Epilogue June 1884
The columbine bloomed in the first week of June.
Clara found it on a Tuesday morning, on the walk she had taken to making along the creek bed before the teaching day began.
She walked the creek most mornings now, twenty or thirty minutes, the path she had come to know through winter and was learning again in its spring version, the same geography revealing itself in completely different terms.
The columbine grew in the bend he had described on Christmas Eve — the place where the creek turned south, the protected pocket of bank that caught the morning sun and held it.
They were blue, or mostly blue, with yellow centers, five-petaled, nodding on their stems in the light June wind.
There were perhaps thirty of them in the patch, and more scattered along the bank beyond.
She stood and looked at them for a long time.
They were exactly what Colorado columbine should look like — both wild and precise, the kind of wildflower that looked as though it had been designed with care and then released into the landscape to find its own way.
She thought: Ruth loved it here. She stood where Ruth had stood, looking at what Ruth had looked at, and she thought this not with grief or with the careful management of grief but with something more like gratitude — for a woman she had not known who had loved this specific place and this specific flower and who had passed that love, through the people she left behind, to someone who had never known her.
She walked back to the house in the June morning, through the grass that was vivid green now in the way Colorado grass was green in early summer — the green of something that had been under snow for five months and was making the most of its time.
Elias was at the northeast fence line, the stretch he was always working on, moving with his characteristic purposefulness.
She watched him for a moment and thought, as she thought every morning when she first saw him, some version of the same thing: there he is. There is the fixed point.
* * *
The school in Pinecrest had been, for the past five months, the occupation that made her most entirely herself.
She taught four mornings a week and rode in on the bay mare Patience — the mare Elias had bought for her in January, exactly as he had mentioned that evening in the sitting room, without ceremony, simply appearing one morning with a horse suited to her.
She had fourteen students by May, ages five through nine, and she knew all of them individually and completely in the way she had learned to know students over seven years of teaching, which was by paying the full attention.
Thomas Granger — the boy who had played Gabriel in the Christmas pageant with such conspicuous lack of enthusiasm — was one of her most interesting students.
He had been told, by one means or another, that he was difficult, and had organized his behavior around this information.
Clara had spent the first month carefully undoing this.
She had him reading by April. The day it happened was a Thursday afternoon, when he had been working through a passage in the history reader, his face set in the expression of a person expecting to fail, and then something had shifted, and he had read three sentences aloud without stopping, and then looked up.
She had said: "There it is."
He had looked at the page. Then at her. "It's still slow," he said.
"It will get faster," she said. "The understanding is the important part. The speed follows."
He had looked at the page again with the expression of someone revising a premise. She had recognized this expression from elsewhere and had thought: good. The revision of the premise. That's the one that matters.
* * *
Nora turned eight in April.
Elias had given Nora a horse of her own.
Not Jupiter — a small gray mare, eight years old, gentle and curious, that he had been negotiating for since February.
He had brought her up on the morning of Nora's birthday, and the look on Nora's face when she came out of the house and found the horse standing at the gate with a red ribbon around her neck was the look Clara had been trying to describe accurately in the journal ever since and had not yet managed.
"She's mine?" Nora had said, looking at the horse and then at her father.
"She's yours," Elias said. "You've earned her."
Nora had gone to the horse slowly — with the deliberate, careful pace of someone managing their own awe — and the mare had lowered her head and huffed once and accepted Nora's hand on her nose.
"What's her name?" Nora had asked.
"She doesn't have one yet."
Nora had looked at the horse for a long time. Then she had said: "Columbine."
Clara had looked at the mountains. Elias had looked at the mountains. Neither of them said anything.
"Because that's what Colorado looks like," Nora said. "When it's itself."
* * *
The rose in the corner of the garden was eighteen inches tall by June.
Clara had found it in a nursery catalog in February — a yellow climbing rose, not the dark red of the one that had been there before, something different and its own thing — and planted it in March, in the corner where the stake still stood, in the soil that had once held Ruth's climbing rose and that was, it turned out, excellent soil for roses.
By June it had put out its first blooms: yellow-gold, full-petaled, smelling of what roses were supposed to smell like when they were grown in the right soil in the right place by someone who had paid attention to what they needed.
Elias had noticed them without saying anything for two days. She had watched him not say anything.
On the third day she had said: "You can say it."
He had looked at the rose. "It's a good rose," he said.
"Thank you," she said.
"Different from the last one."
"Yes."
"Good different," he said.
She looked at the rose in the corner, yellow in the June morning, and thought: yes. Good different. That is exactly what we are trying for, all of us, in all the ways it applies.
* * *
She wrote in the journal on the evening of the columbine Tuesday.
She wrote: Six months. I have been here six months and the list of things I did not know I was coming to is longer than the list of things I thought I was coming to.
I thought I was coming to a practical arrangement in a place I had never seen, to be useful to a man and a child who needed someone useful.
I thought I was coming to a life of moderate satisfaction and legitimate purpose, which was a good life and which I had told myself was what I wanted.
What I was coming to was this: the mountains in all their conditions, from the blizzard of December to the columbine-blue of June.
A child who is, I believe, one of the finest people I have met at any age, who is teaching me as much as I am teaching her.
A man who tells the truth and pays the full attention and who went to the barn on the night of our wedding and came back, as he always came back, and who writes observations in the back of a journal that he did not know I was watching him make.
A community of people who brought honey and invited me to Thursday quilting and wrote to the school board on my behalf because that is what communities do when you are among them and they have decided you belong.
I was coming to a life that was larger than I had planned and more true than I had hoped and exactly as difficult and as good as real things were.
I have pages left. We will fill them.
～ The End ～