Chapter 15
February came in gray, and by the second week Charles had stopped speaking.
Not altogether. He said good morning. The Kinney boy's chest was better, he said, and the passes were still shut.
On the afternoons he took Antonia, he said, "Get your coat," and he took her less.
But the other warmth, the one that had come into the house with the spruce, had gone out of it again.
He sat at the table with his daybook and wrote in it.
When Olivia looked up from the settle, he did not look down. He was not looking.
She knew the date. Harriet had told her in December. The tenth of February. But she had not needed Harriet to tell her that the tenth was coming. Ten years of nursing a dying woman had taught her what a house did as a date came on.
On the sixth, he rode out to a cabin on the far side of the mine road. The wind that day was taking shingles off the church.
"It's a sprain," she said, at the door, with her shawl over her head. "The boy said so. A sprained wrist. It will keep until the wind drops."
"He said he thought it was a sprain."
"Charles."
He was already on the horse. He looked down at her from under his hat. His face was the face from the platform in December, the one that read from a list.
"If a patient of mine rode out in this," he said, "I would tell him he was a fool."
"Then don't."
"It's a sprain," he said, and went.
He came back at dark with ice in his beard and the news that it had been a sprain.
His hands were so cold that he could not undo his own coat, and he would not let her do it.
On the eighth he did the same, to the camp, for a man with a cough.
On the ninth he went nowhere, because there was nowhere left to go.
He sat in the surgery with the door shut until midnight.
Olivia left the door alone. She had learned it.
Antonia had learned it too. She sat on her stool those evenings with the notebook on her knees and did not write in it.
When the surgery door opened at last, and the doctor came through the kitchen to the stairs, she looked up.
He went past. It was the way he had walked past her in October, before the atlas.
* * *
On the tenth, Reverend Bowen came, in the afternoon, and asked to see the doctor in the vestry.
The reverend used the vestry when he wanted to say what ought not to be overheard.
Everyone in the camp knew it. Charles went.
He went the way he went to a confinement, with his coat buttoned and his face shut.
Olivia watched him down the steps. The reverend, she thought, was a braver man than he looked.
She gave it half an hour. Then she put the coffeepot on.
It was a small kindness. Two men in a cold room on a hard day. A pot of coffee brought down the hill in a basket with a cloth over it. Her mother's minister had taken coffee that way for ten years, in the sickroom, and it had made the hard conversations easier. It was what a wife did.
The church was empty. She went through it with the basket, past the pew where they had sung, and down the little passage to the vestry door. It was shut. She could hear the reverend's voice through it, low and even, the way it was from the pulpit.
She stopped with her hand raised to knock.
"...not asking you to forget her, Charles.
Nobody could. I am asking whether you have let yourself see what is in front of you.
You have a wife in that house. A good woman, and a brave one.
I married you to her myself. It is three years today, and I understand that.
But it is three years, and there is a woman in your kitchen who... "
"I married her for the child."
Charles's voice was too loud. It was the voice of a man who has been cornered and knows it. A man who would rather say the wrong thing at the top of his lungs than the right thing quietly.
"I put an advertisement in a paper because Harriet stood on the church steps and told me to.
I wanted a mother for the girl. I got one.
She keeps the house. She minds the child.
Never once has she asked me for anything I did not put in writing, and that is the whole of it, Josiah.
That is the whole of it. I wanted nothing more.
I want nothing more. And I would be obliged if you would not stand in this room, on this day of all days, and tell me what is in my kitchen. "
There was a silence.
Olivia stood in the passage with the basket on her arm. She heard the reverend begin to answer, gently. What it was, she did not hear.
The basket went down on the floor outside the door, without a sound, with the cloth still over it so the coffee would keep. Then she turned and went back up the passage, through the church, out.
She walked home through the snow.
She walked at her usual pace, with her face perfectly composed. Anyone meeting her on Silver Street would have seen the doctor's wife going up the hill in her gray wool, with her hands in her muff. Looking at the path in front of her as she looked at it every day.
