Chapter 10
The house had five rooms, and four of them were cold.
Olivia went through it the next morning like a woman taking an inventory.
The kitchen was lived in, and so was the surgery.
The rest had been shut up since the winter of eighty-five, and it showed.
There was a bird's nest in the parlor flue.
Her own room had been scrubbed, but the room beyond it had not.
There was a woman's sewing basket on a shelf with the needle still in the work.
She left the basket where it was. She lit the stoves.
That took the whole of the first day. The flue had to be cleared with a broom handle.
The parlor smoked. Antonia stood in the hall with her arms around herself and would not come in until it stopped.
But by dark there was a fire in every room, and the house was breathing again.
She could hear it. Boards ticking as they warmed.
Wind at windows that had not felt heat on the other side of them in three years.
On the second day, she baked.
She baked bread, because there was no baker in Galena Springs and the mercantile loaf was a crime. Then she baked more bread than the house could eat. She wrapped four loaves in clean cloths and put on her bonnet.
"Where are we going?" Antonia asked.
"Visiting."
"Nobody visits us."
"I know," Olivia said. "That's why we're going to them."
She took the first loaf to the house next down the hill, where a woman named Mrs. Tolliver opened the door with her sleeves rolled and her mouth already shut.
Olivia said good morning, and that she was the new Mrs. Aldridge, and that she had baked more than they could use. Then she held out the loaf.
Mrs. Tolliver eyed the loaf. Then Antonia, who stood on the step below with her hands folded.
"That's kind," she said, and did not take it.
"It's still warm," Olivia said.
There was a silence. Somewhere in the house a child cried, and Mrs. Tolliver's eyes went to the sound and came back.
"I've a man on the day shift," she said.
"Then he'll be glad of bread when he comes up. There's nothing in it but flour, salt, and yeast, Mrs. Tolliver. I made it myself with my own two hands. This child watched me do it from the stool."
Mrs. Tolliver took the loaf. She held it as if it might go off.
"Good morning," Olivia said, and went on down the hill with the other three.
Two of them were taken. One was not. She counted that a fair morning's work, and said so to Antonia on the way home. The child looked at her sideways, as if she were a new kind of weather.
* * *
On the third day, she took the child to the mercantile.
She had a list. That was her excuse. The house wanted lamp oil, thread, and a great deal else.
She had the tin box. She did not intend to send the doctor for lamp oil when he had a practice to keep.
But the real reason was simpler. She wanted to walk down Silver Street with Antonia's hand in hers, at eleven in the morning, and let Galena Springs see her do it.
It saw. She felt it seeing. Doors that had been open were closed by the time she reached them. Two women talking outside the assay office stopped talking and looked at the sky. A man coming out of the livery stepped back inside.
Antonia's hand was very still in hers. It did not pull away. It did not hold on.
The mercantile was warm. It smelled of coffee and kerosene. Olivia gave her list to the storekeeper, who took it without looking at the child, and went to the back to fill it. There were three other women at the counter. They had been talking. Now they were not.
The door opened behind her.
Olivia did not turn, but she saw the women's faces change, and she knew before the boards creaked that someone had come in who mattered.
Then a voice said, "Good morning, Mr. Adams," and she did turn. It was a voice she had heard on Beacon Hill. She had not expected to hear it here.
The woman in the doorway was handsome. Handsome, tall, and dressed a full season ahead of every other woman in the store. Dark green, with a mourning brooch at her throat. Her hair was iron gray, and her back was iron straight. She carried herself as if the floor had been laid for her.
Her eyes went to Olivia. Then to the child.
Then, without any hurry at all, she gathered her skirts in one gloved hand and drew them aside. Then she turned and went out.
Not a word was said. The door closed behind her with a small, firm click. Two of the three women at the counter set down what they were holding and followed her out. The third stayed. She was younger, and she looked at the floor.
"Who," Olivia said, "was that?"
"Mrs. Pemberton," the younger woman said to the floor. "Mrs. Horace Pemberton. Her husband owns the mine."
"I see."
"She don't mean anything by it, missus. Only she lost her boy."
"So did Mrs. Costa on the third floor," Antonia said.
It was the first time she had spoken in the mercantile. The younger woman looked at her, startled. So did Olivia.
"Mrs. Costa lost her boy in the fire," Antonia said. "She didn't pull her skirt at anybody."
Olivia put her hand on the child's shoulder, and left it there.
The storekeeper came back with the lamp oil.
She paid for it from the tin box, counted her change, and thanked him.
Then she walked out into Silver Street with her head up, her purchases on her arm, the child's hand in hers.
She did not look to see who was watching. She already knew.
* * *
"Teddy," Harriet Bowen said. "His name was Teddy. Theodore, but nobody called him that. He was nine."
They were in Harriet's kitchen, with the door shut and Harriet's sister's three children banished to the yard. Olivia had walked down after supper, alone, and said she needed to understand Mrs. Pemberton. Harriet had poured coffee and understood at once what.
"It was the typhoid winter. The same one that took Maggie Aldridge.
