Chapter 5
The Harmons came forward on Thursday, with the train due out at the week’s end.
Word had traveled, as word does in a county.
The Society woman at the hotel still had a girl unplaced, a little one, delicate.
On Thursday morning, a spring wagon drew up outside, washed so clean it shamed the street.
The couple who climbed down from it might have stepped out of an advertisement for prosperity.
Eber Harmon was forty-nine or fifty, broad, solid, freshly barbered, in a coat that fit him.
His wife, Nella, was a few years younger, straight-backed in gray poplin, her bonnet strings pressed flat.
Between them, they carried the unmistakable air of people whose accounts balanced, whose pew was paid for, whose fences did not lean.
“We heard there is a child in need of a Christian home,” Eber said, hat correctly in hand. “We have come to offer one.”
Lydia gave them the standard beginning, then a good deal more than the standard.
She had four days, and she used every one of them.
The rulebook asked for papers, references, the word of a minister.
The Harmons produced all three the same afternoon, complete, unhurried, faintly amused at the thoroughness.
A quarter section paid off entire. Accounts at both mercantiles, settled monthly.
A letter from their minister describing them as pillars, which was the word ministers used when a family’s tithe arrived on time.
Her vow asked for more than the rulebook, so she took more.
On Friday, she hired a trap and drove out to the Harmon farm unannounced, which was her oldest trick.
Unannounced kitchens told the truth. This kitchen was scrubbed to the grain of the boards.
The parlor held a Bible on a stand, doilies squared to the table edges, a clock ticking like a well-mannered heart.
In the yard, fat hens. In the barn, sleek stock.
Not one thing leaned, rusted, or wanted paint.
She walked the upstairs uninvited, over Nella’s small frown. A bedroom stood ready for the child, a real bed, a washstand, a window facing east. It smelled of soap. It looked, she thought later, exactly the way a room looks when it has been prepared as evidence.
But that thought came later, and honesty made her date it so. On the Friday, she wrote in her notebook: room adequate, clean, furnished.
She questioned the minister on Saturday, alone in his study.
“Have you ever known the Harmons to be unkind? To a hired hand, a beast, anyone?”
“Unkind?” He turned the word over as though she had asked it in Latin. “They are careful people, Miss Marsh. Close, some might say. Eber will follow a nickel a long way. But their name is good. There is no charity subscription in this county without it near the top.”
“Do they love children, sir? It is not the same question as the subscription list.”
The minister smiled at that, a little uneasily. “They have none of their own. Nella has mentioned the want of a daughter to my wife more than once. What passes in a heart, Miss Marsh, I cannot audit. I can tell you no one in Cedar Bluffs will speak a word against them.”
No one would. She tried several. The storekeeper called Eber slow to spend but square. Neighbor women called Nella a wonder of housekeeping. The bank, discreetly consulted, all but bowed at the name.
On the Sunday, she pressed Nella Harmon herself, in the hotel parlor, as hard as she had ever pressed a woman across a table.
“The girl is delicate, Mrs. Harmon. I want that spoken plainly between us. Her chest is weak from bad years. She will need feeding up, warm rooms, a doctor when the cough turns. She will be an expense for a year or more before she is anything else. Some households find that a disappointment. I have seen it curdle.”
“We are not a poor family, Miss Marsh.” Nella’s voice was even, unoffended, exact. “The girl will have what she requires. Food, warmth, doctoring as needed. We do not do things by halves.”
“Why do you want her? There are stronger children on other trains.”
“It is a Christian duty to take in the orphan.” The answer came smooth as a hem. “And a house wants a daughter in it. Mine has stood too quiet too long.”
Every word was correct. That was the whole of the trouble.
Lydia sat across from this composed, scrubbed, churchgoing woman and hunted her as she had hunted applicants for eight years.
She waited for the false note. A flint eye.
A word like use, or need, or worth. It never came.
Nella Harmon said daughter, duty, warmth, in the right order, at the right pitch.
And once, only once, her gaze went to Tilly, who sat small by the window with her hands folded.
It rested on the child’s thin arms a moment.
Something moved behind it, quick and measuring.
It was the look a farm woman gives a weanling in a poor spring, reckoning what feed will make of it by fall.
Then the look was gone, folded away under the bonnet, and Nella was asking about the girl’s schooling.
Lydia turned that half second over for the rest of the day.
Turned it in the light, honestly, the way her vow required.
What had she actually seen? A glance at thin arms. Any farm wife alive assessed a child’s condition on sight, the way a sailor reads the sky.
Concern looked like measuring. Measuring looked like concern.
There was not one word of it she could write in a report.
