Chapter 6
The seed money came out on a Monday evening, in the tin box Lydia kept behind the clock.
Clara sat by the stove with the mending and watched them at it.
The stove drew clean and warm at her back.
Nathan had cursed it alone for years, Lydia said, until the two of them took it apart one Sunday in January and mended it between them, and it had behaved ever since.
Before she came to Nebraska she would not have known to read a marriage in a thing so small.
There was not much left in the box after the winter, and a good deal the farm needed before summer: seed for the north field, shingles for the barn roof, wire, a new plowshare against the old one cracking. Nathan had the list. Lydia had the pencil.
"Shingles," Nathan said.
"The barn's stood two winters leaking. It'll stand a third. The fence won't." Lydia turned the list toward him and put the pencil down between them. "Read it your way and tell me where I'm wrong."
He read it. He moved one item up and one down, and said why in a dozen words.
Lydia heard him out, moved one of them back, and said why in ten.
Then it was settled. Lydia crossed off the shingles.
Nathan looked at the crossed-off line a moment and let it go.
Then he reached over and wound the clock, because he was up.
Nobody had raised a voice. Nobody had won. The list was theirs.
Clara looked down at the sock she was darning and found she had stopped darning it.
She had sat at a table like this before — a parlor table in Kansas, her whole future spread out on it in samples and dates, and the only pencil in the room in Elliot's hand, writing it all into his memorandum book while she watched.
Here the pencil lay in the middle of the table where either of them could reach it.
She had come six hundred miles and not had a word for the thing she was coming toward, and this was it, and she had not known it until now.
The clock ticked on over the tin box. In October the through-cars would stop, and somewhere in town a church stood needing a married man in its pulpit, and Vane's voice came back to her, easy, over his hat.
Reeve could marry, he'd said, and made the little laugh a man makes at a thing that is not his to arrange.
It was not Vane's to arrange. Her heart was going quick and hard, the way it had gone the Sunday she decided to be somebody.
She threaded the needle again and made herself finish the sock.
Wednesday morning she found him on the church roof.
The weather had turned dry and mild, and he was up among the shingles with his coat off, and the sound of his hammer reached her from half the street away. She stood at the foot of the ladder in her second-best dress until he looked down.
"Miss Crowell."
"Reverend. I'd like a word, if the roof can spare you."
He came down the ladder, unhurried, and stood wiping his hands on a rag, and waited. That was one thing she could say for him: he had never once filled a silence for her, or expected her to fill one for him.
"I'll say it plainly, because it's a plain matter," Clara said.
"The board wants a married man for this church.
You are the man for this church, and you're not married, and they'll pass you over for a man with a wife already keeping a manse.
I heard it said in Mrs. Calder's hall." She kept her hands quiet in front of her. "So. Marry me."
He did not move. The rag stopped.
"You'd hold your post," she went on, before he could speak.
"I'd have a house I wasn't a guest in, and my school back — it's to be the pastor's wife's, and I intend to be her.
I have a ticket home in October that I've no wish to use.
I'll earn my keep in that parsonage twice over; you've seen the school. That's the trade, all of it."
"No." He set the rag on the ladder rung. His face did not change at all when he said it. "I told you on the train, Miss Crowell. I don't intend to marry."
"You told me you wouldn't hand yourself hostages.
" She had turned that sentence over for a month, and she gave it back to him now.
"A hostage is somebody who costs you something.
I'm proposing to pay my own way. I haven't asked you to love me.
I've asked you to deal with me fairly, and I believe you would. "
He looked at her, straight on, no polite angle to it, as he had on the train — and then he picked the rag back up.
"The answer's no," he said. "I'm sorry for it."
"So am I." She was surprised to find how level her own voice came out. "The offer stands. Good morning, Reverend."
She walked back up the street without hurrying, and behind her, for a long while, the hammer did not start again.
