Chapter 22
The passes opened on the fourth of April, and Edwin Croft came up on the first train.
He came the way he had come in September.
Neat, tired, train-creased, with the satchel under his arm that would not close.
He came up the gulch on foot from the depot with a paper in his hand.
Charles, watching from the porch, saw him look up at the house and square his shoulders like a man going in to pull a tooth.
"Dr. Aldridge."
"Mr. Croft. Come in."
Croft came in. He stopped in the hall.
The surgery door stood open, and the surgery was full.
Charles had not arranged it. He wanted to say that afterward, and did. Nobody believed him. He had told the reverend when the train was due. The reverend had told Harriet. After that it had arranged itself.
Jack Tolliver was on the bench with his wife.
Ned Purdy was in the chair with his leg out straight.
Beside him, with her bonnet on and her mouth set, was Ada Purdy.
Mott and Kessler's brother stood by the window.
The Dunnes were in the corner, all of them, down to the girl of four.
Hollis was by the desk, turning his hat. The reverend was in the doorway.
Behind them, in the hall, on the porch, down the steps, was half of Galena Springs.
Croft took it in.
"I was given to understand," he said carefully, "that there was to be a hearing."
"There is," the reverend said. "This is it."
* * *
They spoke, one after another, and Croft wrote.
Tolliver spoke first because he had spoken first on the snow.
Then Purdy, from the chair, who said the girl had felt for his toes in the dark and told the doctor whether they moved.
Then Mrs. Dunne. Her Annie was alive because of the doctor's wife, she said, and her boys were alive because of the doctor's girl.
If the Society wanted to remove anyone from Galena Springs, they could start with her, because she was not going anywhere.
Ada Purdy, beside her nephew's chair, said nothing at all. But she did not leave. When Croft's eyes came to her, she held them.
Hollis spoke. He said it plain, in order, the way he had said it in the hall. At the end he added that Karl Brandt had asked him to speak for him. The shift boss stood by every word he had said in the hall, and would put his name to it.
Then Harriet Bowen pushed through from the porch and said a great deal, at full volume. Croft wrote until his pencil broke.
He sharpened it, and turned to Charles.
"And you, Doctor. The placement was until spring. It was your own word. I have it here."
"It was."
"Then what do you ask of the Society?"
Charles felt Olivia's hand come to rest on his shoulder. She was behind him. She had been behind him the whole time, saying nothing. Now her hand was there, warm through his coat, and it did not move.
"I ask you to witness a signature," he said. "And then to give one."
He took the paper from his desk. He had drawn it up himself, from the statute, with the reverend's help and a letter from the county seat. It was not long.
"The Society has the legal custody of her placement.
Under the law of this state, a husband and wife may petition the county court to adopt a child.
The court will require the Society's consent.
That is you. This is the petition. It asks the court to make Antonia Jenkins the daughter of Charles and Olivia Aldridge, in law, with our name.
It asks that she be heir to what I have, as if she had been born to it. "
He dipped the pen. Olivia's hand was still on his shoulder. He signed at the foot of the page, in his small marching hand. Then he set the pen down and turned the paper around on the desk so that it faced Croft.
"The judge sits at the county seat on the tenth. I mean to be there. Your consent goes beneath my name. I would like it before I go, so that there is nothing left for anyone to review."
Croft read the paper twice, as he read his own forms, with his finger on the line.
Then he looked around the surgery, at the seven men and their wives, at the reverend in the door, at the foreman with his hat.
Olivia saw a weight go out of his shoulders that had been in them since the platform in September.
"I have placed four hundred children," he said to nobody in particular. "I have never once been asked for one back."
Then he turned to the child.
Antonia was on her stool in the corner, where she had sat every morning since September. The notebook was open on her knees. She was looking at Croft, straight, with her gray-green eyes. Not folded small. Sitting up.
"Miss Jenkins," Croft said. "Do you understand what is being asked?"
"Yes."
"And do you wish it?"
