Chapter 4 The First Morning
Clara was awake before the light.
She lay in the narrow bed under the quilt that belonged to this house — that had been made by a woman she would never meet, for a son she was learning — and listened to the sounds of a place that was not Boston.
The silence here was not the silence of the city, which was never truly silent but merely quiet between disturbances.
This silence was active. It had depth and dimension.
Wind moved through the spruce on the hill with a sound like breathing, and somewhere in the barn a horse shifted its weight against the boards, and the house itself made the sounds old timber made in cold weather — small, patient contractions, the house breathing too.
She had not slept badly. This surprised her.
She had expected to lie awake cataloguing her own uncertainty, which was something she was capable of at length and in considerable detail when the conditions permitted.
Instead she had fallen asleep almost immediately, as though the sheer geographical distance she had traveled had finally caught up with her body and insisted.
She dressed quietly and went to the window.
The sky was the color of pewter, soft and low and uniform in a way that yesterday's sky had not been.
She thought of what she had said on the wagon — the light's gone flat — and of the way Elias had looked at her when she said it.
Surprise, yes, but something else. The particular expression of a person who has been seen in a way they didn't anticipate.
Snow, she thought. Today.
She found the kitchen empty and the stove banked but not yet lit for the day, and she did what she would have done in her Boston boarding house: she built it up.
She was not incapable. She had been building stoves since she was twelve.
The wood was dry and the stove caught quickly.
She found the coffee, found the pot, found where the water came from — a pump at the kitchen sink, which was better than she'd expected — and had the coffee on before the gray light outside had fully committed to becoming morning.
She was standing at the kitchen window with her first cup when she heard the back door open.
Elias came in from outside with cold air and the smell of the barn on his coat, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw her. He had clearly not expected to find her there.
"You built the stove," he said.
"I know how to build a stove," she said.
"I know. I just — " He stopped. "Thank you."
She gestured toward the pot. He hung his coat and hat and poured himself a cup and stood on the other side of the kitchen and drank it, and they were quiet together in a way that Clara assessed, with some surprise, as companionable.
The stove ticked. The light outside came up slowly, pewter softening toward silver.
"It's going to snow today," she said.
"Yes. This afternoon, I think. Maybe sooner."
"You read weather the way I read children," Clara said. "That kind of knowing."
"What do you mean, read children?"
"You walk into a classroom and within five minutes you know which ones slept badly and which ones are frightened and which one is about to do something you'll have to address before it becomes a problem.
You can't explain it exactly. You just read them.
" She paused. "I imagine it's the same with weather, if you've paid attention long enough. "
"Yes," he said, and the way he said it suggested he had not had this observation made to him before and was taking it seriously.
They drank their coffee. Outside, the first thin flakes appeared — tentative, the weather testing its own intentions.
"I thought it would be afternoon," Elias said.
"Weather doesn't keep to schedules," Clara said.
"No," he said. "It doesn't."
* * *
Nora appeared at half past seven in her nightgown with her wooden horse under her arm, climbed onto the bench beside Clara without preamble, and regarded her with the evaluating look that Clara was beginning to understand was simply how Nora looked at things she was still deciding about.
"Did you sleep?" Nora asked.
"Very well. The quilt is warm."
"My grandma made it." Nora picked up her horse and turned it in her hands. "She died before I was born so I didn't know her but Papa says she was very sensible."
"That sounds like an important quality in a grandmother."
"Papa says it's the most important quality in anyone." Nora considered this. "I think kindness is more important. But Papa thinks sensible comes first."
"I think they might be different kinds of important," Clara said. "Like how arithmetic and reading are both important but you use them for different things."
"So you need both."
"Usually," Clara said.
"Are you sensible?"
"I try to be. I am also occasionally quite foolish. Most sensible people are, if they're honest about it."
Nora gave Clara her horse. Simply held it out. It was a good piece of work — Clem had real skill, the grain of the wood following the arc of the neck, the legs in a delicate suggestion of motion. Clara held it carefully.
"It's a mare," Nora said. "Her name is Ruth."
Clara went still. She did not let it show on her face — years of classroom practice in managing your own reactions so that you did not alarm a child. She turned the little horse over in her hands and said, quietly, "That's a beautiful name."
"She's named for my mama," Nora said, with a simplicity that contained all the weight in the world. "Clem made her for me after Mama went to heaven. He said I should have something to hold."
Clara handed the horse back very carefully. Her voice was steady. "Clem is a wise man," she said.
"He is," Nora agreed, and tucked Ruth under her arm and climbed down from the bench and went to investigate the progress of breakfast.
Clara sat at the kitchen table for a moment after she left and looked at the window, where the snow was thickening, and breathed.
* * *
Elias had not gone back to the barn.
He had meant to. There were things that needed doing. But he had found himself moving slowly through the morning as though his usual efficiency had been disrupted by something he could not put his finger on, and eventually he had admitted that the disruption was Clara in his kitchen.
He was mending a length of fence line at the east end of the house when he heard Nora's voice and then Clara's, low and steady through the kitchen window.
Not eavesdropping. Just pausing. Registering that there were two voices in his kitchen and that this was different from what it had been for two years.
He thought about what Clara had said. Reading children and reading weather — the same kind of knowing.
He had never had it put that way, but it was right.
You paid attention until attention became instinct.
You watched so long and so carefully that watching and knowing became the same thing.
He had thought this was something particular to land and animals and weather.
He had not considered that a person could bring that quality to human beings.
Ruth had had it. Ruth had walked into a room and known everyone in it within minutes, had known what they needed and what they feared and what they were proud of, and she had moved through social life the way Elias moved through land — with easy, native fluency.
He had never had it himself. He was a man who understood the physical world and was a foreigner in the interior one.
By the time he went inside for the midday meal, there were three inches on the ground and the sky had settled into the uniform pewter that Elias had learned, over fifteen winters, meant it was not going to stop.
He stood on the porch and looked north toward the pass and felt the first shift in the air — the barometric drop that preceded a serious storm — and he thought: not a flurry. Something larger.
He went inside and said nothing about it at lunch, because he was not sure yet. But he looked at Clara across the table, and she was looking out the window with an expression that suggested she had registered the same thing, and their eyes met for a brief moment and he looked at his plate.
He would send for Reverend Hobart in the morning. Just in case.