Chapter 13 The Morning of the Vows
Tuesday morning.
Clara was awake before the dark had fully lifted. She lay in the thin pre-dawn light and listened to the house and thought about what today was.
She had expected to feel more afraid. Instead she felt something closer to the sensation she'd had boarding the train in Boston — a clarifying nervousness, the kind that sharpened rather than paralyzed.
The kind that meant: this is real, and you are in it, and there is no version of this that is abstract.
She got up and dressed carefully. She had one dress that qualified as her best — a deep blue wool, high-necked, with small covered buttons at the cuffs.
She had brought it from Boston in the bottom of her trunk not because she had specifically planned for a wedding but because her landlady, Mrs. Alcott, had pressed it on her with the words "you never know what you'll need to be presentable for.
" Mrs. Alcott had been correct about most things.
She braided her hair properly and looked at herself in the small mirror on the dresser. She looked like herself. This was something, she decided. She was not going to arrive at her own wedding pretending to be something more decorative than she was.
She went to build the stove.
* * *
Elias was already in the kitchen.
Not from the barn — he was at the table, dressed.
Not in his work clothes but in the dark coat she had seen hanging behind his bedroom door and never seen him wear.
He had shaved. He looked, across the kitchen in the early light, like the formalized version of himself — the same man but in the key of occasion.
He looked up when she came in.
They looked at each other across the kitchen for a moment.
"You're up early," she said.
"So are you," he said.
She went to the stove — the fire already built, the coffee already on. He had done it. She poured herself a cup and sat down across from him and they drank in the early morning quiet the way they had learned to over the past week, without needing to fill the silence.
"Clem checked the road at first light," he said. "Clear."
"Good," she said.
"Hobart should be here by ten."
"Good," she said again.
Another silence. The stove ticked. Outside, the mountains were beginning to emerge from the dark, shape by shape.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
She considered being diplomatic and decided against it. "A little," she said. "You?"
"Yes," he said. Simple as weather.
She looked at him. His hands were around his coffee cup and he was looking at the table, the characteristic inward quality of a man taking an honest inventory.
"Can I tell you something?" he said.
"Always," she said.
"I was afraid for a different reason than I expected." He looked up. "I thought I'd be afraid of doing wrong by Ruth. Of the ceremony being some kind of betrayal. I thought that would be the hard part." He paused. "It isn't."
She waited.
"The hard part is that I don't feel like I'm betraying her," he said.
"The hard part is that she would have — I think she would have liked you.
I think she would have sat across this table from you and argued about theology until midnight and loved every minute of it.
" He looked at his cup. "I think she sent you. "
Clara's throat closed briefly. She breathed past it.
"Elias," she said. "That is the most romantic thing you have ever said to me."
He looked up, startled. Then something crossed his face — surprised at itself, slightly undone. "I wasn't trying to be romantic," he said.
"I know," she said. "That's why it was."
He looked at her for a long moment with the quality of attention she had come to understand was not observation but commitment — the look of a man choosing to really see something.
"Clara," he said.
"Yes."
"When he asks — today — I'm going to mean the words." He said it directly, holding her gaze. "I want you to know that before he asks."
She met his eyes. The mountains beyond the window were gold now in the early light, the first real warmth of the morning touching their peaks.
"I know," she said. "I'm going to mean them too."
From down the hall came the sound of small feet on the floorboards, and then Nora appeared in the doorway in her nightgown, squinting in the light, and looked at both of them with an expression of deep, immediate satisfaction — as though she had surveyed a project she had been supervising and found it progressing according to plan.
"Are you getting married today?" she asked.
"Yes," Clara said.
"Good," Nora said, and went to get her porridge.
* * *
Reverend Hobart arrived at twenty past ten.
He was a round and cheerful man in his mid-fifties whose horse had the resigned air of an animal that had made this ride in all weathers and had decided to continue having feelings about it in private.