Her whole hard reputation was built on refusing to invent what was not there.
Micah’s farmer had made her skin crawl in the first minute.
He had said "need," said "use," looked at shoulders.
Beside that memory, the Harmons shone like Sunday silver.
If she refused this placement on this evidence, she was not keeping her vow.
She was becoming a woman who could place no child anywhere, because once, eight years ago, the worst had happened.
The scar was not an instrument. Scars ached in all weathers. That was what made them scars.
So she reasoned, alone, on the Sunday night. The reasoning was honest, and every step of it was wrong.
On the Sunday evening, she brushed Tilly’s hair out by the hotel lamp, a hundred strokes. She had done it for a thousand children on a hundred trains. The girl sat still as a small post under it, watching their two reflections in the dark window.
“Is it the clean house I am going to?” Tilly asked at last.
“It is. The cleanest house in the county, I should think.”
The child took this in with her usual gravity. “I can sweep,” she offered. “I know how to be no trouble.”
“You are not going there to be no trouble.” Lydia set down the brush. “You are going there to be a daughter. There is a difference, and you are to learn it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tilly, in the voice that meant she was filing the words away with all the others, to be believed later, if the evidence allowed.
The signing was Monday morning, in the hotel parlor, with the train leaving at noon.
Tilly wore her best dress, with her hair brushed and braided, standing while Lydia made the introductions.
The girl looked a long moment at Nella Harmon, then at Eber, with those grave gray eyes that gave away nothing.
Whatever she concluded, she folded it away in that place where such children keep their conclusions.
“You will have your own room,” Nella told her. “A girl keeps it tidy in my house.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tilly.
“And you will call me Mother in time. There is no hurry about it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tilly.
The papers lay on the parlor table, filled out in Lydia’s careful script.
Placement of a female child, aged six years.
Undertakings as to food, clothing, schooling, church, doctoring, kind usage.
The Society’s printed terms, which she had enforced in eight states, marched down the page in their small certain type.
Eber Harmon signed without reading past the third line, the signature of a man who signed papers confidently.
Nella signed below him, neat as embroidery.
Last of all, the pen came to Lydia, as it always did.
And there, with the nib an inch off the paper, the unease rose in her one final time.
Not a whisper, nothing so clear as the whisper had been at a church hall table eight years ago.
This was fainter, a coolness under the heart, the sensation of a door somewhere far back in the house standing open that should be shut.
She set the pen down. She made herself inventory it, item by item, while the Harmons watched politely.
The house: sound. Room: ready. References: perfect.
Minister, neighbors, bank: all one voice.
The questioning: met without a crack. Against all that, one half-second glance at thin arms, and an ache in an old scar.
She had promised herself never to sign past a warning in her gut.
Was this her gut warning? Or was it only grief wearing her gut like a coat?
It is the scar aching, she decided. Micah, not Tilly. It aches in all weathers now.
She picked the pen back up and signed.
Tilly went to them quietly. At the door of the hotel, the girl looked back once, not pleading, not tearful, only recording, the way she recorded everything. Then Nella’s gloved hand settled on her shoulder and gently steered her toward the shining wagon.
“You will have my follow-up call before winter closes,” Lydia told them from the step. “The Society keeps watch over its children, Mr. Harmon. I say that to every family.”
“A welcome thing,” said Eber comfortably. “You will find her fat and rosy, ma’am.”
The wagon rolled off up the street, washed and prosperous, the small fair head very still between the two straight backs. Lydia watched it out of sight. Then she went upstairs, packed her valise, and walked to the depot in the clear October noon.
Her train came in on time. From her window, Cedar Bluffs slid away.
The courthouse, the church, the Grange Hall where a tall man had turned his hat brim around and around.
Somewhere north of town, a wagon was carrying a girl toward a scrubbed house with a ready room.
Somewhere seven miles out, another house stood with room in it, and nothing to fill the room.
Lydia opened her ledger on her knees and entered the placement. Female child, aged six, to Eber and Nella Harmon, Cedar Bluffs. Household inspected. References complete. An excellent placement by every measure the Society possessed.
She read the entry over, and the coolness under her heart touched her once more, lightly, like a hand she chose not to take.
The train gathered speed into the east. The wheat country poured past the glass, stubble-gold now, waiting for winter.
She had stood in it a week, weighed two homes for one small girl, and ruled by the book both times.
Wagons rolled away from her in two directions across Kansas, and she rode east between them, her papers in perfect order.
In the space of five days, without once breaking a rule, she had committed both of the mistakes that would remake her life.
She had refused the right man. Now she had signed the child into the wrong home.