Chapter 14
January closed the passes on the fourth, and did not open them again.
The train came up on the third and did not come back. Snow lay on the line above the gorge a dozen feet deep. The company sent a plow, and the plow stuck. After that, Galena Springs was an island. The mail came in once a fortnight on a sledge with a man walking beside it. Nothing else came at all.
The practice slowed. Men did not fall off wagons when there were no wagons, and the mine ran short shifts because the ore could not be shipped. For the first time in three years, Charles Aldridge found himself with evenings.
He had forgotten what to do with them.
It was Olivia who found the chess set. It was in the room beyond hers, on the shelf with the sewing basket, in a wooden box he had not opened since Philadelphia. She brought it into the parlor one night without asking.
She set it on the table by the stove and said, "Teach us."
"Both of you?"
"Both of us. The child will pick it up faster than I will. You may as well start with her."
He taught them.
He taught as he doctored, in order, with nothing left out.
The board. The pieces. How each one moved, why, and what it was worth.
Antonia took it in the way she took in the bones, and by the third night she was playing without being told what to do.
Olivia took longer. She asked questions.
She wanted to know why a knight moved the way it did.
When he said it just did, she looked at him as if that were not an answer.
By the second week, he had learned one fact about the two of them.
His wife defended. She built a wall of pawns across the board and sat behind it, waiting. When he came at her, she took whatever he sent with a small nod, as if she had expected it. She lost slowly. So slowly that twice he ran out of evening before he could finish her.
His ward attacked. She came out of her corner on the fourth move with every piece she had.
Queen, bishops, both knights, straight down the board at his king as if there were nothing else on it.
It was reckless. It was also, twice in the second week, effective.
He had not been looking for it, and she took his queen before he saw her coming.
"You cannot play like that," he told her.
"I just did."
"You will lose more often than you win."
Antonia considered this. "But I'll win faster," she said, and set up the board again.
Charles looked across the table at Olivia. Olivia was trying not to smile, and failing. He found that he was not trying at all.
* * *
The ink bottle was on the account books, and they both reached for it at once.
It was late. The child was in bed. The stove had burned down to a red glow.
The lamp was turned low. They were at the kitchen table with the ledgers between them, doing the month.
Olivia kept the household books now, as agreed.
But the practice books were his. Once a month they went through them together, because half the practice was paid in bacon and he could not price bacon.
"The Kinneys," she said. "Two cords of wood against the confinement. Is that fair?"
"It's what they have."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's fair." He reached for the ink to mark it. So did she.
Her hand came down on the bottle a half second before his. His came down on hers.
Neither of them moved.
It was a small hand. He had noticed that before, in the surgery.
Small, square, strong, with the nails cut short.
There was a burn mark across the back of it from some stove years ago.
It was warm. His own hand was cold, as it always was.
He felt her warmth come up through it, as if he had put his palm on a hearthstone.
The hand ought to have been taken away. He knew that. A breath went by. Another.
Then she said, quite steadily, "You had better take the bottle." She slid her hand out from under his. She picked up her pen and wrote two cords in the margin, in her upright Boston hand.
He took the bottle.
They did the rest of the month. Nothing was said about it. When the books were done, she said good night. He said good night. She went up.
He sat at the table for some time after, looking at the ink bottle.
Later, when he thought about it, he told himself that it had been a moment.
Nothing more. Two people reaching for the same bottle at the same time, as happens in a house.
He told himself that he did not remember how long it had lasted, or how her hand had felt.
Or that she had not pulled it away at once.
A man lying to himself was a case he could recognize. He found, for once, that he did not care to stop.
* * *
The bell rang at midnight in the last week of January, one pull that did not stop.
Olivia was up before he was. She had the lamp lit and her boots on when he came down the stairs. "The Dunne child," she said, before he had asked. "The mother's been crying on the porch. She can't let go of the rope."
The Dunnes were one of the two families who had taken their custom to Leadville.
Neither of them said so. He took his bag. She took the lamp. They went down the gulch together in the dark with the wind at their backs.
The child was four. It was a fever, and it was bad.
They worked through the night. Olivia did not remember afterward which of them did what.
She remembered the basin, the cloths, the child's small body burning through the sheet.
Charles's voice, low and level, saying now, hold, again.
Her own hands doing what it said before it had finished saying it, because she knew.
