Chapter 6
Late fall brought Lydia Marsh’s follow-up circuit west again, through a Kansas gone brown and hard.
The route covered six placements in four counties, and she took them in her usual order, thorough as winter.
A boy learning smithing in Salina, thriving.
Two sisters near Abilene, fat and squabbling and loved.
At each gate she felt the old tightness, and at each gate it loosened.
Eight years of vigilance had taught her that most doors, opened suddenly, held ordinary goodness behind them.
Cedar Bluffs came last on the circuit in the final week of November.
The town had shut itself against the cold. Smoke stood up straight from the chimneys, and ice skinned the water troughs by ten in the morning. She hired the same trap from the same stable, and the road southeast unrolled between shaved fields, under a sky the color of dishwater.
She was aware of being glad, and she examined the gladness as she drove.
Part of it was ordinary. The last call of a circuit was the turn toward home, whatever home was.
But part of it was particular. The faint coolness she had carried away from the Harmon parlor had ridden with her for six weeks, light as a burr.
Today she would be quit of it. She would find the girl fat and rosy, as Eber Harmon had promised.
The scar would be proved only a scar. She would board the eastbound with her mind swept clean.
The farm looked handsomer than ever under the gray light.
Sleek stock, tight fences, the wagon washed even now in mud season.
Nella Harmon opened the door before Lydia had finished knocking.
The trap had been seen from a distance, then.
Later, assembling it all, she would find that told her a good deal.
“Miss Marsh. What a thing, in this cold. Come in to the stove.”
The kitchen was warm as a Sunday. It smelled of bread and stove-black. Coffee appeared with cream in the good cups. Eber came in from the barn all courtesy, hand outstretched, weather remarked upon. The clock ticked in the spotless parlor. Everything in the house was exactly where it belonged.
Except that nothing in the house was a child.
Lydia had inspected homes for eleven years, and her eye ran its inventory before her mind gave it words.
No small coat on the pegs by the door. No boots in the boot row under the men’s.
No slate, no rag doll, no mending in a small size in the basket.
No third place worn into the table’s arrangement.
The house did not merely lack the sight of a girl this morning.
It lacked the sediment a girl leaves, and sediment was what she trusted.
“And where is Tilly?” she asked, warming her hands, keeping it light.
“Resting,” said Nella. “She is poorly today. The cold catches her chest, you know how she is. More coffee?”
“I will see her, please.”
“When she wakes, surely. She needs her sleep.”
“Mrs. Harmon.” Lydia set down the cup. “I have called at six homes this month. In every one, I saw the child within two minutes of my foot crossing the sill. That is the Society’s rule, and mine. I will see her now.”
A look went between the Harmons. It lasted no longer than the look at thin arms had lasted, six weeks ago, in a hotel parlor. Then Nella rose, smoothing her apron.
“Of course. This way. Mind, she has been ailing; I told you she was delicate. You told us yourself, for that matter.”
Out of the warm kitchen, the way led down a short hall, past the parlor Bible, to a door at the house’s north end. The ready room, the one with the east window and the washstand, they passed on the way. Its door stood open. It held apples now, spread on newspaper to keep, and a broken churn.
Nella opened the north door. Cold breathed out of it.
The room had no stove, and the chimney did not pass through it. One small window, glazed with frost on the inside. A narrow bed. On the bed, under one thin blanket, lay a shape so slight that for a heartbeat Lydia took it for wadded bedding.
Then the shape coughed.
The sound was nothing like October’s stove-smoke cough in the Grange Hall. This came from down in the chest, a raw, tearing bark, over and over, the body arching with it. Lydia crossed the room in three steps and knelt.
Tilly’s face was gray-white, dry, wrong.
Fever heat came off her like off a flatiron.
The braids Lydia had seen brushed and ribboned were undone to a dull mat.
Below the nightgown’s sleeve, the arm was thinner than it had been off the train in October.
It had been thin enough then to lose a placement.
Six weeks in a prosperous house, and the child weighed less.
She saw the room whole in that first moment, the way she saw everything, whether she chose to or not.
A stool with a mending basket on it, the only task light enough for fevered hands.
A cup of water on the floor, rimmed with ice.
No lamp. No picture. Nothing on the walls but frost, flowering silver-gray in the corners, beautiful the way cruel things sometimes insisted on being.
Six weeks. The girl had been sleeping under her inventory all along, one closed door past the parlor Bible.
“Tilly. It is Miss Marsh.”
