Chapter 16
The door let her into lamplight and the smell of a stove kept low, and from the lit room beyond the kitchen came her sister's breathing — slow, loud, worked at, in through the nose and out long.
"Clara." Lydia's voice came through the open door, even between breaths. "Tell me that's you and not more weather."
"It's me."
"Then there's some order left in the world."
Cold came in at Clara's back, and rain with it, and Mrs. Garrett.
She had the stove lid off and the firebox open before the coat was off her shoulders, and she shed the coat onto a chair with its sleeves still turned back and went on feeding the fire in her shawl.
She did not ask where anything was kept.
Her hands went out to the woodbox and the kettle and the big pot without one wrong reach.
Out past the wall there was harness coming off, and hooves knocking on barn boards — Cole, putting the horse up out of the wet.
Boots on the step, and Nathan came in carrying two pails of water, bareheaded still, the pails hanging dead steady in his hands and everything above his hands gone gray. He set them down where Mrs. Garrett pointed. Then he stood a moment looking at the bedroom door, and did not go to it.
He looked at Clara instead. He had ridden past a nearer gate in the dark to fetch her, and said so, and there was nothing left to say on top of it. Whatever he could not carry into that room he handed to her across the kitchen in that one look, and she took it.
Then he took up the empty pails and went back out into the dark.
Clara washed her hands at the basin, and washed them again, the soap up past her wrists.
At the bedroom door Mrs. Garrett stopped her with one hand on her sleeve.
"I'll keep your kitchen," she said. "Hot water, clean cloths, anything you sing out for — it'll be at that door before you've done asking.
But I'll not come past the door." Her face was as plain as her voice.
"I was in that room the night Mary went.
I'll not be in it tonight. That's all the why you'll get from me. "
"It's plenty," Clara said, and did not ask her twice.
Then she went in.
Lydia was not in the bed. She was up, a shawl over her nightgown, one hand on the foot-rail, walking the little room the short way it allowed — three steps to the window, three steps back.
Mary's quilt lay folded back at the foot of the bed.
On the wall by the window, on the hook set at a woman's height, hung Lydia's good dress, and at its collar their mother's brooch, the blue stone catching the lamp.
Nobody said anything about any of that.
"You came out in a buggy, at night, in this," Lydia said. "Helen would faint."
"Helen would come." Clara set her basket on the trunk lid and laid it out: the boiled linen, the good scissors, the thread, the candle-end. Her hands were level while they did it. "How far apart?"
"Close enough that I've given up being brave in between.
" The next one took her before she had finished saying so.
Lydia went still where she stood, both hands on the rail, her head down, and breathed at it, long and loud, while it went over her.
It took its time going. Then she came upright again, one careful inch at a time. "There. Like that."
"And the blood?"
"Stopped. Before Nathan ever went for you. There's been nothing since." Lydia looked at her over the foot of the bed, straight on. "Is that good or bad? The truth or nothing, Clara."
"I don't know," Clara said. "Calder taught me the birth, and the hour after it. She never taught me the before. So we'll deal in what I know. What I know is that it stopped, and that you're on your feet and talking, and I'd rather have both of those than not."
Lydia held her eyes a moment longer. Then she nodded, once.
"Then it stopped," she said, and went back to her walking.
Clara let her walk. Let a woman be where she wants to be — Calder had said it, and Clara meant to keep every rule that woman had ever handed her. She tied on the dry apron out of the basket and moved the lamp so it lit the bed and not the window.
The rain ran on the glass. Now and again the wind got under the eaves and pulled at a shingle and let it go. It was a small room, and warm. The storm outside it had shrunk to a noise on the roof and a wet shine on the black window, and Clara kept her back to the window and her eyes on her sister.
The candle-end on the washstand burned down a joint.
The pains came, and went, and came sooner.
Between them Lydia talked, because not talking was worse — the hens; the state of the north road; the Ott boy sent down to look at the river, and what he had said, and how he had said it twice.
Once she stopped mid-word, her head up, listening. Out past the wall the axe had started.
"That's Nathan," she said. "Splitting wood. At midnight. In the rain." She put her cheek down on her hands where they gripped the rail, and her voice came out from under her arm, half a laugh. "He'll have the county in kindling by morning."
Clara wrung out a cloth and said nothing.
"I know," Lydia said, to the rail. "I know what it is. You needn't tell me."
Another pain came up and took the talk with it.
This one was longer. Near the top of it Lydia put a hand out, blind, and Clara gave her own hand into it and stood while her sister's grip bore down, the same grip she had first learned at the Petersen place in May, off a stranger.
It went at last. Lydia stayed down over the rail a while, getting her wind, and then turned her head and looked at her sister sideways.
"You've got Calder's face on," she said. "Did she teach you the face as well?"
"You get the face free," Clara said, "with the lint."
When the basin wanted fresh water, Clara went through.
The kitchen was a kitchen with everything in it done.
Wood stood ranked along the wall past any one night's needing.
Both kettles were on. Every vessel the house owned stood full.
On the table, face-down and open, lay a battered Robinson Crusoe with its spine gone soft — laid down mid-page, and it lay exactly there every time Clara came through that night, open at the same place, and nobody was ever in the chair in front of it.
Mrs. Garrett stood at the dry sink with her hands in the washing-up and her back to the bedroom door. Clara reached for the dipper and found it full. She turned to look for a dry cloth, and one came back to her over Mrs. Garrett's shoulder, the woman never turning round.
"Thank you."
"Sing out sooner next time," Mrs. Garrett said, to the window. "Spare your feet."
