Chapter 17 The Hill
The evening it almost happened was a Wednesday in the second week of their marriage — a day that had not announced its intentions.
Clara had taught Nora in the morning, working through long division with the patient repetition it required, and Nora had arrived at the answer on the fourth attempt and looked up with an expression of such fierce satisfaction that Clara had felt, as she sometimes did in the best teaching moments, as though she had watched something ignite.
In the afternoon she had gone to the barn.
Jupiter received her with the attentiveness she had come to expect — his great head turning, his ears orienting, the quality of interest that she now understood as simply his character.
She had been talking to him, without self-consciousness, about the long division, when Elias came through the barn door earlier than usual.
"You're early," she said.
"Finished the northeast section. Came back to check on Cinder's shoe — she's been favoring the left front."
"Should I be concerned?"
"No. Just loose." He came to Jupiter's stall and put his hand on the horse's neck with the automatic ease she had watched him do a hundred times. "How was the arithmetic?"
"She got it on the fourth try. She'll get it on the third tomorrow."
"She's stubborn," he said.
"She's persistent," Clara said. "That's the same quality with better management."
He looked at her. The almost-smile. "Is that what persistence is?"
"It's what I tell my students. Stubborn is what you call it when someone else does it and it inconveniences you. Persistent is what you call it when you do it and it works."
"I'll tell that to Nora and she'll use it against me," he said.
"Almost certainly," Clara said, pleasantly.
He checked Cinder's hoof — just loose, needing resetting — and straightened and rolled down his sleeve. "Walk with me," he said.
"Where?"
"East of the barn. I want to show you something."
* * *
The something was the hill.
He led her out the back of the barn and around to where the land fell away toward the creek in a long, gentle slope.
The snow here was undisturbed — no fence line, no tracks, just the open hill running down to the dark thread of the creek and the aspens on the far bank, their white bark ghostly in the declining light.
"On clear days in summer," he said, "you can see three mountain ranges from here. The front range, the Sangres, and on very clear days the San Juans, which are a hundred miles south." He looked at the hills. "I wanted you to know what it looks like when it isn't December."
Clara stood beside him and looked at what it was in December, which was not the three mountain ranges but was still something — the white hills rolling away, the aspens bare and silver, the sky above going the first pale gold of late afternoon, the mountains catching the light on their peaks and doing something with it that was neither fire nor ice but the particular color that only happened here, at this latitude, at this time of year, at this hour.
"This is a remarkable piece of land," she said.
"I know it. I've known it my whole life.
" He was quiet for a moment. "I came here every evening for the first month after Ruth died.
After Nora was in bed. I didn't know what to do with the evenings.
And I couldn't go back to the sitting room.
So I came here. I stood where we're standing now and I looked at this. "
"What did it do for you?" Clara asked.
"It doesn't need me," he said. "That was what I needed. Something that was simply itself, regardless of what I did or didn't do." He looked at the peaks. "I needed that for a while."
Clara stood beside him and looked at the mountains and thought about being a thing that doesn't need you. About how that quality — the patient, enormous, indifferent permanence of a mountain — could be, in certain seasons of grief, exactly the company required.
They were quiet for a time. The light moved. The creek ran dark and silver below them.
"I'm not uncertain about what I feel," he said.
He turned to face her, fully, as he did when he was saying something he had decided to say.
"I want to be clear about that. I am not uncertain about what I feel, Clara.
I am uncertain about how to — move toward it.
Without making a mistake. Without asking too much or too little or in the wrong way. "
The light was doing something particular. The gold of the late afternoon, falling through the bare aspens across the creek, was in his face now — the lines of it, the gray-green eyes looking at her with the directness that was simply how he was.
"Can I say something?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You have not made a single mistake," she said.
"Not one. You have been exactly what I needed, in every way I needed it, since the first day.
You gave me space when I needed space. You were present when I needed presence.
You've been honest when honesty was hard.
" She paused. "What you are afraid of doing wrong, you have been doing right all along.
The difference between now and two weeks ago is not that you've become better at it.
It's that you're willing to see that you have been. "
He looked at her for a long moment.
"I don't know how you do that," he said.
"Do what?"
"Say the exact true thing without making it complicated."
"You simplify. You find the center of it and say that and leave the rest."
"What's the center of this?" he said. And the question was the real one, the one under all the others.
She looked at the mountains. At the rose deepening toward violet on the peaks. Then she looked at him.
"The center of this," she said, "is that I am in love with you. And I have been for some time. And I think you are in love with me. And that is the whole of it."
"Yes," he said. Low, certain, the word coming with the quality of something that had been true for longer than he had been saying it.
"Then there's nothing complicated," she said.
He raised his hand and she did not move — stood perfectly still on the hill with the mountains turning violet above them and the last light going out of the day — and he put his hand against her face, his palm warm against her cold cheek, and she closed her eyes for just a moment.
He was very close.
