Chapter 15
Woodsmoke came up through the floor before it was light.
Clara lay under the quilt and listened. The stove lid went down. A boot crossed the kitchen, stopped, crossed it again. She dressed in the dark and her fingers made a poor job of the buttons, and she went down the stairs without her shoes.
He had his back to her at the stove. His coat hung over a chair and dripped onto the boards, and there was mud on him to the knee, dried in one place with wet over the top of it. The hair at the back of his head had been cut by a man working without a glass.
He turned round.
"Clara."
She stood in the doorway and could not find one thing to say to him.
"You rode all night."
"Most of it. The weather's behind me. I'd not have got across the Danby flats by noon." He lifted the pot off the stove and poured, and turned, and put the cup into her hands.
It was sugared.
Clara held it in both hands and drank, and kept her eyes down while she drank it.
"Somebody's been at your head with a knife," she said.
"There was no glass at Danby."
"There's no glass in Nebraska, by the look of it."
"No," Cole said, and drank his coffee.
She put the pan on and did the eggs, and he ate them standing at the end of the table with his hat on the chair beside him. There was a stripe of dried mud along the underside of the table's edge where his coat had gone by it. The boards under the chair had a puddle coming out around them.
When he had finished he put the plate in the pan. He had never once done that in April.
"Vesper has a man," he said. "Came out to them in August. Danby's had one since mid-month."
"Since mid-August."
"I told the Conference I'd carry the district till they raised men of their own." He was looking at the stove, and not at her. "They've raised them."
He said nothing about Reverend Ashworth, who was dying forty feet up the road and was the one reason left that he had not named.
The stove ticked. There was five feet of scrubbed floor between them and neither of them crossed it.
Through the door at her shoulder was the front room, and the lamp, and the place on the boards where a mended satchel had gone down and lain.
Two months. They had not been in a room together to say a word about it, and they were in a room together now.
"The church will be full," Cole said. "The sky's wrong."
"Yes."
"I'd best look at my notes."
He went past her to the study with his cup, and the door did not quite shut behind him, and Clara stood in her kitchen with the fire going and her own cup gone cold in her hands.
The church was full at eleven, and nobody had come for the preaching.
The light out of doors had not changed since dawn.
It lay flat and yellow-gray on the sills and on the backs of people's necks, and the wind went along under the eaves in a long note that did not stop.
Half the congregation had its eyes on the windows instead of on Cole, and Clara, in the third pew, could not keep her own from going the same way.
The tin pail stood in the corner of the chancel, under the water-stain, where it had stood since March. There was water in it.
Cole read a psalm and said very little over it. He gave out the last hymn and the church sang it loud and badly, and out past the glass the cottonwoods had begun to turn their leaves over.
Nobody stood about in the yard afterward. They went home.
She laid the table without thinking about it and stopped with the second plate in her hand.
She had set one every night since July. Her hands had gone to the cupboard and taken down two before she caught them at it, and she stood in her own kitchen holding a plate.
She put it at the far end, where it had always gone. He came in and sat down at it.
The rain started at four, flat against the west window.
By five it was hail, loud enough on the shingles that a voice would not have carried the length of the table, and neither of them tried it.
Clara carried the dish down and set it between them and went back for the bread.
The lamp stood in the middle. He ate what she gave him.
Twice the hail came harder and they both looked up at the ceiling and then down again.
Neither of them said one word about the plate, or about July, or about anything at all.
Out in the street the water stood to the depth of a boot.
The church door came off its hook and began to bang.
Cole was up at the second bang. He took his coat down, held it over his head, and went out into it, and Clara stood at the window and watched the shape of him go up the street through water that came over his boots.
He was gone half an hour. He came back with the door tied and the pail emptied and every thread of him black with wet. He would not sit down by the stove. He would not eat anything more.
He stood at the window with his back to her, looking at the water standing in the street. His coat was on the peg and dripping and he had not changed out of anything.
"Clara," he said.
She waited, and did not fill it.
He did not go on.
Hooves in the yard, coming fast, and then not.
Nathan Holt stood on the mat in his coat with the water running off him. He was bareheaded. There was hail caught in the wool at his shoulders, not melted yet, and his hands hung at his sides with nothing in them to turn.
"It's come," he said. "Since five. She's a good three weeks short of her time."
Clara had the door shut behind him and her hand on his sleeve, and he stood there and did not move.
Then, to the wall: "There's blood."
"How much?"
Her own voice came out level. She did not know where she had got it.
"I don't know. Some." He was still looking at the wall. "She had it an hour before she told me. She sent the Ott boy down to look at the water first. She'd not say a word to me till she had his answer."
"And?"
"I went and looked myself." Nathan's eyes came round to her at last. "The willows are under."
Clara stood with her hand on his wet sleeve and did the sum.
The doctor was over the river at the sawmill with a man's smashed leg, and had been a week at it.
Calder was over the river at the Vosses'.
Two hours to fetch her, Calder had said at the gatepost, if the ford was kind to you.
There was no ford tonight. There were no two hours.
There was one midwife in this county and one doctor the far side of the water, and the water lay between them, and it did not consult either of them.
That left her.
Her hands had gone cold. She put them together in front of her and held them there until they stopped.
"Get me my things," she said, and did not wait to see whether anybody would, and went to get them herself.
Behind her Cole was already at the peg.
"There's two ways to go at it," Cole said.
"I ride for Calder. Up the bank above the bend, where there's high ground past the willows — if a horse can put a foot anywhere in that river tonight I'll find it, and I'll be over and back with her by midnight.
