CHAPTER 3 #2
“That’s the kind there’s food for.”
“Dad makes eggs.”
“Then we’ll have eggs Saturday and he can make them.” Clara put the lid on the pot and turned the burner down. “Forks. Where do forks live in this house?”
“The drawer that sticks. You have to lift it.”
“Everybody’s got one of those.”
Daisy got the drawer open with both hands and counted out three forks and three knives and stood holding them, waiting to be told where they went, in her own kitchen.
“Wherever you like,” Clara said. “I don’t know this table yet.”
She went up on her toes for a mixing bowl. Her hand came down on something else at the back of the top shelf, and she brought it out into the light: a coffee pot, blue enamel gone speckled white, the handle worn pale along the underside.
Clara held it with one hand under the bottom of it.
Then she put it where it had been, at the back, handle turned in, and took the mixing bowl down, and went on with supper.
Harlan Cobb came in at dark with the cold coming off his coat in a wave and his thermos held against his chest.
“Evening,” he said. “Don’t get up. I’m after hot water and I’ll be gone.”
“There’s coffee.” Clara had the pot already. “Lid or mug.”
“Lid. Always the lid.” He unscrewed it and held it out, and his right hand took it in a grip that had two fingers left out of the work. “A mug’s a thing you have to carry back.”
She filled it. He drank it standing, coat on, mud freezing gray in the tread of his boots and dropping off in pieces onto the mat.
“You’re the Gables girl,” he said.
“I was.”
“Your mother sold me a pie at the church one year for a dollar and told me to my face it was worth two.”
“It was worth two.”
“It was worth three,” Harlan said. “How’s it looking out there, you’re going to ask me.”
“How’s it looking out there.”
“Two heifers close. He’ll be up.” Harlan turned the lid a half turn in his fingers. “You want it plain or do you want it the way people say it in town.”
“Plain.”
“If the crop comes in short the bank won’t renew, and if the bank won’t renew he sells, and there’s no other ground on this earth with his wife and his boy still in it.”
The furnace came on under the floor. Harlan drank the last of the coffee down and screwed the lid back onto the thermos, and it took him three tries with that hand.
“Wind’s coming around tonight. I’d shut the west gate.”
Clara stood there with a dish towel in her hands and dried a plate that was already dry. Then she dried the next one, and the one after that. She had said yes to a job at two in the afternoon and now the job was standing in the room with its coat on and its boots dropping mud, and it was not a job.
Under the table, Daisy hummed. Four bars, low, no words in it, her heels bumping the bench leg on the offbeat.
Clara stopped with a plate in her hand.
One. Two. Three.
She set it down on the stack and reached for the next one. Harlan tucked the thermos under his arm. The screen door banged and Wyatt came in stamping, and the cold came in around him and went along the floor.
“West gate,” Harlan said to him.
“Shut it on my way through.” Wyatt hung his coat on the peg. “Number eighteen’s got a foot out and nothing else since four. I’ll be back down at ten.”
“Then I’ll take midnight,” Harlan said, and went.
Wyatt washed at the sink a long time, up past the wrists, and dried on the towel Clara handed him.
He sat down at the end of the table with the calving book and the pencil out of the wire and put down two lines in it, and did not turn the book toward himself first, because she had left it square to the edge.
“Sadie and Caleb start nights tomorrow,” he said. “Three nights a week from here on. You won’t have to get up for any of that, and I don’t want you to.”
“Okay.”
“School bus doesn’t come up Six Mile. She has to be standing at the end of the road at twenty past seven.”
Clara wrung the dishcloth out and hung it over the faucet, and the water ran off it in a thin line and quit.
“And if a heifer goes down at twenty past seven?”
“Then she’s late and I tell Mrs. Finch why.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a hope with a coat on.” Clara turned a chair and sat in it, facing him across the table. “I’ll take the road end. Morning and afternoon, every day, the whole eight weeks. You don’t leave a pen for it and you don’t thank me for it.”
“That wasn’t in what I asked you for.”
“No,” Clara said. “It’s in what I said.”
He wrote another line in the book, and the pencil pressed harder than the line needed.
“All right.”
“Okay.”
He looked up from the book.
“You still say okay like it’s a whole sentence.”
Clara put the towel over the oven handle and squared it, which took longer than it needed to take.
“Okay.”
His mouth went, and did not get all the way to anything, and he wrote another line in the book.
She carried her bag up at half past nine, and the stairs were cold, and the landing had one bulb burning in it with no shade on it.
The east room had been emptied on purpose.
Not cleared out—emptied, in one afternoon, by somebody who did not come back afterward and put anything right.
Four squares on the wall stood brighter than the paint around them.
There were nail holes nobody had filled.
The window seat ran under the window with its lid down, and it was the only thing in the room that had been there before today, and the cold came up through the floorboards into her socks like the boards were the outside wall.
Wyatt had put a bed in while she did the dishes. The mattress still had the tag stapled on it and the frame was not square to the wall, and there was a stack of folded sheets on the end of it, and he had not said one word about any of it.
She sat on the edge of it with her coat still on. Downstairs a chair scraped and the kitchen light went out under the door, and the whole house dropped a degree with it.
Clara set her bag on the window seat. She plugged the heater in and it started ticking before it made any heat at all, exactly as advertised.
She went to shut the door and put her hand up on the frame to find a switch that was not on that side, and her thumb ran up the wood and caught on a ridge of pencil.
She turned into the light off the landing.
The marks went up the frame in pencil, one a year, and the top three had Levi written beside them in a woman’s careful print.