Chapter 18 What Keeps
The hill the next day was cold and bright and empty of interruption.
They went after Nora's morning lessons, in the window between her schoolwork and her afternoon project of cataloguing the animals of the ranch by intelligence, a project she had begun the previous week and which required, she had explained, a scoring rubric with seven categories.
She had left them at the kitchen table with a slate full of preliminary notes and the confident air of a scientist who would return to her data in due course.
They left without announcing where they were going. No occasion declared. They had said tomorrow and it was tomorrow and they were going.
They walked the east fence and then around the barn and up the hill.
The aspens were silver and bare against the sky and the snow underfoot was crusted and firm, holding their weight.
Their breath made white clouds that the cold dispersed.
The mountains were doing their winter thing — present, enormous, unhurried, the peaks carrying snow in the upper reaches and the lower slopes showing the dark of timber.
They stood on the hill.
He turned to her.
He put both hands on her face — deliberately, both hands, warm against the cold of her cheeks — and he looked at her for a moment that was exactly as long as it needed to be, the moment of intention, of choosing. Then he kissed her.
It was not tentative. Not the first gesture of a man who was uncertain but the gesture of a man who had been certain for some time and had arrived, at last, at the permission to show it.
Warm and real and him, entirely him, with all the quality of attention that was simply his character — the full presence, the complete commitment to the thing in front of him.
She put her hands against his chest and felt the solidity of him, the realness, and she thought: there it is. There is the thing I came for. Not the ranch, not the practical arrangement, not the life that was reasonable and useful. This. This specifically.
When he stepped back they were both breathing the cold air and the mountains were still there, enormous and patient, and the creek was still frozen below them, and the aspens were still bare and silver, and none of it had changed and all of it was different.
He kept his hands on her face for another moment. "Clara," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"I love you," he said. The words came plainly, without arrangement, in the way the best true things came. "I want to be very clear about that."
She felt the warmth of it go through her in the cold air.
"Good," she said. "Because I love you too. I told you this yesterday and I meant it then and I mean it now and I expect to go on meaning it."
"I know," he said.
"You know," she said. "So stop looking like you're waiting to be contradicted."
Something happened in his face — the release of something that had been held, the quality of a man setting down a weight he had carried long enough to forget he was carrying it.
He laughed. Brief and surprised and entirely genuine, and she had heard him laugh precisely twice before and both times it had done something to her chest that she had been managing, and this time she did not bother to manage it.
"Let's go in," she said. "It's cold."
"It is," he said, and offered his arm, and they went down the hill together.
* * *
What followed was a week of ordinary days that were not ordinary at all.
This was the paradox of happiness, Clara thought — that it did not transform the texture of the days into something unrecognizable, did not replace the stove and the ledger and the fractions and the bread with something theatrical and vivid, but rather made the stove and the ledger and the fractions and the bread feel different.
More themselves. As though the contentment she was carrying acted as a clarifying agent, sharpening the particular quality of each ordinary thing.
The coffee tasted better. The bread dough felt different under her hands.
The smell of the barn in the afternoons.
The sound of Nora's voice working through a problem — the rhythm of it, the pause when she was thinking and the quickening when she had found the answer.
The mountains through the kitchen window at first light, revealing themselves from the dark by slow degrees. His footstep in the hall.
Especially his footstep in the hall.
She had always noticed it — from the first days. But there was a difference between noticing a footstep and noticing a footstep now that the footstep had kissed her on a hill in December and told her he loved her, and the difference was considerable.
On a Wednesday evening — it was the third week of their marriage — Nora presented at supper the results of her animal intelligence research.
She had developed a scoring system with seven categories: memory, problem-solving, communication, emotional expression, adaptability, cooperation, and what she called the understanding of consequences.
"Jupiter scores highest overall," she said. "He has very good memory — he knew Clara from the second day — and his problem-solving is good. Last summer he figured out the latch on the south pasture gate by himself, which is a complex latch."
