Chapter 22
He sat in the parlor a third night running.
The lamp had been turned down low. The house was the quiet a house got after a hard day.
The kettle had been off the heat for an hour.
Quint had ridden out at dusk to take the news to the boys at the south fence, eaten his cold supper, gone to his bed in the loft over the barn.
The dog by the back step had given the sigh she gave when she had decided the house was settled.
The house was settled.
He was not.
He sat in the same chair as the night before, with the parlor's straight curtains in front of him.
He turned over in his hands the receipt Mr. Colt had signed.
The ink had dried. The names at the bottom were his own and Colt's and Saville's, with Lydia's underneath as witness, because she had insisted at the table that she write her name beneath the men's, and he had not had the heart to tell her no.
The ranch was his.
The ranch was his, and a wife was in his cottage with the door shut. There was, on the floor of the bedroom upstairs, a canvas bag with a sum in it that he had not yet looked at again, and which he had not yet decided where to put. And he was, in spite of all that, sitting in the dark.
A step on the stairs.
Lydia in her nightdress, with a candle in a tin holder.
"Pa."
"Lyddie."
"You're not in bed."
"No."
"It's past ten."
"I know."
She came in. She didn't sit. She set the candle on the small table beside the lamp, and the two flames burned together, and she stood in front of him in her nightdress with the candle making a yellow shape on her sleeve.
"Why are you fretting? We have the ranch, and her, and a sum in a bag that we'll learn how to do good with. You went up the stairs at eight to come down again. You have been here since. Why?"
Lydia's face was patient above the candle.
He had thought, sitting in the dark, that he had not been at any clear point in his head.
He had been turning over a thing he could not, in the dark, get hold of by the corner.
Lydia, of course, could get hold of it for him.
Lydia had got hold of every important thing for him in this house for the last week.
“She's going to wonder, all her life."
“What?"
"Whether the reason I asked her to stay was the bag."
Lydia didn't answer right away. She came nearer. She put her small hand on his shoulder, the way she had put her hand on his cheek in the porch chair last night, and her palm was warm through his shirt.
"You’ll tell her what's in your heart, and you will not wait, and you will not pretty it.
You will tell her that you've known it from the second paragraph of her first letter, as you told her in the kitchen this morning, and you will let her hear it without the bag in the room.
She will know, Pa. She will know because she's a woman who reads a man plain.
You don't need to be clever about it. You only need to say it.
Tomorrow morning. Before breakfast. Before the kettle.
Before another single day passes in this house with you in this chair. "
He looked at her.
"And the other thing."
"What other thing?”
"The promise."
"Which promise?”
"The one she made you make. About the ranch.
You said yes to her in the kitchen, and I heard you.
I'm here to make sure you say yes again this week, and the week after, until it's what this ranch does.
You will not let it slide. You will not be the man who said yes in a kitchen and then woke up in a month with a full pantry and a conscience you've stopped listening to.
There's a family in the back of the Methodist church in Prosperity whose father is on a chain gang in Sacramento and whose mother hasn't eaten three meals in a row since Tuesday.
I know because the teacher told us. I told Florence at supper.
Start with them. Because her peace requires it.
Because mine does. Because if you don't, you'll turn into a man I don't recognize and I will know, and you will know I know, and we will both pretend not to. Don't do that to us, Pa."
He sat with his hand on hers.
He did not trust his voice for a count of three slow breaths.
"Lyddie."
"Yes."
"You are a small, yet fearsome thing."
“I'm twelve."
"You are a small, yet fearsome twelve year old thing."
She didn't smile. She did, after a moment, lean her forehead briefly against the side of his head, and then she straightened, and lifted her candle, and looked at him a steady look.
"Tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning, Lyddie."
"Before the kettle. Promise me."
"I promise, child."
"And the family at the church?”
"This week."
She stood another count. Then she went back up the stairs. He heard the door of her room close. He heard the floorboard above the parlor settle with her weight, and settle again.
He folded the receipt and set it in the dresser drawer beside the jar. He blew out the lamp, and went up the stairs to bed, because morning was coming, and a path to a cottage in the gray, and a sentence he had not yet practiced.