Chapter 6
Everett Shaw came calling on Sundays, and he came the way he did everything. On time, in good broadcloth, with his hat brushed and his intentions plain.
He had walked Ada home from church for a year now.
It was settled, part of the Sunday shape of Camden Bluff, like the bells and the dinner smells.
Folks nodded to the pair of them on the plank walk.
The mill-owner kept his measured stride, and the widow walked her two children in front where she could see them.
Nobody smirked, and nobody whispered. It was all as respectable as a deed of title.
This Sunday was fine and blue, with the river showing between the houses at every cross street. Cissy ran ahead gathering the last of somebody’s fence roses. Will walked exactly halfway between his mother and Mr. Shaw, which was his own kind of answer.
“The house finished painting Thursday,” Everett said. “The white with the green shutters, as you liked. I confess it sits there looking rather empty of purpose.”
“It’s a fine house, Everett.”
Cissy doubled back to present him a rose. He accepted it with the gravity of a man taking delivery of freight, and threaded it through his buttonhole. She skipped off satisfied. Will watched the whole transaction and offered no opinion.
“It is. Fine and foolish, a house that size with one middle-aged man rattling in it.” He said it without self-pity, a man stating a fact of inventory.
“There’s a room facing east gets the morning sun.
I had thought, if matters ever arranged themselves, it would do for a schoolroom.
Children ought to have somewhere warm for their lessons. ”
That was Everett’s way of courting. He never pressed and never flattered. He built the future in plain sight, room by room, and left the door of it standing open where she could see in.
Ada walked a while with her eyes on Cissy’s bobbing head.
He was a good man. She knew it the way she knew bread from stone.
Forty years old, a widower these ten years, childless.
The mill was his, the warehouse too, with half the freight on the landing moving to his ledger.
He could have courted anybody. Rich men’s daughters had been walked past him in Sunday dresses for a deMorritt.
Each time he had tipped his hat, then gone home alone to his accounts.
Instead, he sat every Sunday in her worn parlor over the eating-house drinking her coffee. He asked after her children’s lessons as if the answers mattered. They did matter to him. That was the factor about Everett Shaw a person could not get around.
He had buried a wife ten years back and never once spoken of it to Ada beyond the fact. But she had seen him stand a moment some Sundays, at the churchyard fence on the way past. A man who tended one grave faithfully would likely tend a family the same.
“You’re quiet,” he observed, mild.
“I’m adding up my blessings. It’s slow work. You keep bringing more figures.”
He laughed at that, a short, true laugh that made two passing deacons beam at them. Then he was grave again.
“I won’t press you, Ada. I said I’d wait and I’m a man of my word. But I’ll say the whole of it once more, so it’s said.” He stopped walking, and turned his hat brim once in his hands, like a boy half his size.
They walked a few steps in quiet. “I can give you a settled life. The children schooled and provided, the house warm, the winters certain. You’d never stand at that stove again unless it pleased you.
I know I’m not a young man’s romance. I’d not insult you by pretending it.
What I am is steady. I’d be good to you all my days, and I believe you know it. ”
“I do know it,” Ada said quietly.
Down the street the church bells left off. Somewhere a dinner bell took up instead. He waited without pressing, the way he waited on a slow shipment, sure it would come.
“Then that’s all my speech.” He set his hat back on. “The rest is yours, whenever you care to make it. There’s no hurry in me. Only hope.”
They walked on. Ahead of them Cissy had stopped at the eating-house porch, waving her roses like a signal flag. The ordinary noise of Sunday dinner came down the hill to meet them.
And Ada thought, not for the first time, that she would probably marry him.
She could find no reason on earth not to.
She was fond of him. Trust was there too, which was rarer.
And she was tired, the kind of tired three years of before-dawn stoves wears into the bones.
He was offering to take the heaviest of it off her back for good.
Every sensible part of her said yes to Everett Shaw.
The word was hers to say, and she could not think why she kept not saying it.
She served him Sunday dinner with the family, as was custom. Then the boats came up hungry from the landing, the way they did even on the Lord’s Day. The long room filled, and she went back to work with her sleeves rolled.
Everett stayed on through the afternoon, drinking coffee at the family table near the kitchen door, reading his newspaper like a man already halfway home.
Cissy commandeered his watch chain to admire, and he let her.
