Chapter 24
They married in the last heat of the summer, in the little Hill Country church at the end of the single street. The morning was so bright the limestone walls seemed to give off light of their own.
Samantha wore a gown the neighbor wives had sewn her.
It was white and plain. It fit her as nothing had ever fit her in her life.
Six women had measured her for it with their mouths full of pins.
The red-faced woman had done the sleeves.
The storekeeper’s wife had done the collar, and had cried over it, though she said it was the starch.
There was no veil. Samantha had not wanted one.
She had spent twelve years with her face hidden. She meant to be married with it plain.
Her hair was pinned up with the same pins she had used on the platform in May. The same pins. A different woman under them.
Her hands showed. They were work-worn hands, with the knuckles roughened and the nails short. They told the truth about her life. She was done folding them.
Ramsay waited at the front of the church in his good dark coat, holding his hat. When she came in at the door, he turned round.
He did not look at the gown. He looked at her. It was the look from the wagon wheel, the porch step, the carpet, all of them at once and no longer put away. She saw it from the door and had to stop a moment, with her hand on the last pew, before she could go on.
Then she went on.
Harry stood up with them.
He stood at Ramsay’s right hand, in a new suit that had come from town in the same wagon as his bed. He stood as Ramsay had taught him to sit the dun. Back straight. Chin level. His hair was wetted flat and already coming up at the crown.
Nobody had told him to smile, and he was not smiling. He was doing better than smiling. He was standing in a church in front of the whole county as Ramsay Stuart’s son. The heir to the Stuart name and the Stuart land. Every soul in the pews knew it. He was letting them look.
The preacher said the words. He said them plainly, in the same voice he had used to read the banns.
Samantha heard her name go out over the pews. Samantha Bree. Ramsay said it after him. He said it loud, as he had promised, so that it went up into the rafters and came back. She heard a sound along the pews that might have been a laugh, or might have been the other thing.
She said hers. Her voice did not shake. She had thought it might. It did not.
Then she was Mrs. Stuart, and the church was full of people getting to their feet.
They were all there.
That was what she saw, turning from the altar with Ramsay’s hand under her arm and Harry at his other side. The whole county. Every face that had sat along the parlor wall in the white afternoon and watched her stand on the carpet.
The red-faced woman, weeping openly and not troubling to hide it.
The storekeeper’s wife with her handkerchief out.
The thin woman with the drawn-purse mouth, who had come after all.
The heavy sheriff, standing at the back with his hat in his hands.
The hands from the ranch, a dozen of them, in a row, scrubbed and awkward.
The hired girl. The lean sour neighbor, who had come, it seemed, to see what a train-girl looked like in white.
They had all weighed such children once, like stock. Samantha had heard them do it, with a coffee pot in her hand.
And they had come to see her wed, and to wish her joy. They meant it. It was in their faces, turned toward her all down the church. Not one look among them was sidelong.
The bad-blood bride stood at the heart of the Stuart place now, with the bad-blood boy beside her, chosen and claimed. The county had come to watch it done.
She walked down the aisle on her husband’s arm with her marked boy beside her and her head up. She smiled her own smile, and let them see it.
It was halfway through the day when Eleanor came.
The tables had been spread in the churchyard, under the live oaks, because no house in the county would hold everyone who had come.
The wives had brought food enough for three weddings.
There was a fiddler from up the valley. Children ran between the tables in the dappled shade.
Ramsay stood with a plate he had not touched and let men shake his hand.
Harry was under a table with the boy with the fists from the platform, doing something to a dog.
Samantha was by the church door in the white gown when the talk under the oaks changed.
It did not stop. It changed. It went lower. Heads turned toward the churchyard gate. The fiddler missed a note.
Eleanor Stuart stood in the gate.
She had come on foot, from the rooms on the square.
Black silk, the jet at her throat, her hair drawn back hard under her bonnet.
She stood in the gate with her hands folded at her waist. It was exactly how she had stood on the porch on the first day, looking down at a stranger in a creased blue dress.
But she was not looking down now.
She was old. Samantha saw it across the churchyard, and it stopped her breath.
In three weeks the woman had grown old. It was not the black silk or the gray hair.
It was in how she stood. Upright still, but as if the uprightness cost her now, and she was paying for it by the minute.
What had been in her face for forty years had gone out of it.
Something else had come in that Samantha had never seen there, and took a moment to name.
It was fear. Eleanor Stuart was afraid.
She came through the gate. Up the path between the tables she came, under the oaks, with the whole county falling silent on either side of her.
She did not look at any of them. She looked at the church door, where her son’s wife stood in a white gown.
On she came until she stood at the foot of the church steps, and stopped.
Ramsay had set his plate down. He was coming across the grass. He stopped too, a little way off, and did not speak.
Eleanor looked up at Samantha.
“I have come,” she said, “to say a word before these people, since I said the other word before them. It is only right they should hear this too.”
Her voice was not cool. It was not even. It was an old woman’s voice. It shook, and she let it.
