Chapter 3
Her gloves lay in her lap. She did not put them on, because putting them on would mean she was nearly there.
The lamps of Red Willow Junction came up out of the dark, a scatter of them, and then the town: a water tower, a grain house, one street of low buildings with the mud frozen hard in ruts before the doors.
Past the last roof there was nothing. Only the flat dark of the plains, and the wind coming off it through the seams of the car.
So this was the country that had taken her sister in.
Beyond the cold glass, on the platform under the one lit lamp, a woman stood waiting, her hands folded, her chin up into the wind. For a moment Clara took her for a stranger. Then the woman turned her head, and it was Lydia.
She had come six hundred miles half afraid the letter had been a kindness and no more — afraid she would step down and find Lydia worn thin, making the best of a bad bargain the way women did out here.
But the woman on the platform was not making the best of anything.
She stood square in her own coat with her face lifted to the cold.
She had gone brown and weathered across the nose.
She stood on that platform easy, as if she owned the ground under it, and the cold, and the town, and the whole hard country.
The train stopped, and she was down the steps and into her sister's arms.
"You came," Lydia said.
"You said there was no clock. I'd have walked."
Lydia held her off and looked at her. Whatever she saw made her face soften. "You're frozen through. Nathan has the wagon."
A tall man stood behind her, hat in both hands, turning it around. That would be Nathan. She took his hand in both of hers and thanked him for having her, and the tips of his ears went red to the top.
"Lydia said you were shy," Clara said. "She didn't say by how much."
"She's usually right," Nathan said. He put her trunk up on the wagon like it was empty, and handed the sisters up, and they went out into the dark.
The road went north out of town and then west. Clara could not see the river but she knew it was there — a cold breath off her right hand, a smell of mud and wet reed, the run of it under the wheels. The stars were out thick, more of them than she had ever seen.
Nathan tipped his head at a black gap in the trees where the ground fell away toward the sound of the water.
"That's the ford," he said. "Only crossing to the far side this side of the county.
Doctor's over there. If the water's up and you want him, you send early.
It comes up fast in a spring like this one.
" Then he told Lydia the Hendersons' sow had got into Ott's wheat again, and the gap slid away behind them.
The robe smelled of horse and dust. She pulled it up under her chin, not thinking of the ford now but of the two on the seat in front of her.
Lydia had the reins. Nathan did not touch them.
He said "soft, here" where the ruts ran bad, and Lydia had already eased the team before he finished, so the word and the doing came together.
It was not a thing she had ever seen, a man and a woman sitting a wagon so. Her throat went tight, and she looked out at the dark until it passed.
"You've gone quiet," Lydia said.
"I'm too cold to talk. Be grateful."
Lydia laughed and clicked the team on.
They gave her the loft. It was swept and aired, the quilt turned down. She carried her candle up the ladder and it showed her the windowsill, and on the sill a chipped jar, and in the jar a fistful of crocuses. Purple, and one yellow. The dirt was still on the roots.
"Nathan," Lydia said from the ladder. "Don't say anything or he won't come to supper. He dug them this morning."
She touched the yellow one, and for a moment could not speak.
Yellow she had asked for once, in a parlor, over tea. She had been told yellow showed every mark, and given green. Here it was on her windowsill, in a broken jar, put there by a man who could hardly say good morning and had gone out at first light into half-frozen ground.
Supper was late and quiet. The three of them sat at the small table — Nathan saying almost nothing, Lydia easy in her own kitchen, and Clara, for once, too tired to fill the silences the way she always did. Nobody seemed to need her to. Afterward she climbed back up to the loft.
Two dresses she hung on the pegs; the rest she left folded in the trunk.
Lydia had told her to stay as long as she needed, and had meant it.
But back in Kansas it had been settled otherwise — home by fall, after the baby, Elliot still willing — and a girl sent out on a return ticket did not lay all her things out as though she meant to stop.
She lay down under the cold quilt and listened to Lydia and Nathan below her.
Not the words. Just the sound of them, going back and forth, even, one and then the other.
The sound of them went on a while. Then the warmth came up and her thoughts came loose, the way they did at the edge of sleep, one thing and then another with no thread between them.
The green wallpaper. The lamps of the town coming up out of the dark.
The crocuses, and the one of them that was yellow.
A stout woman from church at home she had not thought of in years — and church, and the man who had sat across from her on the train that afternoon with his worn Bible, saying almost nothing. The preacher.
A minister's family pays for his calling, he had said. I won't hand myself the same hostages.
