Chapter 10 What Nora Carries
Sunday was the seventh day.
Clara had not counted the days deliberately, but she was aware of the number the way you were aware of weather — not by looking for it, but by the way it pressed against you from all sides.
Seven days since she had stepped off the stage into the feed bucket and into Elias Caldwell's arms. Seven days since she had stood in this kitchen for the first time and thought: this could be a life.
The reverend was coming tomorrow. The roads were clear. Clem had confirmed it on his ride back from the Granger place — Hobart had been told and was willing and the morning should see him at the ranch by ten.
She thought she was ready. She was almost certain she was ready.
The small remaining uncertainty she carried the way you carried a stone in a shoe — present, specific, not enough to stop you but impossible to ignore.
It was not uncertainty about Elias. That had resolved itself over the week, in the way that some things you expect to be complicated turn out, under the pressure of proximity, to be quite simple.
She wanted to know him. She wanted to be in the room when he was in the room.
She wanted to argue with him about faith and watch him concede when he was wrong.
What she was not certain of was whether she had yet given him the same honesty she had required of him.
He had told her about Ruth. He had told her about the afternoon and the guilt and the two years of sealed grief. And she had listened, and offered her own thinking, and been honest about what she saw in him. But she had not told him about Edward.
She had told him she came west for a fresh start. She had not told him what she was starting from. The engagement. The letter. The word admirable, which she had managed, mostly, to bury under the practicality and forward motion that had carried her from Boston to Colorado. Mostly.
She stood at the kitchen window with her coffee and looked at the mountains and thought: tomorrow he will be your husband and you have told him the map but not the territory. That is not the kind of honesty you required of him.
* * *
The morning was quiet. Elias had gone to the barn early. Clem was occupied in the outbuilding. Nora was still asleep, which was unusual — she was generally awake before the stove was built.
Clara had the kitchen to herself and the bread to make and the particular kind of solitude that felt, increasingly, borrowed — the solitude of a woman who had been solitary for twenty-six years and was discovering that she did not, in fact, prefer it.
She was shaping the second loaf when she heard the small sound from the hallway. Not quite crying. The quality of a child who is trying very hard not to be heard doing something private.
She wiped her hands and went.
Nora was sitting on the floor at the end of the hallway, in the narrow space between the wall and the linen chest — the kind of space children chose when they needed to be enclosed, with something solid at their back and on their sides.
She had her knees pulled to her chest and her wooden horse held against her, and her eyes were red but her face was composed in the way of a child who has had considerable practice at composing it.
Clara sat down on the floor beside her without comment. The floor was cold. The hallway smelled of cedar from the linen chest and of the faint lavender that still lived in the walls.
They sat.
After a while, Nora said: "I dreamed about Mama."
"Tell me," Clara said.
"She was in the kitchen. Not our kitchen — a different one, very bright.
She was making something, I don't know what, and she was happy.
She looked up at me and she smiled and she said 'there you are' and then I woke up.
" Nora's hands tightened on the horse. "I don't want to forget what she looked like. I'm scared I'm forgetting."
Clara was quiet for a moment with the weight of this.
"How old were you when she died?" she asked.
"Five. And a half."
"So you had five and a half years of her.
Five and a half years of the way she looked and the way she smelled and the way she said your name.
" Clara looked at the wall. "That's a long time to spend learning someone.
You don't forget the things you've spent five years learning. They go into you too deep to lose."
"But the dream was different from what I remember. She was different in it."
"Dreams do that. They're not memories, exactly. They're more like — your heart's own way of visiting someone. The face might shift but the feeling is true. How did it feel when she smiled at you?"
Nora was quiet, turning it over. "Safe," she said. "Like when you know someone knows where you are and is watching, and you don't have to think about it."
"That feeling is real. That is your mother in the dream, even if the kitchen is wrong. That is the actual thing she gave you, and you still have it."
Nora leaned slowly to the side until her head rested against Clara's arm.
"Will you tell me about her?" she asked.
"You didn't know her. But sometimes when someone you don't know talks about the person, it's different than when the people who knew them do.
Because they don't get sad in the middle of it. "
"What do you want to know?"
"What do you think she was like. From everything you know."
Clara considered. She thought about the Bible with the warm inscription.
The horse carved and named in the days after grief.
The way Nora sat inside a thing with her full attention.
The way Elias still spoke Ruth's name in a lower register than everything else, as though it lived in him at a different depth.
"I think she was the kind of person who made a room feel different when she walked into it," Clara said.
"Not louder or more dramatic. Just more itself.
More settled and more awake at the same time.
I think she said true things plainly and believed them down to her bones, and I think she loved your father and you with that same plainness — no ceremony, just the full force of it, every day.
" She paused. "I think she was someone who read Isaiah by firelight and meant every word of it.
And I think she gave you everything she had while she had time to give it, and you carry it still. I can see it in you."
Nora was quiet. Her small hand found Clara's and held it.
"I'm glad you came," Nora said. "I was a little scared before you came. I thought I might not like you."
"That was sensible of you. You had no way of knowing."
"But I liked you right away," Nora said. "From the bucket. Even before."
Clara laughed — the surprised, genuine kind. "From the bucket?"
"You fell off the stage," Nora said. "But you weren't embarrassed. You just straightened your coat. Mama used to say you could tell everything about a person by how they handled it when something went wrong in front of people."
Clara sat on the cold floor of the hallway and held Nora Caldwell's hand and thought that Ruth Caldwell had been, by all available evidence, a woman of extraordinary perception.
"Come on," she said. "I have bread rising. You can help me shape the second loaf."
Nora got up and tucked her horse under her arm and took Clara's hand and led her back to the kitchen, which was warm and smelled of yeast and wood smoke, and the mountains were enormous and white through the window, and it was Sunday, and tomorrow the reverend was coming, and in this house that was finding its new shape, a little girl named Nora was no longer watching from the fence.
She was inside.