“I was wrong. I was wrong on the platform. I was wrong in the parlor. I was wrong every day between. I said what my husband said, and never looked to see if it was so. I made an ally of a brute because he was useful to what I believed. Then I set him on a woman who had done nothing but keep my house better than I ever kept it. And on a child who had done nothing at all. My creed did that. Not the man. I did that.”
She stopped. Her hands had come unfolded, and she did not seem to know what to do with them.
“I have sat three weeks in a room on the square doing the sum, and it comes out the same every time. I have wronged you, and the boy. I have wronged my son. And I have come to ask, before all of these people, whether you can find it in you to forgive me. I do not know that I could, in your place. But I have come to ask.”
She stood at the foot of the steps with her hands at her sides, and waited.
The churchyard was so quiet the swallows could be heard going over.
Samantha looked down at her.
There was a great deal she could have said.
Twelve years of it, three months, a white afternoon on a carpet.
The corner of the table. The woman feeling her arms on the platform.
A boy called bad seed over a pile of splintered oak.
Every word she had ever held her face still over was there, behind her teeth.
And she thought of a small vow made in a loft, with snow ticking on the roof. That someday she would stand in a place where nobody knew what she was.
She stood in such a place. It had not turned out as she thought.
Everybody knew. Everybody in the whole county knew, and had come to see her wed anyway.
She stood at the heart of it, in a white gown the wives had sewn, with her hands showing and her face plain.
Not ashamed. Not hidden. For the first time in her life, simply herself, known, and let to stay.
Nobody had ever granted her that. Not once, in twenty years. She had had to take it, on a carpet, with her own two hands.
She knew what it was to stand at the foot of the steps and ask.
Samantha came down the steps.
In the white gown she came down them, with the whole county watching. She crossed the little space of grass to where the old woman stood. Eleanor did not move. Her hands were at her sides. Samantha took them.
They were cold. They were an old woman’s hands, thin and hard. They shook in hers, and she held them.
“You are forgiven,” she said. “You were forgiven at the gate. I only wanted to hear you say it. Now you have, and it is done.”
Eleanor’s face did then what Samantha had never seen it do. It did not shut. It did not stay as it always was. Quietly it broke, as old things break. The gray eyes filled. The mouth that had never in three months turned up at the corners turned down instead, and shook.
“Come in to the tables,” Samantha said. “There’s cake. It’s fresh. Harry made the icing. It’s very bad. You will eat it and say it isn’t.” She held the cold hands tighter. “You are his grandmother. He should know what that is. I never had one. Neither did he. Come and be it.”
She turned, with the old woman’s hands still in hers, and looked over her shoulder at her husband.
Ramsay stood on the grass a little way off, turning his hat.
His face was open, all the way open, and wet.
He came across the last of the grass and put his arm around his mother.
He did not say a word, because he was not one for words.
She leaned into it as if she had been standing up alone for a very long time.
Then Harry came out from under the table.
He came across the churchyard slowly, in his new suit, with the dog behind him. He stopped in front of the old woman who had felt his arms on a platform and said strong enough. He looked up at her with those eyes that were not the platform eyes any more.
“Ma’am,” he said.
Eleanor looked down at him. Her mouth worked. She got one hand free of Samantha’s and put it out. It hovered a moment in the air between them, as if she did not know what a hand did in such a case.
Harry took it. He shook it, once, gravely, as Ramsay had taught him a man shook hands.
“There’s cake,” he said. “I done the icing. It’s terrible.”
The county laughed. It went round the churchyard under the oaks. The fiddler found his note. The swallows went over. The tables filled again with talk.
That was how the girl who fled south with nothing but a name and a secret ended.
As a wife, standing in a white gown under live oaks with her husband’s arm at her back.
As a mother, to a marked boy who had shaken his grandmother’s hand.
And as the giver of grace to a woman who had never shown her any.
She had learned, on a carpet, that grace was not a gift you waited to be granted.
You took it up in your own two hands, and you gave it.
She had her name. She had a family built of the very blood the county had once weighed like stock, standing round her in the dappled light.
There was only the one thing left in the dark.
She felt it that afternoon, under the oaks, with the fiddle going and Ramsay’s hand at her back.
She would feel it every day of her life.
A bent old man in a barn in Iowa, in a night with no moon in it, with a barn-bar in his shaking hands.
Go, he had told her. Go now. Do not look back, and do not ever come back.
She had not looked back. She had never learned what became of him. She never would.
But she had a boy of ten who could sit a horse and rope a post. A boy who had never been let to believe he was worth the teaching, until somebody showed him.
She looked at Harry now, across the tables, with the dog, the cake, his grandmother’s hand still in his.
An old man had knelt behind a glasshouse with a scrap of newspaper, ten minutes at a time.
He would have understood exactly what he had bought with the last of all he had.
A body ought to know what the world was saying about them. That was all. Somebody ought to show them.
Samantha Stuart stood in the churchyard in the white gown the wives had sewn her, and let the world say what it liked. It had come to wish her joy.