Chapter 2
Helen brought it up at Sunday dinner, between the roast and the potatoes.
"Mrs. Ferris was at church," Helen said, passing the potatoes. "She was very gracious about it. She said young girls change their minds, and no harm done, and Elliot bears you no ill will."
"That's good of him," Clara said, and meant it, which made it worse.
"She said—" Helen hesitated, the way Helen did when about to repeat something unpleasant. "She said a girl as lively as you wants a little time to settle. That's all. Time to settle."
Lively. She knew what that meant. It meant flighty, said politely.
Father cut his meat. He had not said anything yet beyond the blessing.
"So we've been thinking," Helen went on, in the gentle voice that meant the deciding was already done.
"Lydia's letters — she says the baby's due at the end of September, and with the homestead and the garden coming on, she'll want help long before then.
You could go to her. You've been wanting to see Nebraska since Christmas. "
"I have," Clara said. It was true. All of it was true, and none of it was a question.
"You'd be a wonder with the baby coming. And it would give things here a chance to—" Helen's hand made a small motion, smoothing an invisible wrinkle out of the tablecloth. "To settle."
"And then home by fall," Father said.
Clara looked at him. He was looking at his plate.
"After the confinement, of course," Helen said quickly. "You couldn't leave Lydia before the baby. But home by fall, before the weather turns. And Mrs. Ferris did say — she only mentioned it — that Elliot is in no hurry. That nothing need be considered final, on his side."
The visit. The baby. The return. Home by fall. Elliot willing. Nobody at the table had asked Clara what she wanted.
"Papa," Clara said. "What do you think?"
Father's knife stopped. He looked at her, and his mouth opened, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something of his own.
"Your stepmother has it right," he said. "Nebraska will do you good."
He went back to his plate.
"Well," Clara said brightly. "Nebraska. I'll need to know everything about cows."
Helen laughed, relieved, and everyone went back to eating, and Clara smiled and kept smiling, and under the table her hands were folded tight in her lap.
She wrote to Lydia that evening. The answer came back inside the week, which meant Lydia had written the same day she got it.
The letter was two pages of arrangements in Lydia's straight hand: the train, the changes at Kansas City and Lincoln, the twice-weekly arrivals, bring boots, bring nothing fine. And then, at the bottom, below the signature, one line more:
Come as soon as you like and stay as long as you need. There is no clock in this house but the one I wind.
Clara read that line four times. She sat on the edge of her bed with the letter in her lap and the house quiet below her and read it once more.
Nobody in two weeks had said anything like it.
Helen had said home by fall. Father had said Nebraska will do you good.
Even Mrs. Ferris, in her own way, had said she'll come round.
And here was Lydia, six hundred miles off, saying only: come when you want, stay as long as you need, the time is yours.
She folded the letter and went to find her trunk in the attic.
The packing took three days, slowly, because there was no rush and because packing gave her hands something to do while Mrs. Ferris's version of events made its way through town.
The yellow paper. The strawberries. The ring returned at the gate in the mud, which was true, and a great deal more that was not, and Clara smiled through all of it at the store and at church and let it pass.
Helen mended her traveling dress without being asked.
Father said nothing further about Nebraska or anything else, but on Saturday morning the trunk had been carried down from the attic to the front hall, and she had not carried it.
Clara stood on the platform Monday morning with the wind going straight through her coat.
"I'm not crying," she announced, crying. "It's the wind. My eyes water in wind, it's a known complaint in our family."
"Of course it is," Helen said.
"Aunt Gertrude had it. Before the consumption took her."
Helen, who had never once been sure whether Aunt Gertrude existed, made a small sound and gave up and hugged her. Then she pressed a parcel into Clara's hands: sandwiches, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string. "Ham and cheese. The station food is terrible, everyone says so."
"You said that to Lydia."
"It was true then too."
Then Helen brought out a second packet, smaller, flatter, wrapped tighter, and held it a moment before handing it over. "And this is for Lydia. Just — into her hands, when it's the two of you. It'll keep till then."
"What is it?"
"It'll keep," Helen said, which was not an answer, and tucked her hands back under her shawl and did not look at the carpetbag again.
Clara put the packet at the bottom of her carpetbag and did not ask again.
Father stood with his hands driven deep in his coat pockets. When she came to him he took one hand out, and put it back, and took it out again, and finally gripped her shoulder with it, hard, and held on.
"You'll want money," he said. "If there's trouble. You write."
"I'll write anyway."
"Well." His hand tightened once and let go. His eyes had gone bright, and he stared down the track so he would not have to look at her.
The whistle sounded. Clara climbed up, found a window seat, and looked out at them on the platform: Father staring hard at the train, Helen with her arm through his, both of them already smaller.
She waved. Helen waved back with her free hand.
Father did not wave — he stood there with his coat blowing and his jaw set, and Clara kept her forehead to the window until the platform shrank to a line and the line went around a curve and there was nothing left of it.
Clara sat back. The glass was cold where her forehead had pressed it. Outside there was nothing but brown fields and standing water and the same flat sky going on and on, and she watched it for a long time because nobody needed her to say anything about it.
