Chapter 16 The Ledger and the Letters
The letter Clara wrote to her sister Margaret in Boston on the ninth day of her marriage was the most difficult letter she had ever composed.
Not because the news was difficult — the news was, by any reasonable accounting, excellent. The difficulty was precisely in the telling of it: finding words for something she had not, in twenty-six years of corresponding with her sister, ever needed to find words for.
Margaret Holt — Margaret Cavendish now, two years married to a solicitor from Cambridge, Massachusetts — was a woman of considerable warmth and considerable skepticism.
She had said, when Clara told her about the advertisement, that she thought it was either the bravest or the most reckless thing Clara had ever done and she was genuinely uncertain which.
She had said it with the affection of a sister who knew exactly which twin she was.
Clara sat at the kitchen table on the ninth morning of her marriage, Nora at her lessons and Elias at the far pasture and Clem at his mending, and she wrote:
Dear Margaret, I have been attempting this letter for three days and have produced four drafts, none satisfactory.
The difficulty is that everything I want to tell you is true and I do not know how to arrange true things about happiness without sounding either theatrical or simple, and you know I am neither.
The man is good. I do not say this because he is easy — he is not easy, he is a man of considerable complexity who has been carrying a large grief for two years and is only beginning to learn what to do with it.
I say it because goodness is a different quality from easiness and is, in my experience, considerably rarer.
He tells the truth. He pays attention. He goes to the barn when he needs to think and comes back when he is ready, and I have learned to recognize this and let it happen without interpreting it as withdrawal, because it is not withdrawal.
It is simply how he processes the world, and I find I have room for it.
Nora is remarkable. I say this as a person who has been teaching children for seven years and knows the full range of what remarkable means.
She is funny without knowing it, which is the best kind of funny.
She handed me her most loved possession on the first day, to see how I held it.
I held it carefully. She has not stopped watching me since, but the watching is no longer evaluation — it is simply interest. The mountains are what I thought the world might look like if it stopped apologizing for itself.
I am happy, Margaret. I am specifically and genuinely happy.
I wanted to say it plainly because you will not believe it unless I say it plainly.
Your sister, Clara P.S. He carries a piece of string in his left coat pocket.
I have not yet determined why. Will report further when I know.
She sealed the letter and gave it to the post rider when he came through on Thursday, and felt, having sent it, the same clarifying relief she felt whenever she had said a true thing at some cost to her own composure.
* * *
The supply run to Pinecrest on the first Saturday of their marriage was her first time in town as a Caldwell, and the difference was notable.
People knew. This was the nature of small communities — the reverend had performed a ceremony, Clem had mentioned it at the post office, and from there the information had traveled at the speed information traveled in a community of three hundred souls, which was to say immediately and completely.
The result was that when Elias helped her down from the wagon outside McKinley's general store, three people passed on the boardwalk in the span of two minutes, and all three looked at her with the expression of people who are trying to appear as though they are not doing exactly what they are doing, which is assessing a new addition to their community.
Clara assessed them in return, which she suspected was not the expected response.
Inside McKinley's she found the stationery shelf, bought the smallest journal, and spent a while at the dry goods section making decisions about the spring garden while Elias discussed his supply order with old McKinley.
She could hear them from across the store — the particular registers of two men conducting practical business, Elias's voice low and specific and economical.
She bought seeds. Tomatoes — the ones Ruth had been famous for, which meant she intended to find out if the fame was justified. Lettuce for the early spring, squash for the summer, herbs for the kitchen: thyme and sage and lavender.
She bought the lavender specifically.
Not to restore what had been. Not as imitation. But because lavender grew in that soil and suited that climate and was part of what the house already was, and she was part of what the house was now, and the two things were not in conflict.
Elias found her at the seed shelf.
"Lavender," he said, looking at the packet in her hand.
"For the garden. Along the south fence. There are old beds there."
"I know," he said. He looked at the packet. His jaw did the thing it did when he was managing something.
"Is that all right?" she asked. Directly.
He looked at her. "Yes. More than all right." He took the packet from her and turned it in his hands. "She'd have been pleased that someone wanted to keep it going."
Clara looked at the shelf. "I'm not keeping it going," she said. "I'm starting something new that happens to include lavender. There's a difference."
He handed the packet back. "There is," he said. "Thank you for making it."
* * *
The chickens arrived on the Thursday of the second week.
This was not planned. It was the consequence of a conversation Clara had with McKinley on the supply run, in which she had asked, as a matter of general inquiry, whether there was anyone in the county selling laying hens, because she had noticed that the ranch purchased its eggs from the Pearce farm when it had the land and the structures to support its own flock, and this was an inefficiency she found unnecessary.
On Thursday, a boy of perhaps fourteen arrived at the ranch gate with twelve hens in a crate, and a note setting out a price that Clara assessed as fair and paid from the household account with the confidence of a woman who has reorganized the ledger and knows the margins.
She was settling the hens into the empty coop when Elias appeared.
"Where did the chickens come from?" he said. Not alarmed. Simply asking.
"The Albright farm. I sent word through McKinley." She settled a particularly agitated hen. "We were spending four dollars a month on eggs. The flock will pay for itself in eight weeks."
He looked at the hens. Then at Clara. "You bought twelve hens," he said.
"Twelve is the right number for the household. More than eight, which is the minimum for reliable supply through winter, and fewer than fifteen, which would require expanding the coop."
"You've thought about this."
"I think about most things," she said. "It's a habit."
He was quiet for a moment. The Rhode Island Red — the largest hen, the most self-possessed — walked to the center of the coop and arranged herself as though she had been there for years.
"I should have consulted you first," Clara said, because this was true. "It's your ranch."
"It's our ranch," he said.
She looked at him.
"As of eleven days ago," he said, "it's our ranch." He was looking at the Rhode Island Red. "The chickens are a good idea. I didn't have them because I didn't think about it." He glanced at her. "You think about things I don't think about."
"And you think about things I don't," she said. "That seems like a reasonable arrangement."
"It does," he said.
By supper, all twelve hens had names, all drawn from a list of queens of England that Nora had encountered in the history lessons. The Rhode Island Red was Eleanor. The smallest hen, a black-and-white bantam with aggressive opinions, was Mary.
"Mary Queen of Scots," Nora clarified. "Not the other Mary. The other Mary was nicer but less interesting."
Elias, at the other end of the table, did not look up from his plate. "Historically accurate," he said.
There were five letters waiting at the Pinecrest post office when Clara stopped in on the second Tuesday of her marriage, on a supply run that had been extended to include the errand because the post rider had been unreliable since the snow came and she did not want to wait.
The first was from Margaret. She had been expecting this. Margaret wrote fast when she was engaged — the letter had taken eleven days to arrive from Boston, which meant it had been written within three days of Clara's letter reaching her, which was Margaret at full speed.
She read it at the kitchen table that evening, with Nora in bed and Elias at his records and the fire doing its work.