The mother in the corner with her apron over her face.
Mr. Dunne in the doorway, gray with cold, saying nothing at all.
At four, the fever broke.
She felt it break. She had her hand on the child's forehead when it happened. The heat went out from under her palm like a tide going out. The child sighed, and slept. Charles put two fingers on the small wrist and counted. Then he sat back on his heels and shut his eyes.
"She'll do," he said.
Mrs. Dunne came out from behind her apron. Her eyes went to the doctor, then to the doctor's wife. She opened her mouth. Olivia saw her decide not to say whatever it was.
"Thank you," she said instead. "Both of you. Thank you."
* * *
They walked home at dawn.
The wind had dropped. The gulch lay blue and still, with the light coming up behind the mountain. Snow squeaked under their boots. The only other sound was the creek under its ice. Charles carried the bag. Olivia carried the lamp, which was out.
Neither spoke.
Halfway up, where the path steepened, she put her hand through his arm.
She did it without thinking. She was tired. The path was steep, and he was there. Then she felt his arm stiffen under her hand. Well, she thought, that was foolish, and began to take it away.
He drew it close.
Without looking at her, without a word, he simply bent his elbow and brought her hand in against his side. Then he held it there, and went on walking up the hill at the same pace as before. She felt the warmth of him through the wool of his coat. She felt him breathing.
So they went up the gulch in the blue light, close together against the cold, as if they had been walking that way for years.
At the door he let her go. He opened it and stood aside.
"Sleep," he said. "I'll see to the stove."
She slept. But not at once.
* * *
Antonia wrote in the notebook every night, after the house was quiet.
She had made it into sections, the way the doctor's daybook was.
Remedies at the front. What was given, how much, and what happened after.
Then observations, which were anything else she had noticed that seemed worth keeping.
The mine lore had gone in there, copied off the prescription slips in her best hand. So had the chess.
On the last night of January, she wrote under Remedies:
Dunne girl, four years. Fever. Cold cloths all night, water by the spoon. Broke at four. Dr. A. says it was the water, not the cloths. Mrs. A. says it was both. They did not argue about it. They did not say anything walking home. I watched from the window.
She stopped and chewed the pencil. Then she turned to Observations and wrote:
The doctor watches Mrs. Aldridge when she reads.
She read it over. It was true. She had seen it four times now, in the evenings.
Mrs. Aldridge sat on the settle with the Bible or the mending.
The doctor sat at the table with his daybook, and did not write in it.
He looked at Mrs. Aldridge instead. He looked the way he looked at a patient, carefully, as if he were counting a pulse.
When Mrs. Aldridge looked up, he looked down.
Antonia wrote:
He does not know I have seen this. Mrs. Aldridge does not know either, or she pretends. I think it is a symptom. I do not know of what. He does not appear to intend to treat it.
She read it over. Then she shut the book, put it under her pillow with the ribbon marking the place, and went to sleep.
* * *
Olivia began the letter on the first of February.
She did not know who it was to. That was the trouble. She had nobody to write to about this. Not Bridget, who would not understand. Not Cora, who would. She sat at the kitchen table after the house was asleep, with a sheet of the doctor's paper in front of her. She wrote Dear, and stopped.
Then she wrote it anyway, to nobody.
I came out here to be useful. That was the whole of the bargain. He wanted a sensible woman to keep his house and mother his ward. I wanted a house that was not up the back stairs. We shook hands on it in a cold church, and that should have been enough.
It was enough. It was more than I had.
But I have caught myself wanting. I do not know when it started.
Perhaps at the ink bottle. Perhaps before, in the surgery, when he stopped explaining.
Perhaps on the hill this morning, when he took my arm and did not let it go.
I have caught myself wanting him to look at me the way he looked at me at the altar, and to go on looking. I want it so badly that I am ashamed.
He did not ask for this. He said so, in ink, before I came. Affection was the one term he would not promise. I said I did not expect it. We were both honest, and I am the one who has broken the terms.
She stopped there. She read it over once.
Then she got up and opened the stove door. She put the sheet in on the coals and watched it go brown, then black, then nothing. The door shut. She stood with her hand on the warm iron until she was sure there was nothing left.
Wanting was one thing. Being laughed at for it was another. She had been laughed at enough.
Then she went up to bed. She passed his door without stopping.