And then — from below, from the direction of the barn — Nora's voice, carrying clearly in the cold air: "Papa! Clem says supper is almost ready!"
They both heard it. The sound of a seven-year-old who knew nothing of moments and everything about supper.
He dropped his hand slowly. She opened her eyes. They looked at each other, and she saw in his face the same thing she felt — the simultaneous frustration and the tenderness of it, the way some things were comic and profound at once.
"She has extraordinary timing," Clara said.
"She always has," he said.
He offered her his arm, which he had not done before, and she took it, and they went down the hill toward the house and the supper and the seven-year-old who had no idea what she had interrupted, and the mountains watched them go.
* * *
In the morning he was at the kitchen table when she came in, and the quality of his face was different from all the previous mornings — more present, more open, the carefully managed version of himself set aside for once.
They were alone — Nora still asleep down the hall.
"I stopped yesterday," he said, without preamble, "because it seemed too soon. Not because it was wrong. I want to be clear about that."
"All right," she said.
"I don't want to presume. I know what we agreed to, at the beginning — "
"Elias," she said. "Look at me."
He looked up.
"The arrangement has been revised," she said. "I believe you know that. And I do not require being protected from the next thing. I am not fragile."
Something in his face shifted — a decisive thing, like the final piece of something coming into place.
"I know you're not fragile," he said. "I'm the one who needed time."
"I know," she said. "And I have given it to you."
"You have," he said. "More than I deserved."
"Don't make it a debt. It wasn't a debt. It was simply what the time required. And the time has done what it needed to do, and here we are."
"Here we are," he said.
"Yes," she said.
From down the hall came the sound of Nora's feet on the floorboards, approaching with the inevitable efficiency of a child who knew breakfast was not served to those still in their rooms. They both heard it.
Elias looked at the hallway. Clara looked at her coffee.
She was smiling before she could manage not to.
When Nora appeared in the doorway, they were both drinking their coffee in the entirely ordinary way of two people who had not been in the middle of anything.
Nora looked at them both. Then, with the serene confidence of someone who had surveyed the landscape and found it to her liking, she climbed onto the bench and said: "Is there porridge?"
"There will be," Clara said, and went to make it.
The Sunday of the Honest Grace
The third Sunday of their marriage was the Sunday that Elias began saying different grace.
Not different in the structure of it — he still said it before meals, he still kept it short, he was not a man who would suddenly begin declaiming at length over the supper table.
What changed was the quality. The quality of a man keeping a promise shifted, by degrees that were nearly invisible on any given day but unmistakable across the arc of weeks, into the quality of a man speaking to someone he believed was listening.
Clara noticed it first on a Saturday morning, the third week.
He said grace over breakfast — a sentence and a half, which was his usual length — but the sentence and a half had something in them that the previous sentences and halves had not.
Presence. The directness of a person addressing rather than performing.
She did not say anything about it. She received it and said amen and passed the bread.
The following week he said, at supper, after thanking God for the food and the day: "And for the conversation this morning about fractions, which reminded me that things I don't understand are still worth trying to understand."
Nora looked at him with bright eyes. "Was that about the fractions?"
"It was about the fractions," he said. "And other things."
Clara passed the salt and thought: there it is. There is the man returning to prayer the way he returned from the barn — when he was ready, in his own time, without fanfare.
She wrote about it in the journal. She wrote: I have watched him come back to faith the way I watched him come back from the barn all those early mornings — with the same deliberate quality, the same refusal to hurry a thing before it was ready.
I think faith, for him, works the same way land works: you prepare it, you plant in it, you wait for what grows to grow in its own time, and you don't try to pull the plants up to make them taller. You trust the ground.
He trusts the ground now. I can see it. The grace sounds like prayer again, which is the best thing I can say about it.
* * *
Nora, meanwhile, had developed her own theology of the table, which she expressed periodically and without warning.
"Do you think God is interested in cattle prices?" she had asked one evening, apparently in response to a conversation she had overheard between Elias and Clem on the subject.
"Why would He be?" Elias said.
"Because we pray about them," Nora said. "So He must hear about them. But is He interested?"
"I think," Clara said, "that if He is interested in us, He is interested in what interests us. The way a good teacher is interested in whatever her students are interested in — not because the subject itself is inherently important to her, but because the student is."
Nora considered this. "So He's interested in cattle prices because you're interested in cattle prices?"
"That would follow," Clara said.
"Then He's very interested in mule intelligence," Nora said, "because I'm very interested in it."
Clem, at his end of the table, examined his plate.
"I expect He takes what comes," Elias said, and something in his voice had the dry warmth of a man who is, at last, at ease enough with the subject to be wry about it.
Clara looked at him across the table and felt, precisely and without excess, the rightness of this: the four of them at the table, the discussion of mule intelligence and cattle prices and what God attended to, the stove warm and the mountains outside. The ordinary holy of a family at supper.