Chapter 13
Everett Shaw pressed his suit on the last Sunday of August, in the parlor over the eating-house, with the coffee going cold between them.
He did it the way he did everything, plainly, kindly, with his cards face up on the table. He had waited until the children were out on the porch. Then he set down his cup, turned his hat brim once in his hands, and asked her to name a day.
“I said I’d not hurry you, Ada, and I’ve kept to it.
A year, I’ve kept to it.” His voice stayed level, but she could hear the work in it.
“I’m not pressing now because my patience is spent.
I’m pressing because fall’s coming, with winter behind it.
I find I can’t face another winter of hoping.
A man wants to know what he’s building for. ”
“Everett...”
“Let me say the whole of it, and then it’s said.
” He looked at her, steady. “You know what I offer. The house is ready. The children would be schooled and provided for. You’d never stand at a stove again except for pleasure.
I’d be a true husband to you, a careful father to Will and Cissy, all my days.
There’s not a soul in this town that wouldn’t dance at the wedding. ”
“I know it,” Ada said quietly. “Every word.”
And she did. That was the whole trouble with Everett Shaw. A woman could not even comfort herself that he was overselling, for he never oversold anything, not flour, not freight, not himself. The offer stood in the room like the house it described, square, warm, and finished.
“Then I’ll ask you plain. Name a day. Any day you like, any season.
Only give me a day, so I can stop living on hope and start living on a calendar.
” He paused, and a look almost like humor crossed his grave face.
“I’m asking you to be sensible, Ada. It’s the thing you do best. I’m only asking you to do it in my direction. ”
The clock on the mantel ticked. Out on the porch, Cissy was teaching Louisa the doll to count, loudly, getting most of the numbers wrong.
“Give me to the end of September,” Ada heard herself say. “You’ll have your answer by then, Everett. A true one, whichever it is. I promise you that.”
He studied her a long moment. He was not a stupid man, and she watched him decide not to ask the question that stood behind his eyes.
“The end of September,” he agreed, rising, taking up his hat. “That’s fair dealing. It always is, with you.”
At the door he paused.
“Whatever the answer,” he said, not turning around, “I’d have it be yours, Ada. Not the town’s, not your mother-in-law’s. Yours.” Then he was gone down the stairs. She listened to his good boots cross her clean floor, and heard the door close soft behind him.
Ada carried the coffee cups to the basin and stood over them a while. Down on the porch, Cissy had reached eleventy-six. The numbers past a hundred were her own invention, said with perfect confidence, and Ada envied her daughter with her whole heart.
Verena Baldwin came on Thursday.
She came as she always came, upright in her good black.
In her bag were peppermints for the children, with a week of gathered judgments to distribute.
She was sixty years old, sharp-eyed, soft-handed.
In one deMorritt she had buried a husband and a son, without once letting the town see her stagger.
Ada had feared her once. That had worn, over the years, into something more like respect with an edge on it.
Cissy got a peppermint, a kiss, and an inspection of her hem. Will got two peppermints, being older, and looked at his grandmother with his father’s eyes until she had to turn to the window. Then the children were sent out. Verena settled herself at the family table, and came to it.
“The whole town says Everett Shaw asked you to name a day.”
“The whole town is well informed, as ever.”
“Don’t be pert, Ada, I’ve come in kindness.” Verena smoothed her black skirts. “He’s a good man. Solid as oak. My son, God keep him, would have liked him, and would have wanted his children provided the way that man can provide.”
“I know what Everett is, Mother Baldwin.”
“My son thought the world of you,” Verena said, looking at her hands. “I’ll say that whenever it wants saying. You made him happier than his own mother ever managed to. It’s for his sake I speak at all.”
“I know that too.”
“Then it’s the other one I’ve come about.”
The room went very quiet. Ada put down the mending she had picked up for her hands’ sake.
“The boatman,” Verena said. Not unkindly.
That was the hard part, Ada thought. None of them ever said it unkindly.
“I’ve eyes, child, and so has the town. He’s at your table every night of the world.
He’s mended half your property. My grandson follows him like a gosling, and my granddaughter has told the whole of her Sunday school class about her particular friend. ”
“He’s been good to us. To the children.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Verena folded her hands. “Now I’ll say what I came to say, and you’ll hear it. There’s nobody else left alive with the right to say it to you.”