It was a comfortable picture. She noticed, in passing, how comfortable, and how little her heart rose or fell at the sight of it.
Bread from stone. She knew a good man. She only wished knowing were the same as wanting.
Across the room, at the corner table with its back to the wall, Louie Morritt sat over his coffee. There he learned what the whole town already knew.
He had not meant to learn anything. He had come up the hill because it was Sunday, and his room at Mrs. Hale’s was small, and the eating-house was the one place in Camden Bluff where being alone felt like company.
Two weeks he had been coming up that hill.
He knew the smell of the place now the way he knew boats, could tell from the porch whether the pie was apple or peach.
Then the mill-owner had come in with the family from church and sat down at the family table. One look, and Louie understood what he was seeing.
It was in the way the man hung his hat on the peg by the kitchen door without looking.
That peg was plainly his. It was in the way the neighbors nodded at him sitting there, unsurprised.
Most of all it was in the way the widow poured his coffee first, thinking nothing of it.
Theirs was the easy, worn-in courtesy of two people the town had already married in its mind.
Something in Louie’s chest went cold, and began, very quietly, to tick.
He made himself study the man, fair and square.
Forty or thereabouts, solid, well kept, gray coming at the temples like frost on good timber.
Prosperous, that was plain, but not soft with it.
He had the hands of a man who had stacked his own lumber in his day.
When Cissy commandeered his newspaper to make a hat, he folded it for her along the proper lines, patient as a Sunday afternoon.
A decent man. Louie had drifted through enough towns to know the breed at sight, and the knowing made the coldness in his chest no better at all.
He had learned men the way he had learned water, by watching what they did when nothing pressed them.
This one stood when the widow came near and did not know he did it.
This one had courted a year without once pushing.
Decency, patience, means. A woman could go the length of the river and not do better.
He caught himself sizing the man up like a rival, and was ashamed.
Rival. There was a word with no sense in it. A boatman two weeks off the river, rival to the mill-owner of Camden Bluff. And over a widow whose given name he had learned from a landlady. He had spoken perhaps forty words to Ada Baldwin in his life, and most of those were thank you, ma’am.
Bending his eyes to his cup, he told himself the plain truth, the way he had told it on a hundred landings.
He was a passing man. Passing men had no stake in the towns they passed. The widow’s courting was her own concern, the town’s, the mill-owner’s. It was no more Louie Morritt’s business than the price of Sunday hats.
The truth sat in him about as well as a swallowed hook.
He watched her cross the room with the coffee pot, laughing at a remark by a deckhand’s wife.
Around the eyes she was tired in a way the laugh did not cover.
He watched the mill-owner watch her too, with a settled, patient wanting that any man could read.
And the cold ticking in his chest wound itself tighter, counting off something he could not name. Days, maybe. It felt like days.
There was no reason on God’s green earth for it to feel like days.
He had come to this town for one purpose, and it was not this.
Somewhere out in the county, or down the next reach of the river, there was a woman who had been a girl called Nora.
Twenty years he had carried her name. That was his business in Camden Bluff, his only business.
When it was finished, however it finished, the river would take him on the way it always had.
The widow Baldwin would marry her mill-owner. The town would eat the wedding supper, likely in this very room. It was a good ending to a hard story, and none of his.
Louie paid for his coffee and let himself out into the Sunday afternoon.
The light off the river was long and gold, the way it had been the evening he landed. All around him the town lay settled and sure of itself, every soul in it belonging to every other.
Down the hill, tied along the levee, a Sunday-idle packet sat getting up steam for the morning run south.
Her stage was down, her firebox glowing against the dusk.
Her class he knew, her draft, near enough her cargo.
He could have walked aboard in the dark without stubbing a toe, and been in Boonville by dinner.
For a moment he stood looking at her the way a man looks at an open gate.
He could be aboard at first light. Ask his questions in the next town, and the next, the way he always had. Leave Camden Bluff to its weddings.
Instead, his feet turned up Front Street toward Mrs. Hale’s, past the white house with the new green shutters, and the cold clock in his chest ticked all the way home.
No concern of his. He said it to the dark that night, more than once, lying on a rented bed listening for the river.
Any man alive can tell when he is lying. It was a long while before Louie Morritt got to sleep.