Chapter 13
"This house," Olivia said, "will keep Christmas properly."
She said it on the twenty-second of December, at breakfast, with the coffeepot in her hand. The doctor looked up from his daybook. The child looked up from her porridge. Neither of them spoke, which she had expected.
"There will be a tree. There will be a goose, if a goose can be had in this county, and a hen if it cannot.
There will be gifts. There will be church on Christmas Eve, and we will go to it together in one pew, like a family that has nothing to hide.
" She set the pot down. "I have kept ten Christmases in a sickroom with a tray.
I do not intend to keep this one in a cold parlor with the door shut. "
"The parlor is not cold," Charles said. "You saw to that."
"Then it wants a tree."
She thought he would say that he had calls. He always had calls.
"There's a stand of spruce above the mine road," he said. "Small ones. I'll take the sled."
He went up that afternoon, with an ax over his shoulder, and Antonia went with him.
Olivia watched them from the porch. Two dark figures against the snow, one tall and one small, going up the gulch at the same pace, saying nothing.
They came back at dusk hauling a spruce that was too big for the parlor by a foot.
Charles cut the foot off in the yard with a face of great seriousness, as if it were an amputation.
Then the tree stood in the corner of the parlor. The room smelled of resin.
* * *
Antonia strung the popcorn.
Olivia had shown her once. After that she did not need showing. She sat on the floor by the stove with the bowl on one side and the thread on the other. Each kernel went onto the needle with a care that made Olivia stop what she was doing to watch.
She did it the way the doctor stitched a cut.
Olivia had seen him do it now, through the surgery door, on the Tolliver boy's chin.
The same stillness in the face. The same small, exact movement of the hands, over and over, with nothing wasted.
There was no hurry in it. She did not break a single kernel.
When the string was done, she held it up and looked along it, as if checking that the stitches were even.
"That's a fine string," Olivia said.
"The doctor's are better."
"The doctor has been at it eleven years. Give it time."
Antonia hung the string on the tree. She hung it low, where she could reach. Then she stood back and looked at it with her head on one side. Olivia had seen her do the same with the atlas. With the mine. With each possession she meant to keep.
That night, going up to bed, Olivia looked in at the child's room as she always did.
The carpetbag was not by the bed.
It was in the corner, under the window, with its mouth open and nothing in it.
The brown dress hung on the hook behind the door.
On the chair, the nightgown lay folded. The child was asleep with her face to the door, as always.
But the bag was empty. It had been empty for some days, Olivia thought, and she had not noticed until now.
She stood in the doorway a long moment. Then she went to bed and kept it to herself.
* * *
On the morning of Christmas Eve, there was a package on Olivia's plate.
It was wrapped in a scrap of brown paper from the mercantile, tied with white thread. It was very small. Antonia sat across the table without moving. Her eyes were on the package, not on Olivia. Her face was so still that Olivia knew at once it had cost her a great deal.
Olivia untied the thread.
Inside was a tin button. A plain coat button, worn smooth, with a scrap of gray wool still caught in the shank. It had been sewn to a length of red ribbon with small, careful stitches so that it could be pinned to a dress.
"It was my mother's," Antonia said. "Off her coat. It's the only thing that came out."
Olivia could not answer at once.
She had seen the child's hand go to her stocking a hundred times.
On the porch that first day. In the mercantile.
At the schoolhouse fence. She had thought it was a habit, the way some children chew their hair.
She had not known there was anything in the stocking.
Now she sat with the anything in her palm.
A tin button that had come through a fire on Mulberry Street.
"Antonia," she said. "I can't take this."
"It's a present."
"It's the only thing you have."
The child met her eyes then. Straight, the way she had looked on the porch.
"I know," she said. "That's why."
Olivia pinned it on. She pinned it to her gray wool, above her heart, where a woman might wear a brooch of price.
It went to church that evening, and to the goose next day.
It stayed there for weeks. When Harriet Bowen asked her on the porch what the little tin thing was, she said it was a family piece. Which it was.
* * *
The doctor's gift came that afternoon, before the service, and he gave it awkwardly.
He had it in the surgery. He went to fetch it. When he came back, he stood in the parlor door with it behind him. He looked like a man who has not given a gift in three years and has forgotten the order of it. Then he held it out.
