven in the morning, with her bonnet still on.
She stood in the kitchen doorway with her basket over her arm and did not come in. Charles was at the table with his coffee. He understood from the bonnet what was coming before she opened her mouth. Outside, it had begun to snow again, a thin, dry snow that did not settle.
"I'll not do it, Doctor. I've thought on it. I've prayed on it. And I'll not."
"Do what, Mrs. Purdy?"
"Keep house for a fire-jinx." She said it fast, as if the words were hot.
"I've a nephew on the night shift, as I told you.
I've a sister with three boys at the Pemberton.
My Alfred went down that shaft twenty years before his chest took him.
I'll not bring a curse on the men that's left.
Not for two dollars a month. Not for twenty. "
Charles set down his cup.
"The child is eight years old. She weighs perhaps fifty pounds. She has not spoken one word in this house since she came. What is it you imagine she will do to your nephew?"
"It isn't what she does. It's what follows her."
Mrs. Purdy looked past him. Antonia was on the stool in the corner by the stove, where she sat every morning. Her hands were around her knees. Her carpetbag was at her feet. She was listening.
"I'm sorry for her," Mrs. Purdy said, lower. "God knows I am. But I've a family. I've said my say."
"Then you'll want your wages."
He paid her from the tin on the shelf. She took the coins without counting them, which was unlike her, and went. The door shut. That was the end of eleven years of Mrs. Purdy.
By sundown half the town knew it.
He heard it at the mercantile, where the storekeeper's wife stopped talking when he came in. She sold him his tobacco with her eyes on the counter. He heard it at the livery, which smelled of hay and wet leather, where two men by the stove did not stop talking at all.
"Walked right out. Basket on her arm."
"Can't blame her. Not with her sister's boys underground."
"Doctor's a clever man."
"Clever's one thing. A man can be clever and a fool the same day."
Charles collected his horse and said good afternoon to them both. They said good afternoon to him.
At eleven that night, a boy came for him from the cabins up the creek, where a woman was in labor with her fourth.
It was a long labor. The fourth was a boy, small and furious.
The father wept. Charles walked home down the creek path with the lantern swinging and his mind on nothing, which was how he liked it. He was gone until three.
The house was dark when he came back, as it always was. But when he went through to the kitchen to warm his hands, the stove was dead. The room was as cold as the porch.
The child was asleep on the stool.
She sat with her back to the wall and her chin on her chest, still in her dress.
The blanket from her bed was pulled around her shoulders.
She had not gone up. Beside the stove was the woodbox, full.
Beside the woodbox were the kindling and the matches, laid out on the floor in a row.
Someone had set them there ready. Then someone had been unable to go on.
He stood over the row of matches for some time.
She had brought the wood. She had laid the kindling in order, the way Mrs. Purdy laid it. Then she had come to the iron door of the stove, and had not been able to open it.
Charles knelt and laid the fire himself, quietly, so as not to wake her. When it caught, he picked her up, blanket and all. She weighed nothing. He carried her to bed without waking her.
Then he sat in the cold kitchen with his coat on, waiting for the stove to warm. The silence in the house had a new quality to it. He had not known it could.
It was guilty.
* * *
Harriet Bowen caught him at the church door on Sunday before he could get down the steps.
She did it the way she did all her errands, at full volume and without apology. A round, quick woman in a knitted shawl, she planted herself on the step below him so that he would have had to walk through her to leave.
"Dr. Aldridge. A word."
"Mrs. Bowen. I have a call at the mine."
"You have a call at the mine every hour God sends. The mine was there before you, and it will be there after. This won't take long."
She glanced past him at the child, who stood on the porch with her carpetbag, waiting to be told where to go. "Antonia, dear, go and stand by the reverend. He has a peppermint in his left pocket, and he's too shy to offer it."
Antonia went. She stood beside the reverend, who looked down at her in mild surprise, felt in his left pocket, and found that his wife was right. Harriet turned back.
"I hear Ada Purdy's left you."
"You and the rest of the county."
"Then I'll say what the rest of the county's too polite to say to your face.
That girl needs a mother's hand. Not a bachelor's housekeeping.
Not a locked surgery door with her supper under a cloth.
A mother, Charles. Somebody in that house who is there when she wakes and there when she sleeps.
