Chapter 19 Christmas Eve #2
March came in like March came everywhere in the mountains — with the promise of spring and the immediate, cold withdrawal of that promise, the days that smelled of mud and possibility followed by the nights that froze it solid again.
Clara had been warned about this, and was still not entirely prepared for it, because knowing that a thing happened and experiencing it as it happened were, as she had observed in many contexts, different kinds of knowing.
She was also not entirely prepared for what the thaw did to Elias.
He became, in March, a different quality of busy than the December and January and February busy she had observed.
The ranch in winter had the quality of managed maintenance — everything kept running at a careful minimum, the attention turned inward, the work smaller in scope and larger in precision.
But when the first real thaw came, when the creek broke and the mud appeared and the cattle in the south pasture began to show the restlessness of animals who had been waiting for something to change — when all of this arrived, Elias turned outward.
He was up earlier. He stayed up later. He moved through the ranch with the purposeful acceleration of a man who has a long list and limited time, which was accurate, because spring was in fact a limited season of intense preparation for summer, and summer was the season that the ranch's year was built around.
Clara watched this and adjusted.
This was something she was learning about herself: she was good at adjustment.
Not the passive kind — she had never been passive, had always been someone who moved toward what she wanted rather than waiting for it to arrive.
But the active, deliberate kind. The kind where you assessed the situation and figured out what was actually needed and then provided it, rather than providing what you had decided in advance to provide.
What was needed in March was: the household run with as much efficiency as possible so that his attention could be fully on the land, meals at reliable times because an irregular schedule disrupted his rhythm, and Nora occupied and managed without requiring him to be present for it.
She provided all of these without being asked.
She also, on the days when the afternoon light was good and the work permitted, went with him.
Not to help in any way that required skill she didn't have — she was not yet capable of the fence work or the cattle management that constituted most of his spring labor.
But to be there. To be an additional presence in the field, to hand him the tool he needed before he had to go back for it, to notice the thing he hadn't noticed because his attention was on the other thing.
And sometimes just to be with him while he worked, saying nothing, because she had discovered that he worked better when she was there even when they were not talking, which was the same thing she had observed about him in the sitting room evenings and which she thought was simply how he was: a man who did most things better in the company of someone he trusted.
One afternoon in mid-March, fixing the gate on the east pasture — a gate that had warped over the winter and no longer hung true — he had said, without looking up from the hinge he was resetting: "You don't have to stay. If you have other things."
"I know," she said. She was sitting on the fence rail, which she had become comfortable doing, watching the cattle in the middle distance. "I want to be here."
He looked at her. She looked at the cattle. She heard him go back to the hinge.
After a while he said: "I'm glad."
She did not say anything to this. She just sat on the fence in the March afternoon and watched the cattle and was glad in return.
* * *
She had her first difficult week in March.
She would have called it a bad week at one point in her life, but she had revised the vocabulary over time: difficult was more accurate, because bad implied a quality judgment on the week that was not quite right, and difficult was simply descriptive, the week was difficult, which was different from the week being wrong.
It started with a letter from her sister saying that their Aunt Frances was ill — not terribly ill, not imminently, but ill in the sustained way that meant things would change and Clara was twelve hundred miles away.
It continued with a run of three days of low cloud and no mountain view, which she had not expected to miss as much as she did when it was gone.
It was punctuated by a student whose difficulty she could not yet solve and which kept her awake on Wednesday night and most of Thursday.
And it ended with a small argument with Elias — not their first, they had had others, but the first one that had left a residue, that had not resolved cleanly before bed.
The argument was about nothing, which was of course the nature of the arguments that left residue.
The surface of it was about the spring cattle plan, specifically about a decision he had made without consulting her that she felt he should have consulted her on.
The underneath of it was about exhaustion and the aunt and the student and the mountains being invisible for three days.
He had said: "I made the decision because it needed to be made and I didn't want to add it to your week."
"I don't need to be protected from decisions," she said. "That was what we agreed. Equal partnership."
"Yes," he said. "And I made a mistake. I was trying to manage things and I managed the wrong way."
She had looked at him. He was not defending himself — he was simply acknowledging the error, the way he acknowledged errors, without excess and without retreat.
"Thank you," she said.
"I'll include you in the spring decisions from here on," he said.
"Yes," she said. "You will."
She had gone to her — to their room, for she had moved in February, on a quiet evening when nothing was said and everything was understood — and lay in the dark and thought about the residue.
The argument was over and had resolved correctly, meaning it had resolved into honesty rather than into managed peace, which was the only resolution that held.
But she was still carrying the weight of the week.
She felt his hand find hers in the dark.
He did not say anything. He simply found her hand and held it.
She held back.
The aunt would be all right. The mountains would return. The student would have a breakthrough eventually, or he would move away and another teacher would be the one to provide it, which was also a kind of resolution. The week would end.
She held his hand in the dark and thought: this is also what the life is. The difficult weeks, and the hand that finds yours in the dark, and the morning that comes after. This too.
She slept.