Chapter 9 Nora Speaks
Saturday came in cold and cloudless, the sky a hard winter blue, the kind that offered beauty without comfort.
The temperature had not risen with the sun's return and would not — Clara had learned enough about Colorado December to understand that the sun here was largely decorative in winter, a light source that declined to provide heat, a candle rather than a fire.
She had been in Pinecrest for five days. It felt like considerably more than that and also like no time at all, which was a contradiction she had decided not to resolve.
The day organized itself around the practical demands of digging out.
Elias and Clem spent the morning clearing the barn approach and the road to the gate — hard work with the heavy wet snow that had packed and crusted overnight — and Clara managed the house, which meant feeding the stove, managing the larder, and supervising Nora, who had an ambitious plan to build a snow structure of debatable architectural soundness off the south side of the porch.
"It's a fort," Nora explained.
"It looks more like a very committed pile," Clara said.
"Forts take time," Nora said, with dignity.
Clara bundled her more thoroughly than Nora considered necessary and let her at it, keeping an eye from the kitchen window while she worked at the bread she had started that morning.
The window framed Nora like a portrait: small figure against white enormity, entirely absorbed, entirely purposeful.
It was the most relaxed Clara had seen her — the free-moving, unselfconscious engagement of a child entirely in her own world.
Clara thought about what it meant, the way Nora was.
The silence that had followed Ruth's death, and the slow return of sound.
She thought about what it required of a child to reconstruct a world after the person who was the center of it was gone.
She thought Nora had done this with remarkable courage, and probably had no idea that she had.
The bread dough turned under her hands, elastic and resistant. Outside, the fort grew incrementally.
* * *
By midday the road to town was passable in the lower sections, which meant Elias thought Reverend Hobart could likely make the ride by Sunday. He came in for the noon meal with this news and delivered it with the careful neutrality of a man reporting the weather.
Clara said, "Good," in the same register, and they ate Clem's soup, and Nora told them at length about the structural challenges of the fort, and nothing more was said.
But Clara was aware, across the table, of a kind of attentiveness in Elias that had been present all week but was different now — less guarded, more direct.
He looked at her when she spoke. He listened in the way of a man who has decided that what a person says is worth his full attention.
She found this, which she had not expected to find attractive, disproportionately so.
She thought: four more days, at most, before she was his wife in the eyes of God and the law and this community. That is a very short time and also a very strange and complete one.
She thought: I am not afraid of it.
* * *
The thing with Nora happened after dinner.
Elias had gone to check the fence line on the east pasture.
Clem was in the bunkhouse. The kitchen was quiet in the particular way of kitchens after a meal, warm and settled.
Nora had her stones on the table again, arranged in some system of classification that had internal logic.
Clara sat across from her with her mending.
They were companionably quiet together for a while. Then Nora said, without looking up from her stones: "Do you love my papa?"
Clara set down the mending.
She considered the question with the full seriousness it deserved.
Nora was not asking carelessly — nothing Nora asked was careless — and she was not asking from anxiety.
Her face was calm, her hands still moving the stones, and the question had been delivered with the straightforward curiosity of a child who had been thinking about something and had decided to inquire.
"I think," Clara said, carefully, "that I am at the beginning of loving him. The way you're at the beginning of a road and you can see where it goes and you know you want to walk it, but you haven't yet."
Nora looked up from her stones. Her eyes were Ruth's eyes — that measuring, present attention.
"Mama said love was a decision," Nora said. "Not just a feeling. She said you decide it and then you do it."
Clara sat very still. "Your mama was wise," she said.
"She was," Nora agreed, with simple, undefended pride. She looked back at her stones, moved a blue one from one arrangement to another. "I think you'll decide it," she said. "I think Papa will too. He's slow about deciding things but when he decides he doesn't change his mind."
"I've noticed that about him," Clara said.
"He decided about the horses," Nora said.
"He has twelve, all different kinds, and Clem said that was too many and Papa said no, it wasn't, and he was right and now Clem agrees.
" She considered the stones. "He decided about me too.
After Mama died, Clem told me — he told me Papa just decided.
That he was going to be all right for my sake, even when he wasn't. He decided it and then he did it. "
Clara's throat was tight. She kept her face steady. "Clem told you that?"
"Last year. When I asked him why Papa was sad but also not sad at the same time. I didn't understand how you could be both." She looked up. "Do you understand how you can be both?"
"Yes," Clara said. "You love someone so much that you keep going for them, even when going is the hardest thing. And the going doesn't mean you've stopped grieving. It means you've decided the person in front of you matters more than the weight behind you."
Nora listened to this with great attention. She picked up her carved horse from the table — Ruth, the horse named for her mother — and turned it in her hands.
"I think you should stay," she said. Not a request. Not quite a statement. Something between — an offering, like the horse itself had been. The thing she loved, held out.
Clara breathed carefully.
"I'm going to stay," she said.
Nora set the horse down. She slid off the bench and came around the table and leaned against Clara's side in her easy, claiming way, the way she had done since the first day, as though Clara were a fixture she had always intended to use. Clara put her arm around her.
They sat like that for a while, the stones on the table, the fire behind them, the cold outside pressing at the glass.
"Papa needs someone who argues with him," Nora said, into Clara's shoulder. "He doesn't have anyone who argues with him. Clem just agrees and Reverend Hobart is nice but Papa doesn't really listen to him."
Clara laughed — a surprised sound, genuine. "I see."
"You argue with him," Nora said. "I can tell. Even when you're not arguing out loud."
"How can you tell?"
"Because he thinks harder," Nora said. "When you say something he doesn't know what to do with, he gets very quiet and then later he thinks about it. I can tell when he's thinking about something. His eyes go somewhere else."
Clara thought about the night before — the argument about grace and honest prayer, and the way Elias had said, at her door, I think you're right. She thought about being worth knowing, which she had said aloud and which had cost her something and which she did not regret.
"Your papa is a good man," she said.
"I know," Nora said. "That's why I wanted a nice one."
* * *
Elias came back from the fence line as the light was failing. He came into the kitchen and found Clara at the stove and Nora at the table, and he stood in the doorway for a moment in a way that Clara, without looking up, sensed rather than saw.
She had developed an awareness of him in the last five days — the sound of his footstep on the porch, the particular quality of his silence versus Clem's silence. She knew when he came in from the barn versus from the pasture by the way the cold came off his coat.
She thought: this is what five days will do, if you're paying attention. Imagine five years.
"Fence is fine," he said, hanging his coat. "Just some drifting against the southeast posts."
"Good," she said. "Supper in twenty minutes."
"I'll wash up." He paused. "The road to town will be clear by tomorrow afternoon. I sent word to Hobart through Clem — Hobart can come out Monday."
She turned and looked at him. He was looking at the wall beside her head — not at her, the way he sometimes didn't when he was saying something that mattered.
"Monday," she said.
"If that's — if that suits."
She looked at him for a moment — at this man she had known for five days who had the quality of someone known much longer, who had told her things he hadn't told his pastor, who read his daughter to sleep with his voice going quiet, who was right now studiously not meeting her eyes because he was asking her something he couldn't quite frame directly.
"Monday suits," she said.
He looked at her then. Just briefly. Something crossed his face that she would have called relief, except that it was more than relief — softer, more unguarded.
The expression of a man who has been carrying something alone for a long time and has been offered, not the removal of the weight, but company in the carrying.
"Good," he said, and went to wash up.
Nora, at the table, caught Clara's eye and gave a tiny, satisfied nod, as though something had concluded to her specification. Clara turned back to the stove before she smiled where Nora could see it.
But she smiled.