Chapter 16
By midsummer, the talk of the county had changed its subject, and did not know what to do with itself.
The story everyone owned by heart had gone stale.
In the old story, a scheming Society woman stole a dying child from respectable people.
Then she went to ground with the man who let his wife die.
It was a good story, as such stories go.
Villains stood in convenient places. It had lasted comfortably through Christmas.
Trouble was, the evidence insisted on riding to church.
Every other Sunday through that summer, weather allowing, the Hartley wagon came down Main Street with the three of them aboard.
And between the tall, silent man and the straight-backed woman sat the exhibit itself.
The gray scrap carried through town in December, the one whole kitchens had agreed was as good as buried, sat up rosy and quick.
Clean calico, ribbons woven into fair braids, waving at horses she knew.
Nothing argues with a county like a thriving child.
Sermons can be doubted, doctors disputed.
There is no answering a six-year-old with color in her cheeks who has lately learned to laugh out loud.
The town looked at Tilly Hartley across the pews, Sunday upon Sunday, and did its sums over.
Unwillingly, the way people do when the ground moves under a story they were fond of.
The revising was awkward to watch, and Lydia watched all of it.
It began with the women. A farm wife who had whispered with the loudest that first Sunday stopped their wagon in July.
She stood twisting her basket handle and delivered a speech.
The child had filled out wonderful, just wonderful.
Here was a jar of her gooseberry preserve, the girl being partial to sweets, no doubt.
Others followed by ones and twos. They praised the child to Lydia the way people lay kindling, carefully, hoping warmth might catch over old ashes.
Some managed, with faces that cost them something, to say a good morning to Abel straight, and to use his name.
That same month, the minister preached on the mote and the beam.
Then, in case any sleeper had missed it, on bearing false witness.
He preached it to the middle distance, naming no one.
The congregation studied its hymnals. Half of Cedar Bluffs squirmed in its own pews that morning.
The Harmons’ pew, Lydia noticed, stood empty, as it had since June.
The mercantile began holding the good thread for her.
The blacksmith, shoeing their team in July, refused payment for a cracked shoe he called a courtesy, and grew red about the ears doing it.
Small coin, all of it, offered sideways, the way a proud town pays its debts.
Lydia banked every piece with a fair face and kept her own counsel about the interest owing.
She found she took no pleasure in the squirming.
That was a discovery. There had been a version of her in the winter that had wanted the town brought to account, name by name.
Watching it actually happen, awkward, basket-twisting, sideways, she found she mostly wanted it over with.
Her one reason walked beside her every Sunday with his hat brim level.
Tilly received the county’s attentions with the wariness of a child who had been public property before.
Praise from strange women was inspected first, like a coin bitten.
But the gooseberry preserve was another matter, and by August she had decided, provisionally, that Cedar Bluffs could stay.
She said so from the wagon seat, in the manner of a magistrate granting a stay.
Her parents kept their faces straight the seven miles home.
Abel bore the county’s repentance exactly as he had borne its verdict. Silently.
But there was one sight that summer she knew she would keep, the way she kept certain pages.
A Saturday in town, the street busy, and Abel crossing it from the mercantile with Tilly riding his shoulders.
Her hands were buried in his hair, the pair entirely occupied with some private nonsense about the hotel’s weathervane.
He walked the whole gauntlet of Main Street that way.
Head up. Stride even. A man was carrying his daughter through the middle of the town that had called him wife-killer for two years.
Never once did he glance aside to see who watched.
Everyone watched. That was the point, though he would never have said so, and likely never thought it.
Lydia, from the wagon, understood what the sight was doing, quietly, at the pace of groundwater.
Stories die hard in a county. But a lie about a cold man cannot survive unlimited public exposure to the original, aloft and laughing, forever asking its opinion of weathervanes.
Every step of that street was costing the old story blood.
Marion’s aunt passed them on the boardwalk that same Saturday, stiff in her summer black.
She did not speak. But she looked long at the child on the man’s shoulders.
Something in the old face worked, could not finish its arithmetic, and looked away.
Even grief’s masonry, Lydia thought, watching her go. Even that, given enough Sundays.
So the summer ripened, and the county turned over its verdict. In the joy of all that thriving, the Hartleys of the north road made one mistake. It was the mistake happy households always make, having no talent for the other kind of arithmetic.
They forgot that word travels everywhere. Not just along Main Street, through the pews, down the pleasant roads where women set kindling. Everywhere. Word does not choose its kitchens.
Twelve miles southeast, at the end of a lane scrubbed bare of weeds, the Harmon farm sat in its perfect fences.
