Chapter 7
The first letter from Boston came on the second of November. Charles read it standing up in the depot, with the wind coming through the cracks in the boards.
He had not expected an answer. He had told himself so every mail day for three weeks. Now there was a square envelope in a firm, upright hand. He found he had read it through twice before he had properly decided to open it.
I would rather be cold in Colorado than furniture in Boston.
"Good news, Doc?" the station agent asked, from behind his grille.
"A reply to a letter, Amos. Nothing more."
He put it in his coat and walked home up the gulch without noticing the climb.
That night he answered it. He sat at the surgery desk, as before, and wrote as before, because he did not know another way.
He set down his circumstances the way he would have set down symptoms. Income, so much a year, paid partly in coin and partly in kind.
A frame house of five rooms, one of them a surgery, on the upper street.
A practice that took him out at all hours and in all weathers.
A girl of eight, placed in his care by the Children's Aid Society, who did not speak.
About Maggie he wrote nothing. Widowed, with the year, and he left it there.
The rest he listed plainly. When he had finished, it looked exactly like a case history.
He came close to burning it. Then he thought of her line about furniture, and sent it anyway.
Her reply came in ten days.
She did not seem to mind the case history. She answered it with one of her own. Ten years in a sickroom. Fevers, dropsy, a broken hip that never mended. She could set out instruments, keep a ledger, and make a chicken go three days.
There was nothing in it about being cheerful, or pleasing, or any of the words the paper was full of.
She said she did not complain, because she had found it wasted the breath.
And at the end she wrote, You said the girl does not speak.
Does she listen? In my experience that is the more useful of the two.
Charles read that at the table with Antonia across from him, watching.
He looked at her over the top of the page. She was listening.
"Yes," he said aloud, to nobody. "She does."
Antonia went on eating. But she had heard the word Boston, he thought, and the word she. Her spoon had slowed.
* * *
The third letter was the hard one.
He had known it would have to be written. He had known it since the first, and he had put it off through two, telling himself it could wait. It could not wait.
If the woman came, she would come to a town that pulled its skirts aside from the child in his house.
She had a right to know that before she bought her ticket.
To bring her out under any other terms would be to win a wife by false pretenses.
He had not lied to a patient in eleven years. He did not mean to start now.
So he wrote the whole of it. Three times. The first draft made the town sound worse than it was, and the second made it sound better. The third he sent.
He wrote about the fire in New York, as much as the agent had told him. Then the train, with its twenty-two other children, and the seven stops at which nobody had chosen her. Then the name.
They call her a jinx, Miss Baker. The whole camp does.
A boy on the train invented it, so far as I can learn.
It came up the mountain with her, and it has followed her through this town ever since like a stray dog.
My housekeeper of eleven years has left rather than cook for her.
Women cross the street. There is not a household in Galena Springs that would take her. That is the only reason she is in mine.
I do not believe a word of it. I want to be clear on that.
I am a physician. I have seen fire, fever, and falling rock enough to know that none of them cares in the least who is standing nearby.
But I am one man. The town is eleven hundred.
A woman who comes here will be the wife of the man who keeps the jinx.
I cannot make that easier than it is. I can only tell you so before you decide.
He sealed it and posted it. Then he did not sleep well for ten days.
* * *
Her answer came on the twenty-fourth of November, in the same upright hand. It was shorter than the others.
Dr. Aldridge,
I thank you for the honesty of your last. It cannot have been easy to write. I will try to answer it in kind.
I have spent ten years among the educated people of Boston, who have physicians on every street and a college across the river.
I have listened to them explain my mother's illness.
It was the bad air off the flats. Her blood, weak on her father's side.
Ill luck, a chill taken at a funeral, a judgment, a draft.
I heard every one of these from people with letters after their names. Not one of them ever cured anything.
So I am afraid your town does not shock me as much as you hoped it might.
Grown people will blame bad air, bad blood, or bad luck for whatever they cannot mend.
They will blame it loudest when they are frightened.
Your miners are frightened. That is no wonder, in the trade they follow.
But a grieving child is not a weather omen.
I have never yet met a curse that could stand up to a hot dinner and a clean bed.