Nobody met her. The wind had the street to itself. Below the church, the mine wheel turned in the gray. It had turned exactly like that three years ago today, she thought, while a woman lay dying in the house she now kept. She had brought him coffee for it.
At the house, she took off her boots and hung up her shawl. She went into the kitchen and lit the lamp.
Then she began the supper.
* * *
There were no tears. Ten years had passed since she had last shed one. She did not see why she should begin now, over a term she had been told in ink before she ever bought her ticket.
He had said he could not promise affection.
He had written it. She had read it, at the sill in the attic, and she had come anyway.
Whatever she had let herself think since then, on a hill at dawn or over an ink bottle, was her own doing and nobody else's.
He had not lied. What he had told the reverend was exactly what he had told her.
The only difference was that this time she had heard it through a door.
So there was nothing to accuse him of.
And nothing to say.
When he came in at dark, she had his supper on the table. She said good evening. She asked whether the reverend was well. He said the reverend was well, and looked at her once, quickly. She gave him the face she had given Cora across the sewing for six months. Courteous. Attentive. Closed.
He did not ask what was wrong. She would not have told him.
After that, the house went back to the first week.
It happened by degrees, the way the warmth had come, only the other way. She kept every term. The stove was lit. Meals were on the table. The books were done on the last day of the month, at the kitchen table. The ink bottle sat between them where neither of them need reach across.
She called him Dr. Aldridge, as she had on the platform. She said good night at the foot of the stairs and went up. She shut her door. Then she turned the key, for the first time since the wedding.
Not to keep him out. He had never tried to come in.
To hear it turn.
He noticed. She saw him notice. On the third night, he stood in the hall with his daybook under his arm, looking at her shut door.
She watched him through the crack of it.
He was trying to name what had changed, and he could not.
His was the face of a man who has heard a bone go and cannot find which one.
Neither of them said a word about it.
The chess set went back in its box.
* * *
Antonia felt winter come back indoors, and did not know why.
She had felt it go. That was the worst of it.
She had felt the house warm through December, room by room.
Then on Christmas Eve there had been that laugh on the hill, and the three of them standing in the stars.
Somewhere in those weeks she had unpacked the carpetbag.
Not by deciding to. One morning the dress was on the hook, the bag was empty, and she had let it stay so.
Now the cold was back. Not in the stove. The stove was fine. In the way Mrs. Aldridge said good night. In the way the doctor sat at the table and did not look up. In the ink bottle, set in the middle where it had never been set before.
She watched. In the notebook, under Observations, she wrote that the doctor and Mrs. Aldridge had stopped. She did not know what they had stopped. Nobody was going to tell her.
Then, on the fourteenth, she looked at the calendar.
It hung on the kitchen wall by the door.
It was the mercantile's calendar, with a picture of a steamship on it, and the doctor wrote on it in his small hand.
Confinements. Calls. The days the mail sledge was due.
She had looked at it a hundred times. But she had never before turned the pages forward, and now, while Mrs. Aldridge was in the parlor, she did.
February. March.
April.
There was a circle on the first of April. It was in the doctor's ink, drawn carefully, as he did his lists. Beside it, in the same small hand, was one word.
Society.
Antonia stood in front of it.
She had known. Until spring. The paper on the hall table, the pen in Nebraska, every door on the line. Then she had let herself forget it for a while, because of a spruce, a button, a laugh.
That had been foolish.
She let the pages fall back to February. Then she went upstairs, quietly, so that nobody would hear.
The carpetbag was in the corner under the window. She opened it. The brown dress came off the hook. She folded it the way the Society had taught her and laid it in the bottom. The nightgown next. The stockings. She did it slowly and neatly, with nothing wasted, as if she were stringing popcorn.
The notebook stayed out. She was still using it.
Then she set the bag behind the door, where it was out of the way, and where she could reach it. She went back down to the kitchen and sat on her stool.
Ready. It was best to be ready before they told you.