Word arrived there too, that summer, by all its usual carriers.
A hired man, back from town with the seed order and the gossip.
A cousin after church. A neighbor woman at the fence line, retelling the minister’s sermon with relish, watching Nella’s face while she did it.
The news landed in that spotless kitchen as it landed everywhere. The girl is thriving. There it underwent a change of state, the way water changes in a cold room.
Everywhere else in the county, the sentence meant gladness, shame, or wonder.
At the Harmon table, it arrived as data.
The sickly bargain, written off at a dead loss, whose dying was to have been the family’s public vindication, had failed to die.
Worse, the entry had reversed itself entire.
Strong, they said now. Rosy. Quick. Helping with the hens, minding a garden, growing like June.
Eight years old come winter, nine behind that.
Every particular that traveled up the lane was another figure in a column.
The column, which had once summed to a bad investment, had begun, impossibly, to sum to a good one.
It was accruing in another family’s yard.
Eber heard it all and said little, which was his way with appreciating assets.
It was Nella who went, one evening in August, to the parlor desk where the Bible sat on its stand.
She opened the shallow drawer beneath. The paper lay where it had lain since October, folded in three, creased sharp.
Placement of a female child, aged six years.
She unfolded it under the lamp and read it through, entire, for the first time since the signing.
Hers was not the reading of a sentimental woman.
The Society’s printed terms marched down the page.
Undertakings, duties, clauses. But what Nella Harmon read in the lamplight in her tidy parlor was simpler than any of that.
Two names at the bottom, hers and Eber’s.
A third, the agent’s, in a small even hand.
Signatures, witnessed, dated. A contract, executed, never rescinded by any court or committee on earth.
“The woman was dismissed,” she said to Eber, who had come to the parlor door.
“Dismissed the same week. Whatever she did after, she did as nobody. You cannot void a signed instrument by stealing what it covers.” She folded the paper back along its creases, exact as hemming.
“The girl was signed to us. In law, she is ours this minute, wherever she happens to be getting fed.”
Eber came in and took the paper, turning it over in his broad hands. For a while, the clock did the only talking. He was a slower reckoner than his wife, but he arrived at the same country by his own roads. He was thinking, in his way, of several ledgers at once.
A girl coming eight, nine, ten, the years when a girl began to earn her keep in a farm kitchen, and earn it well.
The wages a hired girl would cost instead, year on year.
And another column, older, that he would not have named aloud even to Nella.
The feed store, the sewing circle, the empty pew.
A whole county had watched the Harmons be shamed by a byword woman.
Now it watched that woman’s stolen girl bloom like a reproach twelve miles up the road.
The parlor clock ticked on through his figuring, and Nella waited. She had learned her husband’s arithmetic in twenty-six years of marriage. It wanted no hurrying. It came out where it came out, and where it came out, this evening, was where she had already been standing for some weeks.
“Folk would talk,” he said at last, testing it.
“Folk talk now.” Nella took the paper back and returned it to its drawer, beneath the Bible, where the family kept its instruments of weight.
“There is a difference between talk and law, Mr. Harmon. Talk burned us all winter, and we bore it, having nothing in hand. But no dismissed woman’s theft has ever yet voided a contract.
What is signed is signed.” She shut the drawer with a small conclusive sound, wood on wax.
“We shall want advice on the manner of it. Done properly. Through the county.”
“After harvest,” said Eber, whose seasons ordered everything.
“After harvest,” Nella agreed.
And that was the whole of the scene, in that parlor, that August evening. No oath was sworn, no fist came down. Two respectable people, churchgoing, tight-mouthed, discussed a matter of property in measured voices under a lamp. They agreed on the season for it and went to their supper.
Harvest stood six weeks off, gold already climbing the wheat. A county’s whole year bent toward it, sermons, prices, weddings, lawsuits, everything waiting on the grain. It was the season when nothing was begun in Kansas, and everything was decided.
Twelve miles northwest, the household in question sat late on its porch in the warm dark, unknowing.
The corn stood high and whispering clear to the creek.
Tilly, permitted an extra half hour for the sweetness of the evening, leaned in the crook of Abel’s arm, naming stars wrong with great confidence.
Lydia sat close on the other side, correcting nobody.
The paper lay quiet in its drawer, under the Bible, folded in three.
Word travels everywhere. It had carried the girl’s blooming out to every kitchen in the county.
In the one kitchen where blooming was bookkeeping, the books had been reopened.
The wheels that would carry the Harmons back up the north road come fall had already begun to turn.
Such wheels always do, quietly, in their season.