Chapter 3 The Tour
Nora did not come forward when the wagon stopped.
She stayed at the fence with both hands on the rail and watched Clara climb down with the same unblinking attention she brought to things she had not yet decided about. Elias knew this look. It was not hostility. It was assessment. Nora did not issue provisional opinions.
Clara landed from the wagon step and looked at Nora across the yard. Something passed between them in that moment — some quick, wordless evaluation. Then Clara walked toward the fence, not slowly and not quickly, just directly, as though she had decided what she intended to do and was doing it.
She crouched down when she reached the fence so that she was at Nora's height, which Elias noted because not many adults thought to do this, and she said, "Hello. I'm Clara. I've been told you're Nora."
"Yes," said Nora.
"I'm very pleased to meet you." Clara extended her hand over the fence rail with the formality of someone shaking hands with an equal. "I understand you've lived here your whole life."
Nora regarded the hand. She shook it. "Yes. Have you?"
"No. I've lived in Boston my whole life. Do you know where Boston is?"
"East. Very far."
"Very far," Clara agreed. "I was on a train for four days."
Nora absorbed this. "Were you frightened?"
"A little. Mostly I was interested. I'd never seen so much country before. In Boston, buildings get in the way."
"I've never seen buildings that big," Nora said. "Papa says they're very tall."
"Some of them. But they don't have mountains behind them. I think that's a fair trade."
Nora considered this with the seriousness of a small judge weighing evidence. Then she opened the fence gate — which settled something — and stepped through, and looked up at Clara with an expression that was not yet a smile but was its closest neighbor. "I'll show you the horses," she said.
* * *
Elias carried the trunk inside while they went to the barn.
He had expected Nora to hide behind him, or to observe from a distance for several days as she had when the new reverend came.
He had not expected his daughter to take a stranger's hand and lead her to the barn within four minutes of meeting.
He set the trunk in the room he had prepared — Ruth's old sewing room, small but decent, with a window facing the mountains and a quilt his mother had made. He had spent two evenings cleaning it and had tried very hard not to think about what he was doing or what it meant.
He looked at the room for a moment. The quilt. The small lamp on the dresser. The hook behind the door where Ruth used to hang her shawl, empty now.
He went back outside.
* * *
Clara was standing in the middle of the barn, and she was very still.
Jupiter — a generally sanguine horse of fourteen years who was friendly to most people and indifferent to the rest — had walked to the front of his stall and was regarding Clara with his large soft eyes from a distance of about three feet.
Clara was regarding him with an expression that was entirely readable: she was frightened, she knew she was frightened, and she was refusing to act on it.
Nora was narrating. "That's Jupiter and that's Cinder and that's the two mules Clem uses but they don't have names because Clem says naming mules gives them ideas above their station."
"Have you never been near a horse?" Elias asked, coming to stand beside Clara.
"I grew up in a city. I've been near horses in the street. I've never been in a barn with one staring at me."
"He's not staring at you. He's interested. Jupiter is interested in most things." Elias stepped forward and ran his hand along Jupiter's neck in the automatic way he touched horses — not performing gentleness but simply being gentle. "Give me your hand," he said.
She looked at him.
"I'm not going to make you. I'm asking."
A beat of silence. Then Clara extended her right hand, and he guided it — briefly, impersonally, fingers closing around her wrist just long enough to direct her palm flat against Jupiter's neck. The horse exhaled. Clara's breath caught.
"He's warm," she said.
"They're always warm. That surprises people the first time."
Elias released her wrist and stepped back. She kept her hand where it was, and Jupiter lowered his great head and nudged her shoulder gently, and Clara made a small involuntary sound that was either alarm or delight — he couldn't tell which — and then she laughed.
It was a real laugh, not the social kind. Brief and surprised, with a quality of self-forgetfulness in it. Nora beamed. Elias looked at the hay-scattered floor, because he was not prepared for what had happened to his chest just then and he needed a moment.
"All right," Clara said to the horse, in a different voice than she'd been using — lower, more direct. "You're quite something, aren't you."
Jupiter leaned into her hand.
"He likes her," Nora said to Elias, with the satisfaction of a person whose prediction has been borne out.
"He does," Elias said. He did not look at Clara when he said it.
* * *
The tour of the ranch took the better part of an hour, which was longer than Elias had planned.
Nora had strong opinions about what required explanation, and Clara asked questions — not in the way of a polite person generating conversation, but in the way of a person whose mind was genuinely occupied with the answers.
She asked about the root cellar and how they kept the potatoes from freezing.
She asked about the rope strung between the house and the barn.