You say you are one man and the town is eleven hundred. Very well. If I come, you will be two.
I remain, sir, yours,
Olivia Baker
He read it in the depot, as he read all of them. Then he read it walking home. Then he read it at the surgery desk. He read it again at breakfast the next morning, with his coffee going cold at his elbow and the page propped against the sugar bowl.
The child came in without his hearing her.
He did not know how long she had been standing at the corner of the table before he looked up. She was in her stocking feet, with her hair unbrushed. She was looking at the letter, not at him.
Then her eyes came up to his.
"Does the Boston lady know about me?"
Charles sat very still.
Her voice was small, and hoarse from want of use.
The words came out one at a time, as if she were setting them on the table between them and was not sure they would bear weight.
It was the first time in fifty-eight days that he had heard her speak.
He knew the number. Until that moment he had not known that he knew it.
He put the letter down very carefully.
"Yes," he said. "She knows everything. I told her about the fire, the train, what they call you here. All of it."
Antonia's eyes went back to the page.
"And she's coming anyway," he said. "Before spring. Well before spring."
She stood there a moment longer. He watched her take it in, the way he had watched her take in the bones of the hand. From one end to the other and back. Then she nodded, once, and went to her stool by the stove. She sat down with her hands around her knees.
That was all she said that day.
The house was not the same house it had been at breakfast.
* * *
He proposed by post on the twenty-fifth of November.
The letter was written the way he had written the advertisement, and for the same reason. He did not know how to make it pretty. He thought that she, of all people, would rather it were true. So he set out terms.
Marriage, with respect and an honest living, as advertised.
A room of her own in his house, which she would keep as she pleased and which he would not enter uninvited.
The household money, to manage as she saw fit, without accounting to him for it.
And the child, for as long as the child was his to offer.
What he thought would happen in the spring, he left out. He had no answer to it.
As for affection, he wrote that he could not promise it, because he did not know whether he had any left to give. He would not promise what he could not deliver. She would have his gratitude, his protection, and his name. He would try to be a fair man to live with.
He read it through. It was the most honest page he had ever written. He thought it was probably also the coldest, and he could not see how to make it warmer without making it false.
At the end he wrote, The passes are still open, but they will not stay so. If your answer is yes, I would ask you to wire it, and to come at once. If it is no, I will understand it, and I will not write again.
It went out on the Wednesday.
After that, the mail came on Mondays and Thursdays. Charles Aldridge had not waited for anything in three years. Now he found himself standing at the depot window on both of those days, with his hands in his pockets. He watched the line where the track came around the shoulder of the mountain.
He told himself he was there for the medical journal. There was such a journal, and he did subscribe to it.
But the journal came on Thursdays only. He was there on Mondays too, in the wind, with his collar up, looking for the smoke. Amos the station agent had known him eleven years. He took to nodding at the doctor without comment, the way one nods at a man who has come down with a fever.
"Cold to be standing, Doc."
"I've stood in colder."
"That you have." Amos went back to his ledger. "Thursday's train is generally the fuller one, if that's any help to you."
It was no help. Charles stood on the Monday anyway.
The snow came in earnest that week. It lay a foot deep on the upper street. The mine wheel turned in a white haze, and the cabins up the creek were cut off for two days. The passes were still open, Amos said. For now.
The answer came on the fourth of December. It was a telegram, one line, and she had paid for it by the word.
Yes. Leave Boston sixth. Tell the child.
She had spent three of her words on the child. He read it four times before he took that in.
He told the child. Straight up the gulch he went, and into the kitchen with his hat still on. She was on her stool by the stove, with the atlas on her knees.
"She's coming," he said. "She leaves on the sixth. She'll be here inside a week."
Antonia's eyes went to him. Then to the calendar on the wall by the door, where December was, and spring was not.
She said nothing. But she got down off the stool and went to the window.
She stood there looking down the gulch toward the depot, as if the train might already be coming around the shoulder of the mountain.
He stood beside her for a while, with his hat still on.
Thirty-six years old, and he had waited for nothing in three years. For one unguarded moment he felt exactly like a much younger man.