Chapter 8 Where We Disagree
The argument started over supper.
This was not entirely an accident. They had been circling the edges of it for three days — two intelligent people with strong convictions who had been very careful, up to now, not to actually collide.
The storm and the closeness and the accumulated hours of real conversation had worn the carefulness down, and by Friday evening, with the roads still impassable and Clem having retired early with a head cold and Nora asleep before seven, there was no one left to navigate around and nothing left to be careful with.
It began with grace. Elias said grace as he always did — short, plain, honest in its way. He thanked God for the food and the shelter and the clearing of the storm. Clara said amen. Then she said, before she had fully decided to say it: "Do you mean it?"
He looked up. "Mean what?"
"The grace. Do you mean it, or is it a habit?"
The silence that followed was the first genuinely charged silence they had had — live, with consequence on either side of it.
"Why?" he said.
"Because you told me two nights ago that you stopped praying after Ruth died. And you've said grace every meal since I arrived. I'm wondering which one is true."
"They're both true," he said.
"How?"
"I say grace because Nora hears it. Because she should grow up with it. Whether I feel it is separate from whether she needs to hear it."
Clara considered this carefully before she responded, because she could see that it was a real answer and not an evasion.
"I think that's generous," she said. "And I think it's wrong."
"Wrong," he said. His voice had taken on a quality she hadn't heard before — the particular attention of a man who is accustomed to not being challenged.
"Children don't learn faith from the performance of faith," Clara said.
"They learn it from watching someone actually live inside it.
The doubts and the anger and the questions and the moments when it's hard — that's the part that makes it real.
A grace that doesn't cost you anything doesn't teach Nora anything true. "
"So I should sit at the table and say nothing?" His voice was even, but the evenness itself was effort.
"I think you should say what you mean," Clara said.
"Even if what you mean right now is 'I don't know if You're listening, but I'm trying.
' That's a true prayer. That's a prayer Nora could grow up into.
" She met his eyes. "A pretty prayer from a man who doesn't believe it is a kind of lie, Elias. And I think you know that."
The fire crackled. The kitchen was very quiet.
"You have," Elias said, slowly, "a considerable amount of nerve."
"I was told that in Boston as well," Clara said. "Usually by people who didn't like what I said but couldn't find a factual error in it."
Something crossed his face — not quite a smile, but its structural precursor.
"You think you're right," he said.
"I think I'm right about this particular thing, yes.
I also think you're right that Nora needs to hear it.
I just think the 'it' should be something true rather than something comfortable.
" She paused. "I'm not saying you have to have arrived somewhere.
I'm saying you should let her see you traveling. "
* * *
They did not reach an agreement, which Clara had not expected. What she had hoped for, and what she got, was honesty without hostility.
Elias pushed back. He said it was easy to talk about authentic faith when your grief was nine years old and had softened with time, and harder when it was two years old and still had edges.
He said that he was not performing faith for Nora's sake out of dishonesty but out of love, and that those were different motivations with different moral weight.
He said that Clara had grown up in a city with churches on every street, and that faith in the mountains in winter was a different proposition — more solitary, harder to sustain, more dependent on habit than on feeling.
Clara listened to all of this. She did not interrupt. When he finished, she said: "All of that is true. None of it changes what I said."
"You're very certain for a woman who's known me four days," he said.
"I'm certain about the principle," she said. "I'm quite uncertain about you specifically. You're more complicated than I expected."
He looked at her. "What did you expect?"
"A widower. Practical. A little blunt. Good with his hands.
" She looked at the fire. "I did not expect someone who quoted the Psalms when he didn't think I could hear him in the barn, or who reads his daughter to sleep with his voice going very quiet so she doesn't know she's being read to rather than talked to. I did not expect — " She stopped.
"What?"
She looked at him directly. "Someone this worth knowing. I didn't expect that."
The silence that followed was different from all the previous silences. Warmer. More dangerous.
Elias looked at his coffee. Then at the fire. Then, briefly, at her.
"Clara," he said.
"Yes."
"I — " He stopped. His jaw worked. The particular difficulty of a man arriving at something for which he has not prepared the words.
"You don't have to say it yet," she said, quietly.
He looked at her. Something in his face shifted — surprise, and then something that was not quite relief but was adjacent to it. Permission received.
"The reverend will come when the roads clear," he said, after a moment.
"Yes," she said.
"That was the plan."
"It was," she said.
"I want to be sure you understand that when Hobart comes — if you have reservations — I would not hold you to anything. The agreement was practical. You came in good faith. If circumstances have changed what seems reasonable, you're not obligated."
Clara looked at him for a long moment. He was staring at the fire, the set of his jaw suggesting that this speech had cost him something.
"Elias," she said. "Look at me."
He did.
"I don't have reservations," she said. "I have the opposite of reservations. I came here expecting to do something reasonable and useful and I find I want to do something considerably more than that. That is new information I am still incorporating. But it is not a reason to discuss alternatives."
He held her gaze. The fire between them burned and crackled.
"All right," he said.
"Good," she said.
They finished their coffee. Clara washed the cups. Elias banked the fire. The ordinary domestic choreography of two people ending a day, so natural it might have been practiced for years.
At her door he stopped. "For what it's worth," he said. "What you said about the prayers. I think you're right."
She did not say I told you so, because she was not that kind of person. She said, "Good night, Elias," and went in, and listened to his footsteps down the hall.
She sat on the edge of the bed and folded her hands and said a prayer that was entirely honest and not entirely coherent and which ended with the words thank You, which she meant in more directions than she could fully articulate.
She thought that might be all right. She thought He probably understood the ones you couldn't articulate better than the ones you could.