Her hands folded themselves on the carpetbag. The car rocked. A baby cried three rows up and was hushed. She had no one to talk for out here. Clara watched the fields all the way to Lincoln and did not say a word.
The train stopped at Lincoln and took on more passengers. Clara watched them come down the aisle.
She noticed the boots. Everyone else had come down the aisle in a hurry, but these boots came slow and steady and stopped at the seat across from hers.
She looked up. A black coat with dust on the shoulders.
A carpetbag older than hers. And a Bible in his hand — not packed, carried — tooled leather worn soft at the corners and shiny along the spine from use.
"Is this seat spoken for?"
"By you, I'd say."
He sat down across from her. He was younger than she had first thought — six-and-twenty, maybe — with gray eyes, a jaw with a day's stubble coming through it, and hair that needed cutting badly.
He put the Bible on his knee and looked out the window and did not seem to notice or care that half the car was looking at him.
Clara looked at the Bible. The leather was dark with handling, cracked along the spine, and the pages had a worn thickness to them that came from being turned often. She looked at his hands. They were not soft hands. She looked out her own window and lasted about four miles.
"You're not a salesman," she said. "Salesmen talk. You haven't said a word since you sat down." She looked at the black coat, the serious face. "Undertaker?"
"No."
"Lawyer. No — lawyers carry more paper. Schoolmaster?"
"Preacher."
"Oh, that was my next guess."
"It generally is somebody's." He said it without any smile at all, but the dryness was there.
He did not offer his name. She did not ask. She asked other things instead.
"Where are you headed?"
"A town up the line. I've been down at Conference — an old minister's affairs." His voice went flat on that. Clara let it alone.
"You've been out here all winter?"
"Since January. I've ridden more of this country than the conductor, and he gets paid for it."
"My sister's in Nebraska," Clara said. He had not asked, but she wanted to tell him. "She married a cattleman last year. I'm going out to help with the baby — it's due in September."
"That's a long way to go for family."
"Lydia would do the same for me. She'd do worse — she'd do it without complaining."
He almost smiled at that. Not quite, but the corner of his mouth moved.
"Are you close?" she asked. "To your people."
"No." He turned a page. "Not close, no."
She did not stop there.
"My stepmother picked out green wallpaper for the house I was supposed to live in," she said. "I wanted yellow. I didn't get yellow. I didn't get to pick anything — the cake, the curtains, the day. She had it all written down before I finished my tea."
He looked up from his book.
"I gave the ring back," Clara said. "A week ago. And now I'm on a train."
"You'll want to stop me when I run on," she said at last, when she had run on — the empty country sliding past the glass.
"Everyone does. I'm the light one, you see.
Lydia got the sense and Thomas got the distance and I got the noise.
I'm extremely easy not to listen to. It's my best feature; whole rooms relax. "
He looked at her for a moment, not answering right away. Out the window the sun was going down into the grass, and the light came in level and lay along the worn gilt of the Bible's spine.
"You've asked after the conductor's cough twice," he said.
"You moved seats at Seward so the window draft would miss the old woman ahead of us, and you did it so she wouldn't know why.
You've been watching the mother with the baby in the fourth row since Lincoln in case she needs a hand.
" He opened his book again. "That's not noise.
You're not small, whatever they've told you. I don't know why you advertise it."
Clara opened her mouth and nothing came out. She closed it. She looked down at her hands on the carpetbag, then out the window, then back at him. He had already gone back to his book.
A mile went by. Then she straightened up.
"Does your congregation know you do that?" she said. "Notice things like that about people?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You will make it very hard for anyone in your church to keep a secret. They'll marry you off in self-defense — the ladies' committees won't rest till there's a wife in that parsonage keeping you busy."
"No."
"No? A parsonage wants a wife the way a store wants a bell — half the trade's hers."
"So I'm told, at intervals." He looked out the window. When he spoke again the dryness was gone from his voice. "A minister's family pays for his calling. Every mile of it, every empty winter of it. I don't intend to marry. I won't hand myself the same hostages."
He said it flat, and there was no arguing with it. But the word same caught her — the same hostages as whose? He did not say, and his face gave nothing else.
Clara said nothing. The train rocked on. Outside the window the last of the light was going out of the grass, and the fence posts ran by in the dark, one after another after another. He read his Bible. She watched the fence posts. Neither of them spoke.
The conductor came through with his lantern lit. "Red Willow Junction, next stop. Red Willow Junction."
The preacher rose and took down his bag. Standing, he was tall enough that the sway of the car made him brace a hand on the luggage rack. He settled his hat and looked down at her, and his face had closed.
"I hope Nebraska treats you well, miss," he said. "It's a fair country. Hard on small things — but then, that won't trouble you."
He went down the aisle with his Bible in his hand and was the first one out onto the platform. Clara sat a moment longer. His name — she did not even know his name. The carpetbag was in her hands before she thought about it, and the tiredness that had been with her since Kansas City was gone.