Chapter 19 Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve announced itself at dawn.
Clara woke to light — not the gray pre-dawn she had become accustomed to, but the particular quality of winter morning light when the sky is clear and the snow on the ground acts as a second source, reflecting everything back up.
She went to the window and the world outside was luminous.
The mountains were already catching the first direct sun on their eastern faces, the peaks burning orange-gold.
The sky above was the hard, concentrated blue of altitude, so blue it seemed to have depth.
Christmas Eve. Thirty-one days since she had stepped off the stage into the feed bucket.
She counted them not to quantify them but to hold them — to appreciate the density of thirty-one days that had contained the blizzard and the ceremony and the hill and the first prayer and the chickens and the fractions and the garden plan and all the evenings in the sitting room and all the mornings at the stove and all the meals at the kitchen table.
Thirty-one days that had been, in terms of living, considerably more than thirty-one days. This was what it meant to pay full attention: the days expanded. Not in hours. But in content. In the quantity of real things that had happened within them.
She dressed carefully in the blue wool dress and braided her hair properly and went to the kitchen and found him already there, dressed in the good dark coat, and he looked up when she came in, and she thought: it will keep doing this. Every morning, this will keep happening.
"Merry Christmas Eve," she said.
"Merry Christmas Eve," he said. He stood — he always stood when she came into a room, the automatic courtesy of it, as natural as breathing — and poured her coffee before she reached the pot. "You look — " he began.
"Don't," she said. "You'll make me vain."
"You're not vain," he said. "You're the least vain person I've met in some time."
"Then I must be developing it," she said. "Go on."
He looked at her with the quality that was his version of being undone — the quality of a man who had decided not to manage his face for once. "You look like Christmas," he said, finally.
She looked at him. "That was perfect," she said.
* * *
Nora arrived at breakfast with a list. She had written it on her slate board — what she called the Christmas Eve Plan — and she presented it at the table with the gravity of a project manager delivering a schedule.
"First, more decorations on the tree. Second, make the cookies for the church supper. Third, Papa cuts more wood for tonight. Fourth, we get ready for the service. Fifth, the church." She looked up. "I think that covers everything."
"It covers a great deal," Clara said.
"I've been planning it," Nora said.
Elias looked at his coffee. "The wood is already cut," he said. "I did it yesterday."
Nora made a mark on the slate. "Good. Then we can start with the decorations."
The cookies were a production. Clara had the recipe in her head — a simple butter cookie, the kind that held its shape when cut, the kind she had made every Christmas since her mother had first given her the rolling pin and the instruction to press evenly.
She had cut the shapes from cardboard the previous evening — a star, an angel, a simple round — and Nora had spent the morning on the decorating with the concentration of an artist who knew what she wanted.
They worked at the kitchen table, flour on every surface, the stove hot and smelling of butter and sugar.
Clem appeared and was recruited to wash the bowls, which he did with the dignified manner of a man performing a task below his usual station.
Elias sat at the end of the table with his coffee and watched the whole enterprise with the expression she had become particularly fond of — not smiling exactly, but the quality of a man watching something that pleases him and no longer working to conceal that it does.
"The star cookies are for Mrs. Hobart," Nora told him, "because stars are her favorite. The angel cookies are for the reverend because he's in charge of the angels. And the round ones are for everyone else because round is neutral."
"Stars are not neutral," Clara said.
"Stars mean something," Nora agreed. "They mean you are paying attention to something important that is very far away. That's what the wise men did. They saw the star and they knew something important was happening far away and they followed it."
Clara looked at the cookie she was cutting. "That's a very good definition of a star," she said.
"It's what stars do," Nora said. "They point you toward something."
Elias, at the end of the table, looked at Clara over his coffee cup. She looked at him. A brief moment — the kind that happened now with some frequency, the kind that didn't require words because the words were already understood.
"Yes," he said, apparently addressing the general question of what stars did. "They do."
* * *
The service at Pinecrest Community Church was everything that small-town Christmas Eve services have always been, which is to say it was imperfect and thoroughly alive.
The church was full to the walls. Margaret Hobart — who turned out to be a small, sharp-eyed woman with the warmth of a summer fire and the directness of someone who had survived a great deal — pressed Clara's hand when they arrived and said, "I've been waiting to meet you.
Elias has been a new man." She said it without sentimentality, as a statement of observed fact.
The schoolteacher Albright introduced himself to Clara with evident relief at finding another person with pedagogical training.
He had thirty students and was managing them alone.
She told him about the spring, about her background, and he said he would write to the school board first thing in January.
"It appears," she told Elias, finding him at the end of a pew, "that I may have a teaching position in the spring."
He looked at her. "Already?"
"Albright is overwhelmed," she said. "And motivated."
"You didn't waste any time."
"I don't waste time," she said. "It's one of my more consistent qualities."
He looked at her with the fully realized version of his expression — the one that was simply his face directed at her with full intention. "Sit down, Clara," he said.
She sat. He sat beside her. Nora came from behind the altar and located them immediately in the crowd, and her face when she found them — when she found them both, sitting together in the same pew, as they would sit in this pew every Christmas Eve hereafter — was the satisfied face of a child whose project has arrived at its intended conclusion.
Reverend Hobart mounted the pulpit and managed the candles with conspicuous caution, and the congregation settled into the particular quiet of people who are, for the moment, entirely willing to be still. He read from Luke.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
Fear not. The same words from Isaiah that she had read aloud to Nora by the fire on the second day of the blizzard.
She had been afraid, she thought. She had come here with clear eyes, she had told herself, with practical expectations, and both of those things were true, but underneath them there had been fear.
Fear that Edward had been right. Fear that admirable was the ceiling of what she was to people.
Fear that the thing she had told herself she didn't need — to matter, specifically, to someone specific — was a thing she would not find.
Fear not.
She felt Elias's shoulder against hers in the crowded pew, and she thought about what it meant to find the thing you were afraid of not finding.
She thought it required a particular quality of gratitude that was different from ordinary gratitude.
Quieter. The kind you couldn't fully express because it was too large for the words available.
The pageant began. Nora appeared with the other children in white, and her blue sash was perfectly tied, and when she spoke her lines — just three, the angel speaking to the shepherds — her voice was clear and steady and carried to the back of the church without effort.
Fear not.
She said it directly, without performance, the way she said everything.
And in the second pew on the left side, her father breathed very carefully, and the woman beside him felt it, and did not look at him, because some things were private even in a full church.
But she found his hand in the dark of the pew — reached, deliberate, and found it — and held it, and felt his fingers close around hers, and they sat in the candlelit church on Christmas Eve holding hands while their daughter spoke of not being afraid.
After the service, supper in the church hall, the community gathered around tables loaded with everything they had brought.
Clara stood with Helen Granger and Margaret Hobart and talked and listened and felt, with the pleasant surprise of someone who has learned not to assume things, that she liked these people.
That she was going to like this life. That Pinecrest, Colorado, which she had found on a map in a Boston boarding house three months ago and which had seemed then abstract and improbable, was real and particular and entirely hers.
The March Thaw