Antonia held his eyes a moment longer. Then she bent to the notebook and took her pencil. She wrote a line, slowly and carefully, on the open page. She checked what she had written. Then she turned the book around and held it up so that he could see.
Antonia Aldridge.
"I wanted to be sure of the spelling," she said.
Croft took off his spectacles, wiped them, and put them back on. Then he took up the pen and signed beneath the doctor's name.
* * *
The house was empty by four. Olivia had seen the last of them down the steps and shut the door. For a moment she stood in the hall with her hand flat against it.
Then she went to the surgery.
He was at his desk with the signed paper in front of him.
The lamp was lit, though it was still light outside.
He had not moved since Croft's pen went down.
She stood in the doorway. He looked up. Whatever he had been holding shut for three years had come open in him, and he had no notion what to do with it.
"Olivia."
"I'm here."
"Sit down. Please. I have to say a thing. I have been trying to say it since February. I would like to say it before I lose it again."
She sat on the bench where Tolliver had sat.
There was no list this time. He sat with his hands flat on the desk and looked at her. The words came out of him the way the laugh had come on the hill. All at once, as if a door had been found open.
"I told Josiah in the vestry that I married you for the child.
That I wanted nothing more. You heard it.
I have known since the night you locked your door that you heard it.
I let you believe it for two months, because it was easier than telling you that it was a lie.
" His voice was rough. "It was a lie. It was the worst thing I have said in my life.
I said it loud, on that day, because he was right, and I could not bear that he was right. "
"Right about what?"
"That there was a woman in my kitchen." He stopped, and studied his hands.
"Maggie did not send for me. Four days, she lay in that bed, and she did not send, because the camp needed me more.
I let the camp need me more. I have let it need me more every day since.
I built a life out of the next call. So that I would never again be in a room where someone I loved was dying, and I could do nothing. "
He drew a breath.
"And then I put an advertisement in a paper, because Harriet told me to, and I asked for someone useful. Someone sensible. I wrote it in those words on purpose, Olivia. I chose them. Useful was safe. A man can lose a useful woman and go on setting bones."
She waited.
"And they sent me you."
He looked up.
"They sent me a woman who walked through my surgery door with her sleeves rolled and did not ask leave.
Who scrubbed my table and said she was not Maggie.
Who took my arm on a hill and let me hold it.
Who tied a rope around a child with her own hands, sent her into a mountain, and did not shake until it was over. "
His voice dropped.
"I advertised for someone I could do without. God forgive me, I was sent someone I cannot. I have tried. I have tried for two months, with a locked door between us, and I cannot."
He stood up. He came around the desk.
"If the child were grown and gone tomorrow.
If there were no child. If every reason I wrote in that letter in November were struck out, and there was nothing left but the two of us in this house, I would still choose you.
Not for the house. Not for what you can do in it.
For yourself. For who you are when nobody needs anything from you at all.
" He was in front of her now. "I do not know if that is in the contract. I do not care. I am adding it."
Olivia sat very still on the bench.
She had been needed all her life. She had said so once, to a child over the dishes, and burned the rest in a stove.
He was looking at her.
"Charles," she said. Her voice held steady. She found she would not have cared if it had not. "I have been needed all my life. I have never once been wanted. Not once, in twenty-eight years. Until now."
She stood up.
He put his hand to her face, the way she had put hers to his in the kitchen with the letter on the table. His hand was cold. She turned her cheek into it anyway.
Then he bent his head. She lifted hers. He kissed her.
It was not a long kiss. Gentle, careful, given in a lamplit surgery that smelled of carbolic, between a scrubbed table and a desk with a signed paper on it.
The one room in the house where they had learned each other's hands.
It was exactly the kiss she would have expected from him, if she had let herself expect one. Plain. Complete. True.
When it was over, he kept hold of her.
"The judge sits on the tenth," he said, against her hair.
"I know."
"I would like you to come."
"I had not," said Olivia Aldridge, "the slightest intention of staying home."