Chapter 6 What Faith Holds
The storm did not stop the next day.
By Thursday morning — the second full day of the blizzard — there were three feet of snow against the north wall of the house and the drifts had built themselves into graceful, architectural formations.
The temperature had dropped through the night to something that had no name in Clara's Boston vocabulary.
The air outside, when Elias opened the back door to assess conditions, had the quality of a thing that had made up its mind.
"Will it break today?" Clara asked.
"Tomorrow, maybe. Friday at the earliest."
He said this without drama, and she received it the same way.
They had settled, over the course of the previous day, into a kind of household grammar — the way two people who were strangers but not enemies learned to occupy the same space without colliding.
She built the stove in the morning. He managed the barn.
Clem cooked lunch. Nora moved between all of them with the sovereign ease of a child who understood that all the adults in a house exist primarily for her benefit.
On Thursday afternoon, with the storm in full voice and Nora occupied with her stones at the kitchen table, Elias sat across from Clara and said: "You said faith holds against grief. What did you mean by that?"
Clara looked up from the mending she had found in the basket beside the fireplace — Nora's winter stockings, which needed considerable attention. "When did I say that?"
"In your letter. You said you'd tested your faith against grief and found it holds. I want to know what that means. Specifically."
She set down the stocking. He was asking a real question. She could tell the difference between social inquiry and genuine inquiry, and this was the latter, with an edge of need in it. A man who had been living with a question for a long time and had decided she might have a real answer.
"My mother died when I was nineteen," Clara said.
"She was the center of everything I understood about the world.
I had a faith before she died — a good faith, I think, but it was largely theoretical.
When she died, I was angry at God for about six months.
Not sad — angry. I thought He had made a wrong decision and I was prepared to tell Him so. "
Elias looked at her then. Something shifted in his face.
"I prayed the angry prayers," Clara said.
"I didn't edit them or make them polite.
I said everything I thought, which was quite a lot and not particularly reverent.
And nothing answered me the way I wanted — no voice, no sign, no particular comfort.
But I kept doing it, because it was the only thing I had.
And somewhere in the middle of that year I realized I had not been abandoned.
That something was still there, listening to the angry prayers as readily as the grateful ones.
" She looked at the stocking. "That's what I mean.
Not that it doesn't hurt. Not that the questions get answered.
Just that there is something present in the hurt. Something that holds."
The fire spoke. Nora turned a painted stone over and over in her small hands.
"I stopped praying after Ruth died," Elias said. Not confessing — simply stating a fact.
"I know," Clara said.
He looked at her. "How?"
"Because you still say grace at meals. And it sounds like a man keeping a promise he's not sure he still believes in. Which means the belief is still there, somewhere. Just buried."
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that she thought she had overstepped. She picked up the stocking and the needle.
"I blamed myself," he said. "For not being there."
Clara kept her eyes on the mending. She understood that the right response to a confession like this was not to immediately rush to refute it. The person needed to hear it outside themselves first, needed to feel the shape of it in the air before anything else happened.
She let it sit.
The fire burned. The storm moved outside. Nora hummed a small tuneless song to her horse.
"Tell me," Clara said, finally, gently.
He told her. The shape of it: he had been in town the day Ruth fell ill.
He had meant to come back in the afternoon and had stayed for a stupid argument about a fence dispute with his neighbor Granger.
By the time he returned that evening Ruth had already passed the point where the fever might have been caught. She died four days later.
He said: "If I had come home when I said I would."
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
Clara set down the mending. "Elias." She waited until he looked at her. "Four days. With a fever that high, in December, in the mountains, forty miles from the nearest doctor. You could not have saved her. Even if you had come home at noon instead of six, you could not have saved her."
"You don't know that," he said.
"I know enough about fever. I've nursed people through illness and I've lost people to illness and the difference had very little to do with when I arrived and everything to do with how much fight the fever had in it.
" She held his gaze. "You did not cause Ruth's death.
You were absent for one afternoon. You have not been absent since.
You have been here every day for two years. Nora knows it. This house knows it."
Something moved across his face that was not relief — too complicated for relief. But change of some kind. The first fine fracture in something that had been sealed.
"Pastor Elmore has been saying that for two years," he said.
"And?"
"I didn't believe him. He loves me like a father. He has reason to say it."
"And I don't," Clara said. "I've known you for three days." She picked up the stocking again. "Believe it or don't. But I said it because it's true, not because I have any reason to protect you."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Nora, and the expression on his face when he looked at his daughter was something Clara filed away carefully — the expression of a man who loved someone with the whole force of himself and was, very slowly, learning to believe he was allowed to.
* * *
That evening, after supper and after Nora was in bed and Clem had retreated to the bunkhouse, Elias and Clara sat on opposite sides of the fire and the house was quiet around them.
"You disagreed with me on something earlier," Elias said. "About faith. What it means that I've stopped praying. You said the belief was still there, buried. I said I stopped. Those aren't the same thing."
"You're right. They're not." She thought about how to say the next part honestly without saying it unkindly. "I think you stopped speaking but not listening. I think you still hear it — the evidence of it — but you've decided you don't deserve to answer."
He was quiet.
"Nora said her prayers tonight," Clara said. "I heard her through the door. She prays for Ruth every night, and then she prays for you. She said, 'Please help Papa not be so quiet inside.'" Clara looked at the fire. "A six-year-old knows the difference between a quiet house and a quiet person."
Elias put down his coffee. He looked at the fire for a long time with his elbows on his knees.
"I don't know how to get back to it," he said, finally.
"You start where you are," Clara said. "You say exactly what's true, even if it's 'I am angry and I don't understand.' That's a true prayer. Or you don't. It's your faith. I'm not in charge of it. I only mentioned it because you asked."
Something almost like humor crossed his face. "You do that," he said.
"Do what?"
"Give your opinion fully and then remove yourself from the outcome."
"It's what I'd want," Clara said. "The full opinion, honestly given. And then the freedom to decide for myself."
"Most people want to be persuaded."
"Most people want to feel less alone," Clara said. "Persuasion is how they get there when they don't know how to ask for the other thing. I find the direct route is more efficient."
He was quiet for a while. The fire burned low. The storm had decreased slightly — the wind dropping between gusts.
"I think the snow will stop tomorrow night," he said.
"Good," she said.
"The reverend can come out Saturday, maybe. Sunday at the latest."
"All right," she said.
Another silence. Then: "Clara."
It was the first time he had said her name — just her name, nothing attached — and the way it sat in his voice made her look at him.
"Thank you," he said. "For what you said earlier. About Ruth."
"I meant it," she said.
"I know," he said. "That's why."
The fire burned down to coals. They sat on opposite sides of the hearth in the warm dark and did not speak again, and this silence was the third kind — the kind that didn't need anything else.
She went to bed and lay in the dark and thought about a woman named Ruth who had read Isaiah in the chair by the fire, and about a man who had loved her absolutely and was learning, with great difficulty, what it meant to still be alive.
And she thought about herself — about immoderate opinions and Boston schoolteachers and twelve hundred miles traveled toward something that was turning out to be larger and stranger and more necessary than she had known how to predict.
The storm eased. The house settled.
In the morning there would be stillness, and then the hard work of digging out. And then, eventually, the reverend would come.
She found, in the last moment before sleep, that she was not afraid of it. She was, in fact, beginning to look forward to it.