CHAPTER 25 #2
Somewhere behind them Ruthie Dawson made a noise nobody could have spelled.
Harlan said something to nobody about the wind.
The meadow whooped, and two hundred and forty pairs answered it, and Wyatt Miller went right on kissing his wife in front of the entire town of Bear Creek until Daisy pulled on his jacket with her whole weight.
“That’s enough,” Daisy said. “There’s cake.”
Afterward, in the crush by the tent poles, Mitch Lawson worked his way over in a clean shirt with his hat in his hand. He shook Wyatt’s hand and then he shook Clara’s, and he was not a man who had ever been easy at a party.
“Crop paid the note in June,” Mitch said. “I checked, and then I was glad, which is new for me.”
Wyatt turned his hat over once in his hands. “Appreciate you saying it.”
“I’d have said it in June,” Mitch said. “I didn’t know how to put it.”
He put his hat on and went to carry chairs nobody had asked him to carry.
The trestle tables ran the length of the tent, and they had been full at five and were wreckage by six: ham, beans, three kinds of potatoes, a roaster of Gemma’s chicken with the lid upside down beside it, and the white cake going fast at one end while the chocolate one held at the other with its candles burned down into the frosting.
Gemma had a station behind the tables and would not come out from behind it, and she said the same four words to everybody who tried to help her, which were, sit down, you’re a guest.
Clara ate standing up with her shoes off in the stubble. The grass was still warm. Her jaw hurt from her own face.
Sadie Hayes came past with two plates and handed her one without asking.
“You haven’t eaten,” Sadie said.
“I have.”
“You’ve carried a plate around all evening. That is not the same thing, and I ought to know, I did it in July.” She tipped her chin at the near pasture, where the bawling had not let up since four. “Sorry about the noise, ma’am.”
“They’re allowed.”
“It’s the weaning,” Caleb said, coming up behind her with beans. “They’re not upset at us. They’re upset at each other, and it runs about three days, and then it’s the quietest place you ever stood in, which people don’t expect.”
“Caleb.”
“I’m explaining.”
“I know you are,” Sadie said, and gave him her roll.
Daisy sat cross-legged on the end of a table with the notebook open on her knee and a pencil in her fist, and she was taking dictation.
“Slower,” she said. “How do you spell it?”
“N-i-g-h-t-h-a-w-k,” Harlan said. He had his jacket off at last and his thermos lid in his good hand. “Over the corrals, most evenings this month. They go for the bugs the lights bring up.”
“There isn’t a light on the corrals.”
“There’s bugs regardless,” Harlan said.
“You have to say where and when or it doesn’t count.”
“Over the corrals. After supper. Every evening this month but Wednesday.”
The pencil stopped. “What happened Wednesday?”
“It rained,” Harlan said. “A little.”
“Fine.” She wrote it. “Mr. Callahan. You said you had one.”
Tate Callahan crouched down to her level with a paper plate balanced on his knee. “Kingfisher. Under the new bridge, Tuesday, oh-eight-hundred. Went upstream and came back.”
“That’s not how you say a time.”
“Eight in the morning,” Tate said.
“Thank you.” She wrote that too. “Mrs. Finch. Do you have one?”
Nora Finch took the question seriously, because that child could always tell. “A meadowlark on the fence by the school flagpole, most of last week.”
“Everybody has a meadowlark.”
“It was new to me on Tuesday.”
“Fine.” Daisy wrote it. “I’m putting your name beside it so people know who had it.”
The notebook was four pages fuller than it had been in the spring, and two of those pages were in Clara’s handwriting, and one page had a smear on it where a jar of creek water had gone over in April.
Nora Finch came and stood beside Clara with a cup of coffee she was not drinking. She watched Daisy spell nighthawk out loud to Ruthie, twice.
“She read out loud in my room in May,” Nora said. “I waited thirty-one years to be surprised.”
Clara put her hand on Nora’s arm and could not do anything else with her face, so she looked at the willows for a while.
The sun came down onto the bench and the whole meadow turned the color of the inside of a peach.
Somebody was stacking chairs at the far end.
Wyatt was out at the fence line with three men, pointing at the loading chute with two fingers, working Monday out ahead of time because that was how he got through a party.
Then Daisy climbed up onto a hay bale by the tent pole, and Ruthie held the notebook for her, and Daisy stood up straight on it in her dress and her own boots.
“Excuse me,” she said.
Nobody heard her. Clara set her plate down.
“Excuse me,” Daisy said, louder. “I’m eight since yesterday, so the singing is mine, and everybody has to be quiet including the second verse.”
It went across that meadow like water finding a low place.
A hundred people. The stacking stopped at the far end.
Gemma came out from behind her tables with the good knife still in her hand and stood there with it.
Harlan took his hat off and held it against his chest with the two fingers that would not close, and Sadie put her face in Caleb’s shoulder before a note was out of anybody.
Wyatt came up the grass. He did not run and he did not hurry, and he arrived beside Clara and took her hand and held it hard enough to hurt, and that was all he did.
Daisy set her feet. She put her hands down flat at her sides.
“Down in the meadow where the cold creek runs,” she sang.
Her voice was small and high and a half step under the note, and it went out over a hundred people who had known her all her life and had not heard this.
Clara stood still. Four years of a kitchen, a school room, a barn aisle, a truck cab, all of them with a child humming in them and no words ever coming out.
The words came out now, in order, in a meadow, in front of the whole town.
She got to the end of the first verse and stopped for breath, and not one person made a sound.
Then she took the second verse. It is the one about coming back up the bank in the dark, and there is a place in the middle where the tune goes down before it goes up, and Daisy went down and came up and did not lose it. She kept her chin level.
Tate Callahan had his hand over his mouth.
Loretta Gable, who never raised her voice, was not making any sound at all, and her glasses were off, and she was not looking for them.
Nora Finch was smiling at the grass. Gemma set the knife down on the table without looking where it went, and it slid off the edge into the stubble, and she left it there.
Wyatt’s thumb went once across Clara’s knuckles and stopped.
The wind came up off the bench for the last time that day and laid the grass over and took the end of the song down the meadow, past the willows, toward the creek and the new bridge and the water going quiet over the gravel.
Clara stood in the sweetgrass with her hand in Wyatt’s and listened to her mother’s song come back to her out of a child’s mouth, all the way to the end, in a meadow, in September.
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The End