Chapter 20 Christmas Morning
They rode home under the stars.
Clara had been under Colorado stars before.
But she had not seen it like this — from a wagon on an open road, the mountains black shapes ahead, the Milky Way a river of light across the black so bright it cast faint shadows on the snow.
The nearer stars burned hard and specific and the farther ones blurred into the luminous band and the whole thing was so far beyond the word beautiful that she had to simply stop looking for words and just look.
Nora was between them on the bench under the heavy blanket, talking about the pageant. She had already told them about it twice, but she was finding new details with each pass.
"Mary, which was Alice Granger this year, kept looking at the shepherds instead of the baby," Nora reported. "You're supposed to look at the baby as though it's a real baby. I don't think Alice practices enough."
"She did well," Elias said.
"She did adequately," Nora said. She considered.
"If you want to offer help without it seeming like criticism, you say would it help if we practiced together?
Not you need to practice, but would it help.
Mama used to say that. She said the difference between help and criticism was how you held it when you offered it.
Offered up, like a gift, is help. Pushed at someone, like an argument, is criticism. "
They drove in silence for a little while after that, the horse moving at its steady pace.
Clara thought about Ruth, who had said that — who had had the kind of mind that produced the right true thing at the right moment.
She thought: Nora is carrying Ruth through time.
And Elias is. And now, in the small ways she had begun to absorb and use what she learned from both of them, so was she.
"The stars," Nora said, tilting her head back. "When I was little I used to think they were campfires in heaven." She looked at them. "It's a tradition. I tell it every Christmas Eve on the way home."
"Then it still counts," Clara said.
"Do you think heaven has campfires?" Nora asked. The question was genuine.
"I think heaven has whatever makes the people in it most themselves," Clara said. "For people who lived near mountains and cold and open sky, campfires would make sense."
"For Mama," Nora said, "it would have a garden."
"Yes," Clara said. "And Isaiah."
"And Isaiah," Nora agreed.
Beside her, she heard Elias say, low, almost to himself: "Fear not."
She looked at him. He was looking at the mountains ahead.
"That's what she said every time I was afraid of something," he said. "The night before we were married, I was twenty-four and not as certain as I'd thought, and Ruth read me Isaiah, and she said: Elias, fear not. And I thought: she means it. She's not afraid. So I wasn't either."
"And tonight?" Clara asked.
He turned and looked at her across the sleeping child — Nora had gone between one sentence and the next, completely and immediately, as children went. In the starlight his face was clear and quiet and entirely open.
"Not afraid," he said.
"No," she said. "Neither am I."
He reached across the sleeping child and took her free hand, and they rode home under the stars like that, and it was Christmas Eve, and the stars burned in their thousands above the Colorado mountains, and in the wagon a man held a woman's hand, and between them a child slept, and the horse knew the way.
* * *
He carried Nora in while Clara held the doors. He laid her in her bed and tucked the quilt and stood for a moment looking at her sleeping face. Clara stood in the doorway and watched him do it.
She had set the illustrated letters at the foot of Nora's bed the previous evening — the alphabet cards she had spent two weeks making, one for each letter, each with a small picture she had drawn and colored with her watercolors.
A is for apple. N is for Nora — a small figure with dark hair, holding a wooden horse.
In the hallway after, Elias paused. He had the journal she had given him — she had left it on the kitchen table after Christmas Eve supper — and he held it out to her.
"Look at the last page," he said.
She opened it to the page she had written — the page that ended: I am going to go on noticing. There are pages left. I expect to fill them. And below her words, in his hand — the bold, squared hand she had first seen in Ruth's Bible — he had written:
I have been noticing too. I notice that you build the stove before I come in from the barn and that the kitchen is always warm before I need it to be.
I notice that you look at Nora the way you look at things you love, which is directly and without softening.
I notice that you argue with me until one of us is right and then stop, which is different from most people, who argue until someone surrenders.
I notice that you have reorganized this house and this life without erasing what was here before and I do not know how you knew how to do that but I am grateful for it.
I notice that I am glad every morning that you are here. I expect to go on being glad.
Clara read this twice.
She looked up. He was watching her with the full, particular attention that was simply him.
"Elias," she said.
"Yes."
"That is the most you have ever written at once."
Something moved in his face that was the real smile — the full one. "I had time," he said. "You were asleep."
She laughed, standing in the hallway on Christmas Eve, pressing the journal against her chest.