The gray eyes opened, glassy with fever, and worked to find her. Finding her, they did something worse than weep. They apologized.
“I get up directly,” the girl whispered. “I don’t mean to be idle.”
“Hush now. You will lie still.” Lydia’s voice came out level, which astonished her, because inside her something had begun to roar. She took the small, hot hand. It lay in hers, light as kindling. She had held a hand like it before, on a wagon seat in the wheat, in another life.
She stood and turned.
The Harmons filled the doorway, side by side, respectable to the last button. Neither had entered the room. Habit, she understood. It was not a room they came into.
“How long has she been like this?”
“She has coughed since we had her.” Nella’s tone was the tone of ledgers. “You knew her chest when you brought her, Miss Marsh; let us be fair. She worsened these two weeks, with the cold snap.”
“Two weeks. What has the doctor said?”
Silence, one beat of it.
“We have doctored her here,” Nella said. “Onion syrup. Camphor when she frets. My mother raised eight on less.”
“You gave an undertaking, in writing, for a physician when the cough turned. There is a doctor in town, five miles. Two weeks, Mrs. Harmon.”
“Doctor Coates is a dollar the visit, winter roads.” Eber said it not angrily, but the way a man explains arithmetic to someone slow.
“Add his bottles on top. We have already fed the girl six weeks, ma’am, warmed her, clothed her.
She turned out sickly beyond what we were told.
She cannot yet so much as gather eggs without sitting down after.
We bargained on a girl who would grow into her keep.
Instead, the keep grows, and the girl does not. ”
He was not ashamed. That was the fact she took in slowly, standing between the freezing bed and the warm hall.
Neither of them was ashamed. They were explaining a disappointing purchase.
The room with the east window had been dressed for an inspection and returned to the apples when the inspection passed.
The undertakings had been signed the way one signs for freight, terms to recite, not to keep.
Somewhere in their private accounting stood an entry, girl, delicate, and against it a sum that had stopped being worth paying.
Not monsters. She would say it to herself many times that winter. Not monsters, nothing so grand. Misers of the heart, keeping a child the way you keep a poor investment, out of the weather and off the books.
And every word of it was Micah’s farm again.
The adequate paper. The acceptable answers.
A house in good repair, references like Sunday silver.
A child paying quietly, in a back room, the difference between promise and performance.
Eight years she had kept her vow, and the vow had guarded every door except this one.
Nothing stood wrong behind this door that a report could name.
She had signed past the coolness under her heart because it was faint.
After all, the evidence was fair. She had reasoned like an honest woman.
Her reasoning had been honest. The child weighed less.
Something in Lydia that had been burning low for eight years now caught the draft and stood up into flame. It did not feel like anger, or not only. It felt like obedience ending.
“You will hitch your wagon,” she said, “and fetch Dr. Coates. Now, this morning. I will sit with her until he comes.”
The Harmons looked at each other. Then came the shrug.
Eber’s shoulders gave it, barely, a small settling motion, but she read it fluently, for it was written in the only language the house spoke.
The shrug said: a dollar the visit. It said: winter roads.
It said, plain as the parlor clock, that no more good money would follow bad.
The entry was closed. Nobody sent for the doctor for a failing investment.
“We will think on it,” Eber said. “If she worsens.”
“She is burning now, sir.”
“Children run hot. She has run hot before and come through it. We are not made of dollars, Miss Marsh, whatever folk suppose.” He grew reasonable, expansive, a man being patient in his own hall.
“Come spring, she will pick up. You may put in your report that she is housed and fed, for she is. There is no law says we must ruin ourselves on physic.”
Lydia looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked down the hall, at the warm kitchen, at the parlor Bible on its stand.
She thought about the report she could write and everything it would set in motion.
The forms existed. She had taught them to younger agents.
Notice of concern, filed with the county committee.
Petition for removal, forwarded to New York.
Review, correspondence, a hearing when the roads allowed.
The Society’s wheels, which ground fine, but ground slow. Weeks, at the kindest counting.
Behind her in the cold room, the cough tore again. The small body arched under the thin blanket, steadied, breathed.
She had spooned water between the small, cracked lips an hour ago, a teaspoon at a time, while the frost flowers bloomed on the glass.
She had counted the breaths, untaught, the way mothers count them.
Even her counting knew the number was wrong.
There are sums a woman does without arithmetic.
The body does them, standing in a doorway, listening.
Weeks, at the kindest counting. She stood in the warm hall of that spotless house, doing at last the one sum the Harmons had taught her.
The Society had weeks. The child had days.