Chapter Three #2
Albert heard the joke leave his mouth and was grateful for it, because the truth beneath Clara’s questions made him feel unsteady. She was asking whether grown people could be trusted to stay, and Albert wished promises were something he could build with boards and nails.
He turned back to the roof before she could see too much on his face. He had made another promise to Henry’s child. He wondered whether he had the right to make it, after doing so poorly with the last one. Then he drove the nail in straight and told himself rights mattered less than keeping it.
Inside the cabin, Dorothy had heard Clara’s question through the open doorway and felt it pierce a place she had tried to keep guarded.
She wanted to tell her daughter not to ask such things, not to lay their loneliness at Albert’s feet.
But another part of Dorothy had waited for his answer as hungrily as Clara had. She hated herself a little for that.
Two days later, Dorothy sat at Ella Sanders’s table with Grace asleep in her lap and a cup of tea cooling beside her. Ella had invited her under the pretense of needing help sorting mending, but the basket of torn stockings sat untouched between them.
“Albert has been coming by,” Ella said, far too casually.
Dorothy looked into her cup. “Only because of Henry.”
“Of course,” Ella said.
Dorothy narrowed her eyes. “You say that as if you don’t believe me.”
Ella picked up a stocking and turned it inside out. “I believe Albert loved Henry like a brother. I also believe a man can begin doing something for one reason and keep doing it for another.”
“Ella Sanders, do not go matchmaking in my grief,” Dorothy said.
Ella held up both hands. “I am not matchmaking. If I were matchmaking, there would be pie, and you would have no doubt of my intentions.”
Despite herself, Dorothy’s mouth twitched. “Why does everyone keep bringing pie into bargains I never agreed to?”
Dorothy’s first instinct was to protest. Albert was Henry’s friend. He came because he felt guilty. He brought milk because Clara had saved a biscuit and wood because Tommy had asked for it. There was nothing more to be made of it. There could not be.
“He is helping because he thinks he failed Henry,” Dorothy said.
Ella’s expression softened. “Maybe he did. Maybe a good man can fail and still decide to do better.”
Dorothy looked down at sleeping Grace and smoothed one finger over the baby’s cheek.
She was not ready for Albert’s help to mean anything beyond help.
If it meant more, then she would have to think of Albert as something besides the man who had carried Henry’s coffin. Her heart was too tired for that.
The accident at the mill happened late on Friday, when everyone was tired and thinking more about supper than the blade.
A board kicked back hard enough to knock a tool from Albert’s hand and split his palm open against a rough edge of metal. The cut was not wide enough to threaten his life, but it bled freely and left red drops scattered across the sawdust.
For one terrible moment, the mill yard became the day Henry died. Albert smelled fresh-cut wood and iron and blood. He heard men shouting. He saw Henry’s face pale beneath sawdust. He felt again the helplessness of standing there with two working hands and no way to put life back where it had gone.
Albert had thought he had put that day in a locked room inside himself.
He worked longer hours, slept harder, talked less, and pretended the door would hold if no one touched it.
But blood on sawdust had found the key. The memory had not weakened with time.
It had only waited for him to stop running.
“Travis?” Everett’s voice cut through the memory. “Sit down before you fall down.”
Everett caught his arm. “It is a cut that is dripping on my floor.”
“Your floor has seen worse.”
Everett’s face tightened, and Albert regretted the words as soon as they were out. “Go get it tended,” Everett said. “That is an order, not advice.”
Albert wrapped his hand in a rag and shook his head. “It’s only a cut.”
He should have gone to his own cabin. He should have washed it there, bound it tight, and pretended the sight of blood had not pulled him backward six months. Instead, he found himself walking toward Dorothy’s cabin with his injured hand pressed to his chest.
Dorothy opened the door and took one look at his wrapped hand. “Albert.”
“It’s not bad,” he said.
“Men only say that when it is bad enough to need tending.” She stepped aside. “Come in.”
She set Grace in Clara’s arms, sent Tommy to sit on the pallet, and brought Albert to the small table.
Her movements were quick and sure, the same way they had been when Tommy scraped his knee, or Clara woke feverish in the night.
Albert sat because she pointed to the chair, and because obeying her seemed easier than speaking.
Dorothy unwrapped the rag and drew in one sharp breath. “You should have gone to Belle. She has better supplies.”
Albert looked at the basin, the cloth, and the firm set of her mouth. “Belle would fuss,” he said, “and you command.”
Albert nearly smiled, though his hand throbbed.
Dorothy in command was easier to face than Dorothy frightened.
He wondered how often since Henry’s death she had been forced to sound certain when she was not, to take charge because there was no one else to do it.
The thought quieted him more effectively than her order.
“Then be still.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Albert obeyed, though the corner of his mouth twitched when she tightened the cloth.
Dorothy told herself her hands were steady because she had tended children through fevers and scraped knees, because a cut palm was nothing compared to what she had already survived.
Yet her heart beat too fast as she wrapped the cloth around Albert’s hand.
He had come to her. Not to Belle, not to his own empty cabin, but to her door with pain in his face and blood on his sleeve.
She did not know why that mattered so much, only that it did.
She washed the cut with warm water and a bit of soap, then wrapped it with clean cloth from her sewing basket.
Her fingers were gentle, but not timid. Albert watched the bend of her head, the loose strands of hair near her cheek, the concentration in her eyes.
For one breath, he saw Dorothy not as Henry’s widow, not as a duty he had failed, but as a woman sitting close enough that he could feel the warmth of her hand through the bandage.
The tenderness of her hands frightened him more than the cut did. Pain had a place and a reason. This new awareness of Dorothy had neither, at least none he was willing to admit, and Henry’s shadow still stood beside the table.
Dorothy tied the bandage firmly. “There. Try not to bleed through it before morning.”
Albert forced a smile. “I’ll do my best.”
Dorothy did not release his hand right away. “Was it like Henry’s accident?”
Albert’s throat tightened. “No. Not really. But for a moment, I remembered too much. I did not mean to bring it here,” Albert said. “The memory, I mean.”
Dorothy’s fingers tightened around the edge of the bandage. “It was already here.”
Dorothy looked toward the stove, though Albert did not think she was seeing it. “The morning Henry died, we quarreled over kindling.”
Albert stayed very still.
“It was foolish,” Dorothy said. “He had meant to split more before leaving, and I was tired, and Tommy had been up half the night. I told him he remembered everyone at the mill before he remembered his own stove. He laughed at first, but I would not laugh with him. Then he said he would do it when he came home.”
Her voice broke on the last word. “He never came home. That was the last thing I said to him. A complaint about kindling.”