"He did," Elias said. "I had to get a new latch."
"That's problem-solving and also consequences," Nora said, making a mark on her slate. She moved on through Cinder, the draft horses, the mules, and finally Clem's dog. When she arrived at the mules, she paused for effect.
"The larger mule scores surprisingly well on problem-solving. He opened the feed storage twice this fall, which required figuring out a hook-and-eye latch. But his cooperation score is very low because he uses his intelligence primarily to inconvenience people rather than to work with them."
"That is," Elias said, "an accurate assessment of that mule."
"The conclusion," Nora said, "is that intelligence without cooperation is not as useful as moderate intelligence with good cooperation. This may be a general principle."
There was a pause.
And then Elias laughed. Not the small sound she had heard before — the adjacent-to-a-laugh sound. The full version. Warm and genuinely surprised, and it lasted longer than she expected, and the quality of it transformed his face completely, and it was the most unguarded she had ever seen him.
Nora looked pleased and slightly confused. "Is it funny?"
"Yes," he said. "But also completely right."
"I thought I might be," Nora said, and went back to her supper.
Clara looked at her food. She was smiling in a way that required management. She managed it insufficiently. Elias looked at her. "Intelligence without cooperation," he said, quietly. "Is not as useful as moderate intelligence with good cooperation."
"I know," she said. "You're right." And she looked at her plate, and the fire burned, and outside the Colorado winter dark pressed close around the warm house, and inside it was entirely, completely enough.
* * *
She had the conversation she had been meaning to have with Pastor Elmore on the second Sunday of February.
He had been trying to have it with her since before Christmas, she suspected — he was a man who paid pastoral attention and who had, she thought, quite a lot of things he wanted to say to her about Elias, about the family, about what he had observed over the past months.
He had been patient in not pressing, which she appreciated.
And when she found him in the church vestibule after the service on that February morning, and their eyes met in the way of two people who have been circling the same conversation, they both simply stopped.
"Walk with me," he said, nodding toward the churchyard.
They walked. The February churchyard was brown-gray and cold, the gravestones in the far corner dusted with the morning's light snow.
Clara had not been back to that corner — Ruth's grave was there, and she had not yet felt it was the right time.
She was not sure when the right time would be.
But she was thinking about it more, which perhaps meant it was approaching.
"How is he?" Elmore asked.
"Better," she said. "He's praying again. Genuinely, I mean — not just saying grace as an obligation."
Elmore exhaled slowly. "I have been hoping for that for two years," he said. "I didn't know if it would come."
"It came on its own," Clara said. "I didn't produce it."
"You gave it room," he said. "That's the same thing, sometimes."
She thought about room — about the quality of giving someone the space their thing needed to arrive. She thought this was, in some ways, the thing she had been most careful about since she came. Not pushing the grief, not pushing the faith, not pushing the love. Making room and waiting.
"His daughter," Elmore said. "What was it that happened there? I've seen a change in her since Christmas that I can't quite account for."
"She decided I was safe," Clara said. "On the first day, actually. It took a few days for me to understand that it had already happened."
"And you?" he said. "Are you happy here?"
She had been asked this by several people and had given several versions of the same answer. She gave him the fullest version, because he was a man who would receive it properly.
"I am," she said. "More specifically and thoroughly than I expected.
I came here with practical expectations — I thought I would be useful and fulfilled and that this would be sufficient.
I did not expect to feel located. To feel like this was where I was supposed to be.
" She looked at the mountains beyond the churchyard fence.
"I feel located. I didn't know I was missing that until I found it. "
Elmore looked at the mountains too. "Ruth felt that way about this valley," he said. "From the first year. She said to my wife once that she had been looking for the place where she was most herself and she had found it." He paused. "I think you may have found the same place."
Clara stood in the February churchyard and thought about two women who had found the same valley and made their lives in it in their different ways, and about the valley that apparently had room for both.
"I think so too," she said.