Chapter 19
The return ticket had lain in the trunk, under the linen, since March.
She was up before him the next morning, and knelt in the gray light and drew it out, and looked at it once.
Then she fed it into the stove, set the kettle over the place where it had been, and got the breakfast on before he ever stirred.
Out at the Holt place, Lydia was at the table with her hands in the bread dough. Clara said it there, and the hands worked the dough a moment more, and then stopped.
"Say it again."
"We're to be married. Properly, in the church. Ashworth's coming to do it."
Lydia wiped her hands on her apron, taking her time about it. "You said all that," she said, "and never once made it light. Not one bright word anywhere in it."
"No."
"Well then," Lydia said. "It's true." She came around the table, and her hands came to Clara's shoulders, and she looked at her through one long breath, and then went back to the bread.
"Who's to stand up with you?"
"You are," Clara said. "The pair of you. Bring the baby."
Lydia worked the dough. "She'd not have stayed home," she said, with a wry smile.
She woke that Wednesday to the first true cold of the fall.
The good dress went on in the gray of the morning, the buttons done up by fingers that made a better job of them than they had the day she came off the train to marry a stranger.
By ten she stood in the swept church, and heard the Holts' wagon come up outside, and then the door, and then the small ordinary sounds of people finding their places behind her, more of them than she had thought to expect.
She turned when the vestry door went. Ashworth stood in the frame of it on Frederickson's arm — his heart had kept him to Calder's back room since the spring, failing by inches all the long summer, and it showed on him now.
He caught his breath at the door, then came out and took his place at the rail on his own two feet.
She and Cole rose from the front pew and crossed to him together.
A chair waited at the front for him, Mrs. Calder's doing, before he was through the vestry door. Ashworth looked at it once.
"Not for this one," he said, and would not take it.
She stood and let the old words come, slow, in Ashworth's voice gone thin everywhere but the middle of it. He put the questions to her one at a time and waited, and one at a time she had the answers ready.
This time each vow landed in her like a stone dropped into a well, and she waited to hear it strike bottom before she said the next.
She had said these same words in this same church once before, with a lie folded up small inside them, and they had cost her nothing.
Then the last was out and could not be called back.
When they sang, Willie Pritchard's voice came up true out of the pews, the last of the rasp gone out of it at last, and she had to look down at the rail a moment before she could find the note herself.
When it was done, Ashworth sat down.
The pen was cold in her fingers in the vestry.
She put her name down where the book stood open for it, and Cole's came in under hers — that square hand she would know anywhere now.
Nathan and Lydia bent to the page after them, Nathan slow and careful over it.
She came back out to the church with the ink still wet, and stopped where she stood: the pews were full to the back, every face in them one she could put a kitchen to.
Mrs. Garrett sat among them. She had not once been able to cross into that bedroom the night Lydia's baby came — she had stood the night at the door, because she had been in the room when Mary Holt died in it years before.
But Lydia had come through it, and the baby too.
Her eyes went to the mother and the child now, and stayed there, and did not drop away.
She felt Lydia's hands at her collar, setting straight what was already straight, and staying there a moment longer than the fixing asked before they lifted away.
Nathan's hand went out and closed hard over Cole's, and not a word from either of them. He had given Cole this same grip at the first wedding, in Mrs. Calder's parlor, when the marriage was still a bargain struck on paper — the same hard hand, only held a breath longer now.
Then Ashworth took a hand of each of them into his own — hers, and Cole's — his hands dry and cold, the skin gone to paper.
"There," he said. "That's the last of my errands."
At supper that evening her eyes kept coming up off her own plate, and every time they did his were there across the table, waiting.
All through the bargain he had slept in the study, she in the bedroom, a wall between them and never a word said about it. That night, the supper things washed and the lamp turned down, he did not go to the study.
He crossed to where she stood by the table. His hand came up warm along her jaw and into her hair, and she turned her face into it before she had thought to. No storm swept them into it this time, and no flooded ford lay between; she closed the last of the space herself and kissed him.
She had promised God and the county to stop leaving the plain things unsaid. She said the plainest one there was.
"Come to bed."
He put out the lamp and drew her close.
The Holt door opened before she had her hand to it the next week, and Lydia stood there with the baby held out, red in the face and wailing, before Clara had the basket off her arm. "She's fed and cross about it. See if you have better luck."
Clara was halfway through the visit when Ada went heavy against her shoulder, all at once and fast asleep, and she carried her through to put her down.
She came up short in the bedroom doorway.
A cradle stood by the bed that had not been in the world the last time she stood in this room — new wood still pale, a line of small flowers cut along the head of it, close together and not quite expert, cut by a hand that had never before in nine years let itself make one useless pretty thing.
She laid the sleeping child in it. It rocked once on the boards and went still.
Clara came back out to the kitchen. Lydia stood at the stove with her back half to the room.
"He built it out in the barn, nights, after I'd gone up," she said, to the window.
"I'd hear the tools through the floor and lie there and say nothing.
If I'd once let on I knew, he'd have stopped.
" Her voice stayed level — the levelest Clara had ever heard it.
Clara crossed the kitchen and put a hand on her sister's shoulder — Lydia's own gesture, given back — and left it there. Lydia let her.
October came in dry, with frost on the early mornings, and Ashworth did not live to see it.
The study was the warm room in the evenings now, and its door stood open, and she had her own place at the desk while Cole worked his sermon on the far side of the lamp.
She took down a clean sheet and squared it to the edge of the desk before she wrote.
Then she caught her own hand doing it — the way his hand did it — and looked at that a moment, and left the sheet squared.
At the top of the page she wrote: Thomas.
She sat with that a while. Then she wrote on, plainly: that Lydia had a daughter at the Holt place, named Ada for their mother; that Clara herself was married this fall to the minister at Red Willow Junction; that the parsonage kept a spare room, and the train came through twice a week, and there would be a place laid for him at their table whenever he cared to come.
It did not come to a full page, and she signed it.
Then she took a second sheet and wrote four lines to her father, and signed her whole name, and sealed the two letters together by the lamp.
On the Friday she walked them down to the depot herself and stood while the train took them up, and turned for home. Geese went over as she came up the road, high, a long line of them working south. She turned in at her own gate.
THE END