It came up from the camp. It took forty-one souls in this gulch before it was done, and Teddy Pemberton was one of them.
He was the only child they had. Horace was forty when he was born, and Eugenia past thirty. They'd given up hoping."
"And the doctor?"
"Was at the camp, where the fever was worst, doing what a man could. Josiah went to the Pembertons' when the boy sickened. He was there when the boy died. Eugenia never forgave Charles for not being. Never said so. Never had to."
Olivia turned her cup in her hands.
"So she blames him."
"She did. For a while." Harriet's voice dropped, which for Harriet meant it came down to the level of other people's ordinary speech.
"Then she stopped blaming him, because he'd lost his wife the same week and there was no satisfaction in it.
And she stopped blaming the company, because it's her husband's company.
And she stopped blaming God, because she goes to church.
But she had to blame something. A woman can't bury her only child and blame nothing. So she started on luck."
"Luck."
"Bad luck. Signs. A bird in the house. A picture that fell.
She's got a list, Olivia, a whole list of things that happened that winter that she should have read and didn't. She's been reading them ever since.
And then in September a red-haired girl came up the mountain with a story about a fire, a barn, a burst lamp, and every child in the camp singing jinx. You can imagine."
"I can."
"Grief has strange ways of keeping warm," Harriet said. "That's all it is. She's not wicked. She's cold. She's found something to hold on to, and she'll hold it until somebody gives her something better."
Olivia sat with that for a while.
"Does the doctor know?" she asked. "Why she does it?"
"The doctor," Harriet said, "has not let himself know anything about that winter in three years. Drink your coffee."
* * *
Antonia asked her on the fourth night, over the dishes.
She asked it as she asked all her questions, without any lead-up. As if she had been carrying the question around for days and had only now found the right place to set it down.
"Why did you marry him?"
Olivia went on drying the plate in her hands.
"You never saw him," Antonia said. "You came all the way from Boston. He could have been anybody."
"He could."
"So why?"
Olivia set the plate on the shelf. She thought about giving an easy answer. Then she turned to the child. Antonia stood at the basin with her sleeves pushed up and her hands in the water, waiting with that terrible patience of hers. Olivia found that she did not want to.
"Because he asked for what I am," she said.
"He wrote an advertisement. It said he wanted a sensible woman who could keep a house and mother a child.
And I read it, and I thought, well. That is what I am.
That is exactly what I am, and nobody has ever asked for it before. They've used it. Nobody's asked."
Antonia waited.
"And someday," Olivia said, "God willing, he may ask for who I am. Which is a different thing. But that's not in the contract. I didn't come for it, and I don't expect it. Hand me that pan."
The child handed her the pan.
"What's the difference?" she asked.
"Between what a person is and who they are?" Olivia dried the pan. "What you are is what you can do. Who you are is what's left when nobody needs you to do anything. Most people never find out."
Antonia was quiet for a while, with her hands in the water.
"I'm a jinx," she said. "That's what."
"That's what they call you. It isn't what you are." Olivia hung up the cloth. "What you are is a girl who reads Latin off a bone chart at eight years old. As for who you are, I've been here four days. Give me time."
* * *
Charles came home on the fifth night from a three-day call at the camp.
There had been a fever in the bunkhouses.
Not the typhoid. Only a fever, the ordinary kind, but eleven men down with it and the company frightened.
He had stayed until he was sure. Nine hours of sleep in three days was all he had had.
He came down the gulch in the dark with his bag over his shoulder and his mind on nothing.
At the top of his own steps, he stopped.
There was light in the window.
Not the surgery window. The kitchen. Lamplight, yellow and steady, lying across the snow on the porch in a shape he had not seen there for three years.
He stood on the top step with his hand on the rail.
The door was not locked. He opened it, and the smell came out to meet him.
Bread. Fresh bread, coffee, woodsmoke, and a fourth smell under them that he could not name at first. Then he could.
Warmth. The house was warm, all of it, not just the kitchen.
Even the hall. The parlor door stood open, and a fire burned inside.
And from the kitchen came a sound he had never heard in this house at all.
The child was laughing.
It was not much of a laugh. Rusty and short, it stopped almost as soon as it started, as if she had surprised herself. But it was a laugh, and it was hers. Olivia's voice came after it, low and dry, saying words he could not catch. Then a clatter. Then the laugh again, shorter still, and stifled.
Charles stood in his own hall with his bag on his shoulder and the snow melting off his boots onto the boards.
He stayed in the hall a moment, in the dark, with the light and the warmth coming out at him through the kitchen door.
In eleven years he had walked into a great many houses.
He had stood at a great many windows. What it was to be the man outside, looking in at a lamp, a table, people who belonged to each other, he knew very well.
He had not known it was possible to be that man in his own hall.
Then the child said, "He's back," without turning around because she always knew. And Olivia came to the kitchen door with a cloth in her hands and the lamplight behind her. She took him in, standing there.
"You'll be wanting supper," she said. "Take your boots off. I've just done the floor."