The same as whose? She turned it over, slower and slower, and it would not come out even. Then it went with the rest of them, and she was asleep, and did not think of him again until Sunday.
The cow did not like her.
"That's Bess," Lydia said, setting down the pail. The animal put its head over the rail and gave Clara a long look out of one dark eye. "She was Nathan's first wife's. She has opinions. She'll come round."
She'll come round. It was all Mrs. Ferris had ever said about Clara, said over her head for years, and here it was again in a Nebraska barnyard, applied to a cow — and Clara laughed. Lydia looked at her, not knowing the half of it, and laughed too.
For the next days she made herself useful, because she could not sit still in a house any more than she could stop breathing in one.
Red Willow came clear around her a little at a time.
The one street. The store, the livery. The neighbors who came by with an egg or a piece of news and looked the new sister over.
The church at the end of the road, white and small and poor.
It was a hard, bare country, and she found she did not mind it.
It was in the wash-house, the two of them alone with the sheets steaming, that she remembered the packet.
"Helen sent this. For you." She dried her hands and took it out — small, flat, tied with thread. "Into your own hands, she said. When we were alone. She wouldn't tell me what it was. She just said it would keep."
Lydia took it and went still. Not startled — still, the way you go still when you have been waiting a long time for a thing and are afraid to want it out loud.
She turned it once, felt the shape of it through the paper, and did not open it in front of Clara.
Something came up in her face and was put away again before Clara could read it, and Lydia slipped the packet into her apron, close, the way you pocket a thing you mean to be alone with.
"Thank you," she said, and picked the sheet back up.
Clara let it lie. She had a drawer for things like that, and she had learned not to open it before its time.
By Sunday she had decided to be somebody.
She would not have admitted to planning it.
But she had come six hundred miles to be a woman nobody had a word for yet — not the flighty Crowell girl, not the one who broke it off with Elliot Ferris in the mud, but a new face come in on the Tuesday train to a town that knew nothing about her.
She wore her good blue and went up the aisle on Lydia's arm with her chin up and her face lit.
It worked, the way it always worked. Heads turned. A stout deacon held her hand too long. The sister, a woman said behind her. From Kansas, said another. Clara moved into the warm current of being looked at and thought, here I can begin clean.
The church was poorer than it had looked from the road. A brown water-stain spread across the ceiling boards, and in the corner of the chancel a tin pail sat out to catch the drip. She was still looking at the pail when the old minister got himself up to the pulpit.
He was ancient and gray, and he took the rail in both hands like it was the only thing keeping him standing.
His voice came out big and cracked. He gave the newcomer a nod that found her across the whole church.
Then he said his strength was not what the winter had left it, and they would have the reading, and most of the morning, from the young man who had carried the district on his own back since the snow came.
The young man rose from the front pew and turned around.
It was him.
The blood went up her throat and into her face. Her hands closed on the hymnal. Her face held — her face always held — but behind it everything came loose at once.
The gray eyes. The bad haircut, no better than it had been on the train. The worn Bible open in his two hard hands.
A town up the line, he had told her. He had let her talk. The wallpaper. The ring. Lydia got the sense and Thomas the distance and I got the noise. She had given a stranger on a train the whole truth of herself, because the miles would take him and she would never see him again.
And here he was at the front of the only church for forty miles, with his name going around the pews, low and warm. Reverend Reeve. That's young Mr. Reeve. Cole.
His eyes came to her in the third pew and stopped.
Of course they did. He missed nothing. For one breath he looked at her the way he had on the train, straight, without sliding away, and the heat came up in her face again, and she had to look down at her hands.
She could see him take it in — that she had not known; that she had come up the aisle glowing, playing the bright new stranger, with no idea he would be there.
Something crossed his grave face that might have been an apology on a warmer man and on him was just a fact set down.
Then he looked at the book and began to read, and did not look at her again.
The hymnal stayed shut in her lap. She could not follow a word he read. There was one badly cut head at the front of the church, and she was aware of nothing else.
At the edge of it she was aware of the old minister too, in his chair, not minding the reading at all. His eyes went from the young man at the lectern to her and back, slow, and pleased about something. An old man fond of his flock, she thought, and let it go.
Somewhere in it he blessed the Holt household — the two he'd had the joy of marrying twice over, he said, once in Mrs. Calder's parlor at Christmas and once in this church when the roads opened, and was glad to see the Lord adding to.
Clara heard it the way you hear things through a wall.
She was looking at the back of a dark head, and thinking that Nebraska was a very big country, and Red Willow Junction a very small town in it.