When he told her it was a guide rope — for when the snow came in so hard that a man could lose his direction between the two buildings and freeze to death fifty feet from shelter — she was quiet for a moment. "That happens?" she asked.
"Not often. But it happens."
She looked at the rope. "Practical," she said, in the tone of someone filing something under Things About Colorado I Did Not Know.
Clem materialized from the direction of the hay store at some point — he had a way of appearing at relevant moments that Elias had never quite solved.
He was large and creased and moved with the deliberate unhurriedness of a man who had decided long ago that haste was mostly theater.
He shook Clara's hand and looked at her with small sharp eyes.
"Miss Holt," he said.
"Mr. Dryden," she said.
"Just Clem." He looked at Elias. "Stew's on," he said, and went back the way he had come.
"He seems trustworthy," Clara said, watching him go.
"He is. He doesn't talk much."
"That seems to be a quality you value around here," Clara said, and her expression was entirely neutral.
* * *
They went inside as the light was fading.
The house was warm, smelling of the beef stew Clem had put on that morning, and of the pine Elias had burned the night before, and underneath those things, faint and unreachable, of Ruth's lavender, which had persisted in the plaster of the walls for two years no matter what Elias burned or cooked.
He did not think about this.
Clara stood in the doorway of her room. "The quilt is beautiful," she said.
"My mother made it," he said.
"Is she still living?"
"No. She died eight years ago." He stopped. "Before Nora."
Clara turned and looked at him with an expression that was quiet and direct. "I'm sorry," she said. Not the reflexive kind. The kind that acknowledged the actual weight of the thing.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it, and moved on before the moment could become something he wasn't ready for. "Supper in twenty minutes," he said.
* * *
Supper was the four of them at the kitchen table — Elias, Clara, Nora, and Clem, who ate with the family as he always had.
Elias said grace, short and honest. He thanked God for the food and the shelter and — he paused here — for safe travel.
He heard Clara murmur amen beside him with a naturalness that meant she had been saying that word her whole life and had not outgrown it.
Nora had taken Clara's hand twice during the tour without ceremony — once to pull her toward the calving pen and once simply, on the path back to the house — and Clara had let her each time without comment, which Elias found he kept returning to, the way you returned to a thing you couldn't quite categorize.
"What do you teach?" Clem asked.
"Reading, primarily," Clara said. "Arithmetic. Some geography. Whatever the children need most. The older ones I take through history." She looked at her stew. "This is very good, by the way."
"Old family recipe," Clem said. "The family being me and whoever left the original cow."
Clara laughed. Elias watched her laugh and looked at his stew.
After supper, while Clem washed the dishes and Nora laid out her horse on the kitchen table and set about telling Clara its name and history, Elias went outside. The cold hit him cleanly. He stood on the porch and looked at the sky.
The stars were out — hard and white and numerous, the Milky Way a visible smear across the black. He had looked at this sky ten thousand times. He had looked at it alone for two years.
He thought about what had happened today, practically, the way he assessed everything.
A woman had arrived. She was competent, forthright, and unexpectedly perceptive.
She was not frightened by the mountains or the silence.
She had made his daughter laugh within an hour.
She asked better questions than most men he had known for decades.
These were the facts. He arranged them in a line and looked at them.
He stood until the cold got into his hands, and then he went back inside.
Clara was at the kitchen table with Nora, bent together over a piece of paper, and Clara was drawing — actually drawing, a horse, recognizable and surprisingly good — and Nora was issuing corrections with the authority of an editor who had very specific ideas about anatomical accuracy.
"The ears are wrong," Nora said. "They go more like this."
"Show me," Clara said, and handed her the pencil.
Nora drew two ears with great concentration. They were not anatomically perfect but they were earnest.
"Yes," Clara said, as though Nora had solved something. "Exactly like that."
Elias said, "Nora, it's time for bed," because someone had to.
Nora protested, briefly. Clara did not intercede, which he noted with relief — she was not going to override him. She said, "We'll draw tomorrow," and Nora accepted this, and went to get ready for bed.
Elias stood in the doorway of the kitchen. Clara was tidying the table.
"The reverend should be able to come out by Friday," he said.
"That's fine," she said.
"I wanted to say — " He stopped. "I'm glad you came. Whatever happens."
She looked at him. Something in her face — not surprise exactly, but the expression of a person who had been prepared for something harder and found it wasn't. "Thank you," she said. "I'm glad I came too."
She did not add whatever happens. He wondered if that meant she had decided something already.
He went to help Nora with her prayers, and by the time he came back the kitchen was clean and Clara's door was shut and there was only the light under it to say she was still awake, and outside, very quietly, it had begun to snow.