The lamp in Mrs. Calder's back room was turned low, and Ashworth was propped up on three pillows with his spectacles on and nothing to read. Cole sat in the hard chair by the bed with his hat on his knee.
"There's a marriage been put to me," he said.
"It would answer a good deal." He had the reasons ready and got them out before Ashworth could put in a word.
"The board wants a household. If the call goes to the married man Pritchard's people favor, it goes on the household and nothing else, and the church takes a stranger it knows from one letter over a man who's carried the district all winter.
And she'd keep her school, which they mean to take from her the moment there's a pastor's wife to hand it to.
She built that school out of nothing — eleven children singing where there were none, and the Pritchard boy among them the one afternoon before his grandmother stopped it.
It's no small thing to give away to a stranger. The school alone?—"
"You said the school already," Ashworth said. "Third time round."
Cole stopped. He turned the hat a quarter-turn on his knee.
"She's got a ticket home in October and no wish to use it," he said. "She said so herself."
"Mm." The old man's hands lay folded on the quilt. "Who asked whom?"
"She asked me. This morning. Terms and all, like a hired hand offering to take on the season."
"And you told her no."
"I told her no."
Ashworth watched him. The lamp fizzed a little at the wick, and out in the kitchen Mrs. Calder was moving pans.
"Then why are you sitting in my sickroom," the old man said, "telling me all her reasons."
Cole turned the hat another quarter. He started again — the board, the letter, the school — and got three words into it and stopped, and the room stayed quiet a long time.
The old man on the pillows said nothing.
He lay there with his spectacles catching the lamp and watched the young man turn his hat.
"It would be an arrangement," Cole said finally. "Nothing more. She understands that. She proposed it herself."
"So you said."
"It answers on both sides. There's no—" His hand moved, and he did not finish it. "It's sensible."
"It's sensible," Ashworth said. He did not add to it.
Mrs. Calder came in with broth on a tray and set it on the stand, and looked from one of them to the other.
"The doctor's coming across Friday whether you like it or not," she told Ashworth.
"And the hens have gone off laying again, so it's beef, and you'll take it and be grateful.
" She went out. Neither man had said anything, and the door clicked to.
Ashworth reached toward the broth and did not take it.
"Saturday," he said. "Calder won't let me as far as the porch, so it'll be her parlor. Bring her at ten, before the town's about." He got his spectacles off, folded them one-handed, slow, and set them on the stand by the broth. "Go on home, Cole. You've a roof to finish."
Cole stood. At the door he stopped, half-turned, with a thing he meant to say, and the old man had already shut his eyes.
He rode out to the Holt place Thursday at midday and did not come in. Clara went to him in the yard, and the two of them stood by his horse with the spring wind moving between them.
"If the offer stands," he said, "Reverend Ashworth will marry us Saturday morning. Mrs. Calder's parlor, ten o'clock."
"It stands."
"Then I'll come for you at nine." He looked at her a moment — a stranger she was going to marry in two days, dust on his shoulders, hat in his hand — and put the hat on. "It's a fair trade, Miss Crowell. I'll keep my half of it fairly."
"I never doubted that part," Clara said, and he mounted and rode back toward town, and she stood in the yard until the bend of the road hid him.
That night, with the plates cleared and Nathan gone to the barn, Lydia asked her one question.
"Is it what you want?"
Clara considered lying and found she didn't need to.
"It isn't what you have. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
" Clara pressed her hands flat on the table to keep them still.
"But you answered an advertisement and got on a train to a man you'd never met, because it was sensible.
You told me so, not a week ago. It wasn't love that put you on that train.
It's love now." She made herself hold her sister's eyes.
"I'm not counting on that part. I'd be a fool to.
But the rest of it is mine — I thought of it, I asked it, I set the terms. Nobody arranged me into it. "
Lydia held her eyes a long moment across the table.
"Then I'll stand up with you," she said, "and I'll wear my good collar," and she got up and put the kettle on, and that was all the managing she did.
Saturday came in clear. Clara wore her good blue.