Chapter 19
Florence had taken her clothes out of the cottage chest of drawers, and now they lay on the bed in two short folded piles, and the open travel case lay on the chair by the bed, and she was not yet putting them in.
She had been not putting them in for forty minutes.
The lamp was turned up, and the cottage smelled of hot oil. Outside, moonlight cut the dooryard into a pale square. A faint, thin breeze came under the door and made the flame shift. The cottage had been her place for a couple of nights. She had not, in any way that mattered, made it hers.
She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and let herself, for the first time that evening, look at the question she had been holding off since the parlor.
She thought of the bag.
The bag was in the wood. The bag had been in the wood for a day and three quarters.
Nobody who had not buried it knew where it was.
Nobody who had not buried it would find it; in three months the dry grass and dust would have done their work, and the smaller stone next to the larger would have settled, and the mark would be gone even to her.
She could leave it there. She had thought of it once already.
If she left it in the wood, she would walk to the train in the morning with only her travel case and a long ride east, and a small fortune wrapped in canvas would lie under earth waiting for nobody.
The cash would rot, slowly, and the gold would remain undiscovered.
She would have done nothing wrong with it.
She would have done nothing right with it either.
It would be without moral weight, and that might be better.
A knock came at the door.
It was small and quiet and not Beau's.
"Florence?"
She crossed the room and opened it. Lydia stood there in her nightdress and a shawl, with her hair down and her hand pulled inside the cuff of the shawl. She looked younger than she had this afternoon. She looked older than she had this afternoon.
"Lyddie."
"Can I come in?”
"Come in."
Florence shut the door behind her. Lydia stood in the middle of the room with her shawl held tight at her throat, and her eyes went to the bed, and to the two short piles, and to the open case on the chair. Then they went back to Florence's face, and stayed.
"You're packing?”
"Yes."
"I told Pa to let you decide. I told him. He's a fool."
"He isn't a fool. He's a tired man who is trying to be honorable. He's making a mess of it. That's not the same thing as a fool."
The girl sat on the edge of the bed, on the empty side, beside the two short piles. She put her hand on the topmost folded thing, which was Florence's gray shawl with the red thread at the border, and she ran her finger along the red, and didn't look up.
"I've been thinking,” the girl said after a moment of contemplation.
"All right."
"You know why he's sending you. The ranch. He told you. If Pa had the money to pay the man by Saturday, he wouldn't send you away. You know that already. I'm saying it because you're packing anyway."
She thought of the wood.
She thought of the bricks under the canvas.
She thought of Mrs. Kendall waving on a platform.
She thought of her own mouth saying my shawl, Beau.
It was cold, and of what it had cost her.
She thought of Beau Ferris's face in the parlor saying I will not be the kind of man who marries a woman into his trouble and calls it love, and of the small honest weight of a thing she had wanted somebody to say to her all her life.
She didn't say any of it.
She said, "I will give it thought tonight. I will give it thought. I will not promise."
Lydia's hand stopped on the red thread. The girl drew her hand back into the cuff of her shawl. She stood up. She didn't cry. She didn't do anything at all.
"All right."
"Goodnight, Florence."
"Goodnight, Lyddie."
The girl went out. The door shut. Florence sat on the bed beside the gray shawl and put her own hand where Lydia's had been.
The thread was rough under her thumb.
She sat that way a long time. She didn't pack.
She didn't unpack. She thought about a wood.
She thought about a man's parlor. She thought about a kitchen on a Tuesday morning in Worcester.
And after a long while she rose, very quietly, and put the lamp out, then lay down in her clothes on the white sheets, and waited for whatever the night was going to make her think of.