She counted the questions off, soft, on her gloved fingers. “What is he, Ada? I don’t ask his manners, I can see those. I ask what he is. Where are his people? Where is his land? What name does he carry, and where did he get it?”
“A woman can answer those three questions of every man in this county. Answer them of the boatman.”
Ada said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had asked the same questions of the dark, more nights than one.
“You can’t,” Verena said, gently. “Nobody can. A man with no people is a man the wind can take, and the wind always comes. I’m not saying he’s wicked.
I’m saying he’s weightless, and you have children.
You’re not a girl choosing for her own heart.
You’re a mother choosing ground for two little ones to stand on, and my son’s little ones at that.
” Her voice caught, only slightly, and was mastered at once.
“Think of the children. That’s all. Whatever else you weigh, weigh them heaviest.”
She gathered her bag then, kissed Ada’s cheek with dry lips, and went out through the eating-house. On the way she paused to straighten a bench that did not need it.
From the window Ada watched the straight black figure go up the street, nodding to this one, judging that one, upright as a chimney. Sixty years old, and never once anybody’s fool. That was what made it hard.
And the terrible thing, Ada thought, standing alone in her kitchen, was that every word of it was true.
Every word. That was what there was no arguing with.
Everett was good, the house was ready, the town approved, the children would be safe.
The boatman was a man with no answers to the three questions, a man the wind could take.
Verena was not wrong. Everett was not wrong.
The neighbor women with their counting fingers were not wrong.
The whole world stood on one side of the scale, sensible, unanimous, kind.
On the other side stood one quiet man with warm eyes. By any measure the world knew how to make, he had no weight to him at all.
She had always been able to find the sensible answer. It was her one gift, the thing three hard years had honed sharp. Give her a doubtful account, a short harvest, a leaking roof, a bereaved boy. She would find the answer a person could stand on, then stand on it.
She hunted that answer now, all the rest of that week, and could not find it anywhere.
It should have been simple. It had been simple in June.
Marry Everett, said sense in June, in July, in every month of her widowhood.
The words had not changed. Only some hand had quietly unmade the certainty behind them, evening by evening, plate by plate, story by story.
She could not name the day it had happened, any more than you can name the day a rope frays through.
At night it was worst.
She lay awake in the hot dark, weighing, the way Verena had told her to weigh. Security for her children, a lifetime of it, certain as a deed. Against what? A feeling. A snag. One voice she could pick out of forty. And a man about whom she knew, when she counted it honestly, almost nothing at all.
Put so, it was no contest. It shamed her that it felt like one.
Twice, she got up and stood at the window. The lamp at Mrs. Hale’s burned late both nights, the way it always burned. Whatever he waited up for, he was still waiting, three streets off, under the same dark. She went back to bed no more sensible than she had risen.
She despised herself a little, lying there.
A grown woman, a mother, hesitating over so plain a choice, like a girl mooning at a fence.
If a neighbor had brought her this account, two columns, everything in one column, the answer would have been out before the coffee cooled.
She knew what was sensible. She had promised Everett a true answer by the end of September, and there were only sensible answers to give.
In the dark, without meaning to, she reached for the old story.
She had done it all her life, though she had never once put words to the habit.
On the bad nights, the fevered nights, the nights after Henry died, she had told it to herself the way other women told prayers.
The two children. The little blue boat. And the long river, with the place at the end of it where nobody is ever sent away.
It had never once failed to quiet her, in twenty years of bad nights.
It failed her now.
She lay in the dark and told it. The words came up strange, like furniture moved in the night.
Tonight, the two children would not stay strangers.
The boat would not stay a dream. Every bend of the river seemed to ask her something, then stop, then wait, the way his voice stopped at the good part.
She got as far as the firefly meadow and found she was crying, quietly, without any notion in the world why.
The story had always been her comfort. Somewhere in this long summer it had turned into a question instead. It lay there in the dark beside her, patient as the river, waiting to be answered.
Who told you? she asked it, silently, for the first time in her life.
The story said what it always said. Nothing. It only ran on ahead of her in the dark, round one more bend, the way it had run for twenty years. Somewhere ahead was an ending somebody else was keeping.