Somebody who talks to her. Because I don't believe you've said fifty words to the child in three weeks. "
"She doesn't speak, Mrs. Bowen."
"That's not what I asked."
He had no answer for that. He looked over her head at the gulch, at the gray boards and the raw yellow ones, at the mine wheel turning above it all.
"The girl leaves in the spring," he said. "The agent comes back with the thaw. There is no sense in..."
"Spring." Harriet said the word as if she were setting it on a table to look at. "Spring is a poor excuse for a man ducking plain duty, and you know it. It's October. That's five months if the passes open early, and seven if they don't. What's she to do meanwhile? Raise herself?"
"I've managed."
"You have not managed. Ada Purdy managed.
Now Ada's gone, and you're out at all hours with nobody in that house but a child who won't go near the stove.
" She saw his face change, and nodded. "Yes.
I know about that. Josiah saw the kindling on the floor when he called on Thursday.
He came home and sat down and didn't say a word for an hour.
My husband is not a man who is easily quieted. "
Charles said nothing.
Harriet reached into the reticule on her wrist and took out a folded newspaper. She held it out to him.
"My sister in Boston sends me this. She thinks it's a scandal, and she reads every line. It's a matrimonial paper. Men out here advertise for wives back East, and the wives come. It's done all the time now. Half the married women on Silver Street came that way. You've delivered their babies."
His hands stayed in his pockets.
"You brought that to church."
"I brought it to you. Church was where you'd be." She pushed it into his hand. "You're a widower of thirty-six with a house, a practice, and a child in your care. That's not a tragedy, Charles. That's an advertisement. Write it plain, and post it Tuesday."
He walked home up the steps with the paper in his pocket and the child a pace behind him. Halfway up he heard a small sound and turned. She had the peppermint in her cheek. Her face was as still as ever, but her eyes had gone to the mine wheel, then to him, then away.
"Mrs. Bowen is a great deal of noise," he said, for want of better.
Antonia gave no answer. But she moved the peppermint to the other cheek, and kept pace with him the rest of the way.
* * *
Tuesday was too far off. He wrote it that night.
At the surgery desk, with the paper spread under the lamp, he read the columns twice.
They were worse than he had expected. Ranchers who described themselves as of pleasing appearance.
Miners who promised a life of ease. A widower in Oregon who wanted a helpmeet of cheerful disposition with good teeth, and said so.
A rancher in Wyoming wanted a girl not above twenty-two, and had underlined it.
Before he took up the pen, he went to the parlor door and looked in.
The child was asleep in her corner, with the atlas shut on her knees. The lamp had burned down. Her hair had come loose from its braid and lay over her face. In her sleep she had one hand closed tight around a small hard shape in her stocking. He did not know what. Nor had he ever asked.
Back at the desk, he took a clean sheet.
He had written a great many pages in his life.
Case notes. Prescriptions. Letters to the company about the creek.
He had never written anything meant to make a person choose him, and he found that he did not know how.
So he wrote the only way he knew, which was the way he wrote a diagnosis.
Plainly. Everything that was so. Nothing that was not.
A physician, aged thirty-six, widowed three years, in sole practice in a silver camp in the Colorado mountains, seeks correspondence with a sensible woman of good character, with a view to marriage.
He read it over. True, all of it. He went on.
There is in his household a motherless girl of eight years, placed in his care, who has known great sorrow and needs a woman's hand. The house is plain but comfortable, the practice steady. The town is small and rough. The winters are long.
What the advertiser can promise is respect, an honest living, and a home. He does not pretend to promise more than he has, and would ask the same honesty in return.
He stopped there. Twice he read it over. It was as honest as he knew how to be, and it was enough. A woman reading it would know exactly what she was answering.
He dipped the pen to sign it.
Then, without deciding to, he wrote one line more.
The mountain winters are very long, and a house with one person in it is a lonely place.
He sat over that for a while.
Then he folded the sheet. He put it in an envelope with the fee and addressed it to the paper in Boston.
He sealed it with the same care he gave to a bandage.
It was an arrangement, he told himself. A matter of practical necessity.
A child who needed minding, a man who could not mind her, and a sensible woman somewhere who would see it in those terms, as he did. Nothing else.
The envelope went on the hall table for the morning post.
He left it where it lay, with its last line inside it. He turned down the lamp and went to bed.
Sleep was a long time coming.