Chapter 13
He was gone all that night and most of the next day, and when he came back he had it decided.
She knew it before he was through the door. His face had set in the careful stillness, and she had learned to read that stillness by now — it was the look of a man who had made up his mind and did not mean to be moved off it.
He did not sit down. He kept his hat in his hands.
"Ashworth's failing," he said. "Calder can't be at his bedside and out at the far houses both. Somebody ought to be with him at the end, and it ought to be me. He held that call open for the two of us all spring. I'm not going to let him die with no one in the room."
That was true.
"And the sickness didn't stop at Red Willow. Vesper lost their minister to it, and the Danby church has nobody at all, and there's burying and marrying stacked up across half the district with no one to do it. They've asked me to ride out and cover what I can until they can raise men of their own."
That was true too.
"It'll take most of the summer. I'll be gone more than I'm here.
" He turned the hat once in his hands. "The parsonage is yours, and the school.
I've asked Mrs. Calder to look in on you.
It's the sensible thing, with the work what it is.
" A pause, and then, lower, the last board hammered into place: "It's near enough what we set out to do in April. "
Every word of it was true. None of it was the reason.
"You're running," she said.
He stopped turning the hat.
"I'm doing the work in front of me."
"You're doing every scrap of work in the county that happens to be somewhere I'm not.
" Her voice came out level, and some cold far-off part of her was proud of how level it came.
"Ashworth is dying, yes. Vesper needs a preacher, yes.
And if they didn't, you'd have found something else just as true by supper, because the true thing was never the point.
You kissed me last night and it scared you half out of your life, and by morning you'd found a whole summer's worth of reasons to be up on a horse. "
He looked at her then — straight on, the first time since he'd come in.
"And you," he said. Quiet. "You've already worked out how you mean to do this. You're going to make it small. You're going to laugh it down to nothing so it can't cost you a thing."
It landed because it was true. She felt it go in.
And then she did the exact thing he had named, because she did not know another thing to do with a hurt that size. She laughed.
"Cole." She made her voice easy, and it came out easy — there were years of practice in it.
"It was a hard month. We buried children.
We sat up till we couldn't see straight, and neither of us has slept a whole night since June.
People take hold of each other in a stretch like that.
It doesn't have to mean anything at all.
" She smiled at him, and handed it over small and finished, wrapped and tied.
"Go and sit with the old man. Go and ride to Vesper.
I mean it. I'll keep the school and mind the house and be right here when you get back, and we'll neither of us go making it into more than it was. It's the sensible thing."
She gave him his own words back, with the smile still on.
"Go."
He looked at her a long moment, as though there were something he was waiting for her to say. She did not say it. She let him off.
He nodded, once. He set the hat on his head and went out to saddle the horse, and by dark he was gone to sit with the dying man.
The house went very quiet after him. There were the two afternoons of singing school, and she was gladder of those hours than she had ever been.
The rest of the time she had to invent — she turned out a cupboard that did not need turning out, weeded a garden already weeded, and sat in the evenings with the lamp and a book whose page she did not turn for an hour at a stretch.
By the third evening she could not sit in the front room any longer, and Cole was off somewhere on the Danby road, so she walked to the boardinghouse to see the old man.
Ashworth was propped up by the window, gone very small, the skin of his face come down close to the bone. Calder said he did not always know people now. He knew Clara.
"The bright one," he said. What was left of his voice was almost nothing. "Sit."
She sat. She had brought soup he would not eat and did not pretend otherwise, and set it aside, and took the chair.
The room smelled of camphor, and of the sickroom under it.
There was a Bible on the sill he was past reading, and a cup of something gone cold that Calder would coax into him by and by.
He lay with his hands out on the coverlet, an old man's hands now, all cord and bone.
Two months back those same hands had held a whole town's grief steady.
"He sits with me nights," Ashworth said, when he had the breath for it.
"Your husband. Comes in off the road at dark and takes that chair till I'm asleep.
Gone again before I wake." A pause. "Every morning.
Out the door before the sun's up. You could set a clock by a man that eager to be somewhere else. "
Clara said nothing.
He was a while finding the breath to begin again. "He's gone to ride."
"He has."
"Course he has." Something pulled at the corner of his mouth that on a well man might have been a hard smile.
"His father rode. All his life." The breath ran out and he waited on more.
"I stood up at Amos's wedding thirty-odd years back, and I buried Ruth after.
He was off on the circuit when her time came.
Got the word a week late, in some other county, and I don't believe it cost him a night's sleep. "
His eyes came round to Clara, pale and enormously tired.
"Believed to his last day that they were what stood between him and his real life." A slow breath. "Good at the leaving, that family. Every last one of them. It's the staying they were never any use at."
He shut his eyes. She thought he had dropped off, and sat still so as not to wake him. Then, without opening them:
"You let him go, I hear. Didn't fight him on it."
"It seemed the kind thing."
"Mm." A long silence, his chest working.
"You'd know about kind. Making it easy for a man.
So nobody in the room has to say the true thing out loud.
" The pale eyes came open again, and there was nothing hard in them, only the tiredness, and under it something that might have been sorrow.
"The pair of you. God help the both of you. A matched set."
He had nothing more in him after that. His hand moved on the blanket and she took it, and they sat. After a while his breathing went long and even, and she understood he was asleep. She stayed until Calder came, and then she walked home.
The July light held long into the evening, as it did that time of year.
She came up the road past the shed. His horse was gone, and would be gone most of the summer.
The church's buggy stood in it where it had stood since April, the shafts up, a grain sack over the seat.
Ashworth had driven that buggy to every burying in the county for thirty years, and nobody had put a horse to it since the Sunday his knees went.
Everything was exactly as they had set it out in April. The parsonage was hers. The school was hers. The quiet was hers.
She set the table for one. Her hand went to the cupboard for the second plate first, out of a habit only a few weeks old, and she caught it there and put it back and set down the one.
She ate alone and did not fill the silence with anything, because there was nobody to fill it for, and because the old man's tired eyes had followed her the whole way home.
A matched set.
It was the one thing anybody had said to her in a long while that she could not laugh off.