He came through the door trailing cold air and goodwill, shook Elias's hand with both of his, looked at Clara with open warmth, and said: "Well. God bless the snowstorm, say I."
He took coffee. He admired the kitchen. He told Nora she had grown three inches since September, which Nora received with appropriate seriousness.
He had brought, from his saddlebag, a small jar of preserved peaches from his wife, which he presented to Clara as a wedding gift with the dignity of a man delivering something of real significance.
"Margaret said a bride ought to have something sweet on her day," he said.
"Please thank her," Clara said. "That's very kind."
Clem appeared from somewhere and stood in the kitchen doorway with his hat in his hands, which was his version of full formal dress.
Reverend Hobart set down his cup. "Shall we?"
Elias looked at Clara.
She nodded.
* * *
They stood in front of the fireplace.
Not what Clara had imagined, when she had imagined such things — the church, the white flowers, the formal procession of a large family.
What she had instead was: a kitchen fire warm in the hearth behind Reverend Hobart, who was beaming with the uncomplicated joy of a man doing what he most believed in.
Clem in the doorway, hat in hands, face composed into the expression of a man attending something important.
Nora standing between her and Elias, holding both their hands.
The mountains visible through the sitting room window, blue-white in the December light.
It was, she thought, considerably better than what she had imagined.
"We are gathered here," Reverend Hobart began, "in the sight of God and these witnesses, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony." He said it with the warmth of someone who believed each word.
She was aware of everything at once: the weight of Nora's hand in her left, small and warm and certain.
The height of Elias beside her, the solidity of him — present, real, a person who occupied space in the world with the same unhurried certainty as the mountains.
The smell of the fire. The cold coming off the window glass.
"Elias Caldwell," the reverend said. "Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, forsaking all others, until death do you part?"
Elias turned to look at her.
He had intended, she could see, to say I do — the two words the ceremony required. But he looked at her, and something happened in his face, and what he said instead was:
"I do. And I want you to know that I mean it."
Reverend Hobart blinked. Then he smiled — the smile of a man who has performed many ceremonies and rarely heard anything new in them.
Nora squeezed Clara's hand.
"Clara Holt," the reverend said. "Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, forsaking all others, until death do you part?"
Clara looked at Elias. At the face she had been reading for ten days — the weathered lines, the gray-green eyes, the quality of attention he brought to things he had decided to see.
The man who went to the barn when he needed to and came back when he was ready.
Who read his daughter to sleep with his voice going quiet.
Who told the truth in preference to comfort.
"I do," she said. "And I mean it too."
Nora, between them, made a small sound of profound satisfaction.
There was one ring — Elias held it for a moment before he said, quietly, just to her: "It was my mother's. She left it for this."
Clara held out her hand and felt the ring settle onto her finger, warm from his palm, and she thought about a sensible woman who had made a quilt and saved a ring and raised a son who told the truth and came back.
"By the authority vested in me by the Territory of Colorado and in the sight of Almighty God," said Reverend Hobart, "I now pronounce you man and wife."
The fire crackled. The mountains stood in the window. Clem cleared his throat.
Elias took her hand — the hand with his mother's ring — and held it, and looked at her, and she looked back, and there was a long moment in which neither of them moved or spoke and the room was very still around them.
Then Nora said: "You're supposed to kiss her, Papa."
Clem made a sound in the doorway that was rapidly converted into a cough.
Elias looked at his daughter. Then at Clara. There was color along his jaw that had not been there before. Clara was fairly certain there was color in her own face as well.
He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her cheek — brief, warm, careful. His hand tightened on hers for just a moment.
It was not what the novels had described. It was real, and it was his, and she would think about it for the rest of the day.
"There," said Nora, with great satisfaction. "Now you're married."
Reverend Hobart laughed — a full, genuine sound that filled the kitchen. Clara laughed too. Even Elias, she saw when she looked at him, had given up on the straight face.
Clem went to make coffee.