The step, and the door, and Nathan shouldered in with an armload of split wood, the rain running off him in strings.
He stacked it with the rest, looked once at the bedroom door, and went back out.
The stack by the stove had climbed past what the kitchen could burn in a month, and the ground between the step and the woodpile was walked to mud, and through the wall the axe took up where it had left off.
The door shut behind him and left Clara standing with the full dipper in her hand.
Pails instead of talk. Wood instead of the doorway. She had done the same work her whole life with talk, and she knew every stroke of it from the inside.
She carried the water in to her sister.
It was Nathan who brought the next hot water to the door.
He leaned in and set the can down inside the sill without crossing it, the wet still on his shoulders, and he had straightened to go when Lydia said his name.
"Nathan."
He stopped in the doorway.
She was at the foot of the bed, both hands on the rail, waiting out the tail of a pain, and she made him wait too, until she had breath enough to say it with. Then she said it plainly.
"I told you once — if something was wrong, I'd say so." Her breath went, and came back. "Something's wrong. I'm frightened. Come in where I can see you."
He stood in the doorway with the water dripping off him onto the boards. For a long moment he did not move.
Then he came in. He said nothing. He shut the door behind him against the draft, crossed the little room past the hook and the folded quilt, and stood where she could see him.
When the next pain took her, her hand left the rail and fastened on his forearm, the knuckles going white with it, and he stood and took it, his other hand come up flat over hers.
The pain went. Her grip stayed. So did he.
The room was quiet after, and it was only quiet. Clara wrung a cloth at the basin and let it be.
Out in the dark, somewhere in there, Bess left off her complaining. Somebody had gone and milked her. Nobody said who.
An hour on, the kettle in the room wanted filling, and Clara carried it out and walked into the middle of Cole leaving.
His coat was on. The barn lantern was down off its nail and lit in his hand, and he was running it off low and quick to the room in general — to Mrs. Garrett's back at the sink, to Clara coming through the door — the way a man talks a plan out loud to make it sound already settled: he'd take the lantern up the road as far as the bend and keep a watch on the water; the minute the ford gave a horse a foot of grace he'd be over it and bring Calder back himself; between whiles he'd ride the near bank and meet John coming, so the house would have word the moment there was word to be had; he'd say a word of prayer with them from this kitchen before he went; the fire was made up to last, the wood was in, and there was nothing this house would want that —
"Cole."
He stopped.
Mrs. Garrett came and took the empty kettle out of Clara's hand before she was three steps into the room, and filled it off the stove, and stood holding it, her back to the two of them now instead of the bedroom door.
A plan for every hour of the night. Clara had heard four of them inside a minute, and every one was generous, and every one was up a dark road, out of this house.
Nathan had hauled water until his wife called him in off the hauling.
She herself had talked, all her life, until a sick boy on a pallet taught her to stop.
It was all the one trick, and Cole stood in front of her in a wet coat, holding a lantern.
"The water won't drop for being watched," she said. "John has the bank. Calder can't be got till the river says so, and the river won't say so tonight. You've thought of everything, and every last thing you've thought of is out that door."
He stood with the lantern in his hand. The flame moved on his face, and his face did not move.
She could have made it easy. The easy shape of it was right there in her mouth — go, then, and God go with you — bright, quick, costing nobody anything. She had handed him that exact door once already this summer, and watched him take it.
She put her hands together in front of her.
"Stay," she said. "Not for her. For me."
The rain went on against the roof. Through the wall her sister breathed at a pain and came down the far side of it. Mrs. Garrett stood at the stove with the filled kettle in her two hands and did not move.
Cole looked at her. His eyes stayed.
Then he blew the lantern out and hung it back on its nail. He took the wet coat off and hung it beside the lantern. He turned his cuffs back. Then he crossed and took the kettle out of Mrs. Garrett's hands, carried it to the bedroom door himself, and set it down inside the sill.
Mrs. Garrett moved along the stove and made him room.
In the bedroom, the rest of that night, it was Clara, and Lydia, and Nathan standing where his wife could see him, his arm given over to her grip.
Clara kept the room warm and her hands clean and hurried nothing.
Between pains, when Lydia asked for talk — "not the bright kind; just talk" — she gave her plain things in a low voice: the school children by name, which Ott boy had finally found the tune and which never would, what the front row looked like on a Thursday afternoon.
Lydia listened with her eyes shut and her hand over Nathan's, and said, once, "Go on," and Clara went on.
Everything outside that door was Cole's and Mrs. Garrett's between them, and none of it came through the door without being sent for.
The fire never fell. The water came hot at the first asking, and after the first asking it came before.
When the candle-end on the washstand guttered, a fresh candle stood waiting on the tray at the door, beside the hot can, and nobody had asked for that either.
Twice, through the wall, Clara heard the pump work and the stove door go, and wood went on so quietly it never knocked once.
The axe out in the rain did not start again.
Once, between pains, Nathan got his arm back long enough to go out and come in again carrying the low chair — the one he had built in the spring, its back angled for her — brought through one-handed and set down at the foot of the bed, turned so she could reach the rail from it.
He did not say what it was for. Lydia looked at the chair, and then at him, and lowered herself into it.
Between that pain and the next one she rested, her head back against the angle he had cut to fit her.
Toward the small hours the pains closed up until there was no room left between them for talk of any kind. Lydia stopped her walking then. She knelt down at the side of the bed with her arms up on it, her hand still over Nathan's, and put her head down, and worked.
Clara washed her hands again, and knelt down beside her sister.