Chapter 12 What Clem Sees
Monday morning came cold and bright and Reverend Hobart did not.
Clem had ridden to the edge of the property at seven to check the south road and returned with the news that a section of it, where it crossed the creek bed below the Granger property, had flooded with the snowmelt and then refrozen overnight into a glaze of black ice that no sensible horse would attempt.
The reverend, if he had tried to ride out, would have either turned back or ended up in the creek. Either way, he was not coming today.
Elias received this information at the kitchen table with his face doing its weather-assessment thing — steady, calculating, arriving at practical equanimity.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Or Wednesday," Clem said. "Depends on the temperature."
"Tomorrow," Elias said, with a finality that suggested he was not asking the temperature's opinion.
Clem looked at Clara. Clara looked at her coffee. Nora ate her porridge.
"More bread?" Nora asked.
"Yes," Clara said, and passed it.
* * *
Clem found Clara in the barn at midmorning.
She had taken to coming to see Jupiter after breakfast — not for any practical reason but because the horse had become, in a week, a reliable kind of company. He was interested in her in a straightforward, uncomplicated way that she found restoring.
Clem appeared in the barn door with two cups of coffee and the unhurried air of a man who has decided something is going to happen and is simply waiting for the moment.
"Thought you might want this," he said.
"Thank you." She took the cup. "You don't have to check on me."
"I'm not checking on you," he said. "I'm having my coffee somewhere warmer than the bunkhouse." He settled onto a hay bale with the comfortable authority of a man at home in a barn, which he had been for fifty years. "The south road'll be clear tomorrow. Hobart'll come."
"Good," Clara said.
"You're not nervous."
She looked at him. His small, sharp eyes were not unkind. "Should I be?"
"Most people would be," he said. "Marrying a man you've known nine days. In a snowstorm. In the mountains." He drank his coffee. "Not most people's situation."
"It's not," she agreed.
He was quiet for a moment. Jupiter shuffled in his stall.
"He's a good man," Clem said. Not a recommendation. A fact.
"I know," Clara said.
"Closed off since Ruth," Clem said. "I don't mean cold — he's not cold.
He just put everything behind a door and locked it.
Keeps himself to the work and the girl." He looked at his cup.
"You're the first person in two years he's talked to like a person talks.
I've been watching it all week. I thought you should know that. "
Clara stroked Jupiter's nose. "Why are you telling me?"
"Because you're going to have to decide whether to keep pulling the door or leave it alone," Clem said. "And I wanted you to know that the door's worth pulling. Whatever's behind it is worth the work."
She looked at him. He was watching her with the directness of someone who had earned the right to it by sixty years of paying attention and keeping most of what he saw to himself.
"Clem," she said. "Did he ask you to talk to me?"
"Lord, no," Clem said, with something that was almost offense. "He'd hate this. Don't tell him."
She laughed.
Clem stood, finished his coffee. "Fence on the north side needs looking at this afternoon. If he asks, that's where I was."
"I'll tell him," Clara said.
He went. The barn door swung shut behind him, and the wind moved through the gaps in the boards, and Jupiter leaned into her hand.
She stood with the horse and thought about doors and what was behind them, and about a man who had put everything behind one and locked it, and about the particular kind of courage it took — not the dramatic kind — to reach for the handle anyway.
She thought she might be exactly the kind of woman to do that.
* * *
That afternoon, Elias came to find her.
This was unusual. In the nine days she had been on the ranch, the traffic had generally run the other direction. He was not a man who sought people out. So when he appeared in the doorway of the sitting room where she was mending, she looked up with the awareness that something had shifted.
"Walk with me," he said.
She put down the mending and got her coat.
They walked the east fence line in the cold afternoon, their breath making clouds, the snow crusted and crunching underfoot. He did not speak immediately, and she did not prompt him. She had learned that with Elias, silence before speech was not emptiness but preparation.
The mountains were extraordinary in the afternoon light, the sun already declining toward the western peaks, the shadows on the snow a blue so intense it looked painted.
The creek that ran along the eastern boundary had opened slightly in the afternoon warmth, a thin dark line of moving water between ice-edges.
"I owe you an apology," Elias said.
She glanced at him. "For what?"
"For what I said when I wrote the advertisement. What I said in my letter." He kept his eyes on the fence line. "I told you I wasn't seeking a romantic arrangement. I told you it was practical. And I meant it when I wrote it." He paused. "I don't mean it now."
Clara looked at the creek. The water moved, dark and quick, between its white banks.
"I know," she said.
He looked at her.
"I've known for several days," she said. "I was waiting to see if you'd say it."
"You could have said it first," he said.
"I could have. But it needed to come from you."
He absorbed this. They walked. A crow lifted from a fence post ahead of them and flapped away in the cold air, complaining.
"I don't know what I'm doing," he said. "I know how to run a ranch and raise a child and mend a fence in December. I don't know how to — " He stopped.
"Do this?" she offered.
"Yes."
"Neither do I," she said. "I've done it wrong once already. I have no particular expertise."
They reached the corner of the fence line and turned north.
"I think," Elias said, "that when Hobart comes and we stand in front of him — I mean it. Whatever words he says, I mean them. Not because it's practical. Because I want to."
The words came out with the quality of something that had been held under pressure for a long time and was finally released. "Because I want to."
"Yes," he said.
They walked the fence line in silence for a while after that, and the silence was the third kind — the kind that didn't need anything else.
The mountains cast their long shadows east and the cold deepened and the creek ran between its ice banks and overhead the sky was turning toward the particular violet that preceded a Colorado nightfall, and Clara Holt walked beside the man she was going to marry tomorrow and felt, for the first time in a very long time, entirely located.
Not somewhere she had ended up. Somewhere she had arrived.