Chapter Nineteen #2
“My business,” George said, his voice coming out lower than usual, “is to ask for your daughter in the spring. I’ve set aside the south parcel of the home place for a house.
I’ve spoken to Wade. I had meant to come up to your porch tomorrow afternoon with the new yearling colt and put the question to you over a coffee.
But the porch I am sitting on is yours as much as my own by the customs of the valley, and the question seems to want asking here.
So I am asking it here. With your blessing, Ben. ”
Ben held his gaze.
Then, he picked up his fork and set it back down again, which was Ben Greene’s tell. He said, dry as bone, “You shall come up tomorrow afternoon all the same. With the colt.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you have my blessing, son. You have had it since July.”
Alice put a hand flat to her face and made a sound that came out half laugh, half something else.
Sadie, who had taken the whole exchange in over the rim of a half-eaten biscuit, rose suddenly to her feet on the porch boards.
“A wedding!” Her voice rose at the back of the porch with a clear, delighted note.
She came up off the bench at her end on her good leg with a careful hop.
Her wooden spoon, having traveled from the kitchen to the porch by means of her apron pocket, went up in her fist in the manner of a flag at a county fair.
“A wedding,” she announced again, in case the porch had failed to hear. “Uncle George and Miss Alice are getting married!”
“Yes, sweet girl,” Zoe answered, the corner of her mouth pulling at the small, careful hop.
“We are going to need a great deal of cake. I shall require a new pinafore!”
“Yes, sweet girl, you shall require a new pinafore.”
“Auntie Alice.” Sadie turned her face at her end of the bench at last. “I have been waiting since Tuesday for permission to call you aunt out loud. Aunt Alice! Aunt Alice! Aunt Alice!”
Alice’s eyes had gone very wet at the corners. She set her coffee cup down, came around the end of the bench, and pulled Sadie into the front of her grey wool dress without a word. The wooden spoon went up between them in Sadie’s fist and stayed there.
Across the porch, Ben put his hand briefly to the side of his own face.
Wade’s eyes had come up off the pewter plate at his knee.
They went to George at the other end of the bench. George’s hat had come off his head an inch and gone back on at an awkward angle. The line of his mouth had set in something he had small ability to control at the moment.
Wade’s own mouth pulled at last.
“Sadie—” Zoe began, but the girl was past stopping.
“We’re having a wedding. I want to be the flower girl. I want a basket. I shall scatter petals. I have considered. I shall scatter petals from the back of the church to the front. Roses. White roses, if Auntie Zoe can grow them by then. Pink, if she cannot.”
Alice was laughing properly now, both hands pressed to her mouth.
“Child,” Ben said, gravely. “You are going to be the finest flower girl this valley has put forward.”
“I know.”
Ben’s grey eyes had gone unexpectedly bright at the rim. He cleared his throat and lifted his coffee cup.
Wade lifted his. Zoe lifted hers. Alice lifted hers. Sadie, lacking a cup, lifted her plate in good faith, and the small porch circle met in the middle and raised itself in toast to a thing it had been quietly preparing for since June.
“To the young people!” Ben said, lifting his cup.
“To the young people!” the porch answered.
Wade kept his hand at the rim of his coffee a count longer than the toast required.
The young people. He had small claim to that any longer. He was thirty-four this evening, with a Bible cover inside that carried his mother's name in yellow chain stitch, and a woman across the bench from him whose hand had laid into his palm on the night of the snake and had stayed there.
Five days. Wednesday morning. The end of the practical month. His eyes lifted and Zoe was already there.
She had been looking at him through the whole of the toast. The dark blue of her eyes was steady in the lamp light, and the small private smile at the corner of her mouth had not moved.
Wade held her eyes.
Five days, Zoe, he thought across the porch board. Five days, and I will be at the step with the asking in my mouth.
Her free hand came up briefly to the side of her own throat at the cuff of her collar and stayed there.
Across the porch, Ben cleared his throat once and set his cup down between his boots.
“Sadie, sweet girl. Fetch the cream pitcher. Your aunt and uncle have no intention of doing it themselves at the moment.”
***
The pie came out at half past seven.
Sadie cut the slices, which was permitted on the strength of the occasion, and the impartiality of the small magistrate distributing apple and crust was a thing to behold.
Wade took the plate. “This,” he said, addressing the slice rather than the company, “is the first birthday pie this house has produced in seven years.”
The porch went quiet.
Zoe set her own plate down carefully on her knee.
Ben kept his eyes on the boards.
“My mother had a brown sugar crust,” Wade went on, slow, low. “She had it from her mother in Indiana. The recipe is in the brown book in the kitchen drawer. Third page from the back. In her hand. I have looked at it twice in seven years and shut the drawer both times.”
He paused.
“Zoe Preston, I think, opened the cover for the first time at the kitchen table at six-thirty this evening,” he said, low.
“Tuesday afternoon,” she said, soft. “I also,” she added, “put an apron mark on the brown book. The household will have to extend its forgiveness to a flour smudge in the margin.”
Sadie reached across and patted her wrist with a floury hand. “Forgiven.”
“Thank you, sweet girl.”
“Mama would have made a worse one.” Zoe pressed her lips together. She held her plate steady. She looked very carefully at her slice.
Beside her, Wade was looking at her over the brim of his coffee cup. The look held a long count. Zoe felt the heat go from her collarbone to her temples and stay there.
She picked up her fork to give her hands a task.
It was over the second cup of coffee that she asked her question. “Who keeps the small white church on the north pasture?”
A silence.
Ben drew a breath.
“It’s gone unkept three years,” he said, careful. “Wade’s father built it in fifty-five with two of his boys and the boy who is now my deputy.”
“Alice and I are going to bring the rosebush back. With your leave.”
Wade turned his head toward her. “Go on.”
“The bush. The altar cloth. A clean linen on every pew between now and Christmas. The Ladies’ Aid riding out on Saturdays.
Mrs. Greene’s satin stitch on the cloth, because hers is the finest in the valley and she will hear nothing else.
White roses on the altar in June.” She drew a breath.
“With your leave, Wade. I don’t propose to do it any other way. ”
He held her gaze in the lamplight. “You have it,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the church on Sunday. I’ll bring my own pruning shears.”
Ben set his coffee cup very gently down on the boards.
Alice drew a small, bright breath.
Sadie set her plate aside. She folded her hands. She looked up at her uncle in the lamplight, small grave face, cinnamon smudge still at one cheek where Alice had failed to reach it earlier.
“May I come with you?” she asked.
A long quiet.
The porch held its breath.
Wade looked down at Sadie in the lamp light at his knee.
The answer was already in his mouth.
He had small idea how long it had been waiting at the back of his teeth.
Since the Sunday of Sadie's running. Since the kitchen on the night of the snake. Since the spool of wire at Larkin’s that morning.
Since the Bible cover at the pine table earlier, the chain stitch of yellow thread on cream Belgian linen, his mother's name set down at the front by Zoe's own hand.
“You may, Sadie.”
“All right.”
She picked up her fork. She finished her crust.
George set his coffee cup down between his boots in the manner of a man trying to keep his face in working order.
Ben’s pale, hard sheriff's face had gone soft at the corner of his mouth by careful degrees. The line of his jaw eased.
The small joy at the center of the porch boards had become a thing the household could lay down and walk around for as long as it cared to.
They sat a long while.
Whoever was going to rise first seemed in small hurry to do so.