It was a notebook. A real one, bound in brown cloth, with a marbled edge and a ribbon to mark the place. The kind he wrote his own daybook in.
"For your remedies," he said. "And your observations. The prescription slips are not a system. I have been finding them in the woodbox."
Antonia took it in both hands.
She left it shut. She held it the way she had held the atlas that first night, as if it might be taken back. Olivia, watching from the settle, saw her thumb move once along the marbled edge and then stop.
"I have written something in the front," Charles said. "You may read it later."
"What does it say?"
He hesitated. Olivia saw him decide to say it aloud.
"It says that any mind which keeps such records deserves proper schooling. Whatever the jinx-talkers of Galena Springs may say about it." He cleared his throat. "That is all it says. It is not a long inscription."
The child looked up at him.
For a moment nobody in the parlor moved. Then Antonia said, "Thank you," in her hoarse, careful voice. She opened the book and read the front page. It was one line. Olivia had seen his hand. It could not have taken her more than a moment to read.
She read it for a long time anyway.
* * *
The church was full on Christmas Eve, and warm for once. There were lamps in every window, and a stove at each end roaring.
The Aldridges had a pew. Not the front, not the back.
A pew in the middle, on the left. The doctor had sat there alone for three years.
Olivia had sat beside him for eleven days.
Now there were three of them in it. Charles at the aisle, Olivia in the middle, the child at the wall with a hymnal she could not see over.
Olivia was aware of being looked at. She had been aware of it since the wedding.
Tonight she found she did not mind. Let them look.
There was a tin button on her dress and a spruce in her parlor.
She had a child on one side of her and a husband on the other.
The town could make of that what it liked.
They sang.
The child sang. Olivia had not expected that.
She had not heard Antonia sing. She had barely heard her speak.
But when the reverend gave out the carol and the whole church stood, the child stood with them.
She opened her mouth, and sang. Thin, true, not loud, with her eyes on the hymnal and her red hair coming loose under the lamps.
Olivia dared not look at her. She kept her eyes on the reverend's back, and sang. The child's shoulder was against her arm.
Across the aisle, three pews forward, Mrs. Pemberton was not singing.
Olivia saw it without meaning to. The iron-gray head was turned.
The mourning brooch caught the lamplight.
Eugenia Pemberton was looking across the church at the red-haired girl in the doctor's pew.
Her gloved hands were closed around her hymnal so tightly that Olivia could see the knuckles stand white through the kid.
Her eyes never left the child. Not for the whole of the carol.
Olivia thought of a boy named Teddy, who would have been twelve, singing in that pew. And she went on singing, because it was Christmas Eve, and because there was nothing else she could do for either of them.
* * *
They walked home under the stars.
There were more stars than Olivia had known there were. In Boston, the sky had been a gray lid. Here it was a black bowl with holes punched in it, thousands of them. So many that the snow gave back a light of its own, and they did not need the lantern.
Antonia walked between them.
She had taken Olivia's hand at the church door, the way she did now, without asking. Then, on the steps, she had put out her other hand and taken the doctor's. Olivia had felt him check, half a step, and then go on. He said nothing. He held on.
So they went up the gulch three abreast, on the packed snow, with the child in the middle holding both their hands.
Nobody spoke. Below them the church lamps went out one by one.
Above them the mine wheel stood still for once, black against the stars, because it was Christmas Eve and even the Pemberton stopped for that.
"Mrs. Bowen asked about the button," Olivia said.
"What did you tell her?"
"That it was a family piece. She said she'd never seen a brooch so plain. I said that was because she'd never seen one so valuable. The setting was a family secret, I told her, and she would have to apply to the jeweler."
"Which jeweler?"
"I said Antonia Jenkins, of New York and Galena Springs, by appointment."
Charles laughed.
It came out of him all at once, a real laugh, loud in the cold. It was so unexpected that all three of them stopped walking. Olivia had never heard it. It sounded like a creature that had been shut in a room for a long time and had just found the door open.
He stopped as quickly as he had begun. Standing in the snow with the child's hand in his, he looked at Olivia over her head, as if he did not know what had happened.
Nobody said anything.
It was a shining silence. The stars. Snow giving back their light. And the three of them standing quite still in it, holding hands, with the sound of that laugh still somewhere in the air.
Then Antonia tugged, once, at both of them.
"It's cold," she said. "Come on."
And they went on up the hill.