"Come here," he said.
She went. He put his arms around her and held her, his chin resting on top of her head, and she felt the full solid reality of him and she put her arms around him and held back, and they stood in the kitchen on Christmas Eve and it was very simple and very good.
After a while he said, into her hair: "The string in my pocket. Clem gave it to me the winter after Ruth died. He said, in case you need something to hold. I forgot I had it."
She laughed against his chest. "Did it help?"
"I think it must have," he said.
She pulled back enough to look at him. He was looking down at her with the open face, the unmanaged face, the face she had been waiting without knowing she was waiting to see.
He kissed her, which was not the first time now and was therefore different from the first time — not the discovery of the thing but the confirmation, the easy warmth of a thing known.
She put her hand on his jaw and felt the warmth of his face under her palm and thought: here.
Here is the life. Not an idea of it. The actual thing.
"Merry Christmas, Clara," he said.
"Merry Christmas, Elias," she said.
She went to her room and lay in the dark and felt, moving through her in the warm dark, the full weight of where she was and what it was and what it meant. She did not try to reduce it to a smaller feeling. She simply let it be the size it was.
She slept deeply and completely and woke to Nora.
* * *
Nora's feet in the hall, Nora's voice: "Papa! Clara! She was there! She was there at the bottom of the bed! All the letters!"
And then Nora herself on the edge of the bed, fully dressed at some impossibly early hour, her hair in the wild state of a child who had dressed quickly in the dark and not found the hairbrush, her wooden horse under her arm, her face incandescent.
"All twenty-six," Nora said. "And N is for Nora and the picture is me with Ruth. You drew us both."
"Both always," Clara said.
Nora came and held on — the full claiming embrace, face against Clara's shoulder — and Clara held her, and over the top of her head the room was light-gray with the first of Christmas morning, and from the kitchen came the smell of coffee, which meant Elias was up and had built the stove, which was itself a gift, the most ordinary and complete kind.
* * *
The kitchen on Christmas morning: warm from the stove he had built, smelling of coffee and pine tree and the salt pork he was making for breakfast. Elias at the stove in his work clothes, because he had already been to the barn and back.
Nora erupting through the door with all twenty-six illustrated letters fanned in her hands like a hand of cards.
Elias had set something on the table beside Clara's place.
A package in brown paper tied with string.
Inside was a book — well-loved, carefully mended, its spine reinforced with a strip of brown leather.
She opened the front page and read: The Complete Works of George Eliot.
And below that, in a bold, squared hand: To my daughter Ruth, who knows the worth of a true mind. From your father, Christmas 1868.
Clara held the book in both hands and was quiet.
"It was on her shelf," Elias said. "She read it more times than I could count. I believe she would have wanted it used. By someone who would use it the way she did."
Clara looked up at him. He was standing by the stove with his coffee, watching her with the quality of attention he always had.
"I'll read it slowly," she said. "So she gets to be in it a long time."
He looked at her with the expression she had come to understand was his version of being entirely undone.
He looked at her with it and she held it and they were quiet for a moment across the kitchen, with Nora between them still organizing her alphabet cards by some interior principle she had not yet explained.
"Breakfast," Elias said, and turned back to the stove.
"Yes," Clara said, and set the book on the chair and went to help.
* * *
The Christmas Day afternoon walk took all four of them to the eastern hill — Clem had accepted the invitation with the resigned pleasure of a man who had been going to be at his own leisure but found he preferred this.
Nora stopped at the top of the hill and stood with her arms slightly out, her face tilted toward the winter sun, her eyes closed.
She was not praying or performing. She was simply standing on the hill in the sunlight on Christmas Day with her face toward the light, the way a growing thing turned toward what it needed.
"She does that," Elias said quietly. "Sometimes I find her like that. Just standing. Just in it."
"She knows how to be present," Clara said. "It's one of her best qualities. She got it from somewhere."
"She got it from Ruth," he said.
"Both," Clara said. "She got it from both."
He looked at his daughter on the hill, and Clara looked at him looking, and the mountains were behind them and the hawk was above them and the world was very large and the afternoon was very bright and it was Christmas Day and they were on the hill together and it was, in all its particular and unrepeatable detail, exactly right.
Nora opened her eyes and turned and saw them. "Come up!" she called. "You can see all the way to the Granger fence from here!"
Elias held out his hand.
Clara took it.
They went up the hill.