" He did not say what they all knew, that a horse could put a foot nowhere in that river tonight.
Nathan said nothing.
"Or we don't wait on the river at all. We bring Lydia into town — Calder's front room, a lamp, every article in the world under that roof, and the doctor's own door twenty minutes off. An hour in the buggy, going slow and easy, and I'll pray with her before we move her a foot."
He had the lantern down off its nail and was turning up the wick, already fitting himself to the second way — the buggy, the slow road in, Lydia settled under Calder's roof by morning.
"You'll not move her," Nathan said.
Cole stopped with the lantern in his hand.
He looked at Nathan. Nathan looked back at him, steady, with the water running off his coat onto the mat, and said nothing else.
It was not a thing he would argue and not a thing he would explain.
Lydia would have the child in her own bed, in her own house.
There was no more to say about it, and he did not try to say it.
Cole nodded. He set the lantern down and picked it up again, and when he spoke it was as a man laying out the only night now left to be had.
"Then I drive you out. I keep your fire up, your water hot, the horses seen to.
And Clara does not ask twice for one thing out of that kitchen all night. Not once."
Clara had been at the preserving kettle in July when Lydia said it. Her own bed, in her own house, and he could come into the room or he could stand in the yard, and whichever he did she would know what she had married. Nathan had been out in the barn.
He had got it from somewhere.
Clara went past the two of them and got the press open. The linen came out, the boiled linen, folded down at the bottom where she had put it in July for no reason she could have given anybody. The good scissors. Thread. A candle-end. The oil for the lamp, in its can, with the cork wired on.
She packed the basket herself. Nobody handed her anything.
Out in the rain Cole put his own horse to Ashworth's buggy, with his coat still off his back from the church door.
Nathan's horse stood in the shed with its head down and its sides going, and nobody rubbed it down, and nobody said one word about it.
The ruts on the north road were running full. The lamp swung on its bracket and threw the light up into the rain and down into the water, and the fence posts went by, one after another after another. Clara sat with the basket on her knees.
"Soft here," Nathan said.
Cole took it soft.
"Hard over."
He took it hard over, and after that nobody spoke for three miles.
Off to the north, past the black of the trees, the river was making a sound Clara had never heard it make. Not the run of it under the ford. Not the rush it had come up to in June. It was low and steady and it had no top to it.
They would pass the Garrett place within the mile. Clara knew it, and knew too that Mrs. Garrett had stood at more beds in this county than she had, and had likely thought the same thing Nathan was thinking now, riding down in the dark.
"I came past her gate at a gallop, going for you," Nathan said.
He did not look round. His hands lay on his knees, big and useless in his lap.
"Garrett's closer, and Garrett's done this before, and I never pulled up.
I went the extra mile in the rain for the one Calder trained.
" It was the longest speech she had ever had out of him, and she understood what it cost him, and what it was: not an apology, and not quite a thing a married man says to a woman not his wife.
A reckoning, said out loud, of who he had trusted his wife's life to.
She did not make it small. For once in her life she let a thing that size sit in the air where he had put it, and only said, "Then we'll stop and get her too. Four hands are better than two."
Nathan nodded. The buggy went on.
At the Garrett place Cole gave Clara the reins and got down and went up the walk bareheaded. The door opened before he was at it. It shut, and opened again, and he came back with Mrs. Garrett behind him in her husband's coat, the sleeves turned back twice and a shawl over her head.
She put a hand on the wheel and got up behind the seat and settled herself into the wet straw.
"John's gone for the ford," she said. "He'll want to see the water with his own eyes.
There's no telling him." She settled the shawl and said nothing else, and she asked nothing — not why they had come for her at that hour, not whose child was coming, not one question the whole way.
She had no need to ask. A buggy at the door in the black of a night like this said all of it, to a woman who had answered such a knock before.
Clara did not turn round to look at her, and could not have said a word to her if she had.
In June, in the rain, on the far side of the churchyard fence, Cole had read the burial over this woman's own daughter.
Now she sat in the wet straw at Clara's back, going out to help another woman's child into the world, and asked nothing, and Clara let her sit unlooked-at, because there was no word in her for it that would not have been an insult to the size of the thing.
A half-mile on there was a black gap in the trees on the right hand, where the ground went away from the road and down.
Nathan had tipped his head at it in March and told her it was the only crossing this side of the county.
The sound came up out of it now, up through the rain and over the noise the wheels were making in the water.
Cole did not turn his head. Nathan did not turn his.
The rain came down. Clara held the basket and went over what she knew.
Keep the room warm and the door shut. Wash your hands, and wash them again after. Let a woman be where she wants to be, and do not shift her out of it for your own convenience. Nothing is got by hurrying a thing that was never yours to hurry.
And Calder, in her own kitchen in March, over a bowl of lint: The river doesn't consult either of us. You use the hands you can find.
The buggy came up to the gate, and Bess was in the byre and had not been milked, and Clara heard her complaining of it before she heard anything else.
She got down at the step Nathan had built. Through the kitchen window she could see the near end of the table, and the lamp on it, and past the lamp a door standing open onto a lit room.
Mary Holt had died in that room, and the baby with her.
Clara put her hand on the latch and turned round.
Cole was out in the yard at the horse's head. He had his hat off and he was letting the rain come down onto his bare head, and he did not move toward the house. The lamp swung on the buggy and put him in the light, and out of it, and in it again.
Clara looked at him a moment longer than she needed to.
Then she opened the door and went in.