Chapter 20
The strangest week of Ada Baldwin’s life was the one after the miracle, when the miracle itself turned and became the obstacle.
She had not thought such a thing possible. She would have said, that first golden morning, that the hard part was behind them. The truth was out. The name was given back. What remained but to be glad?
What remained, it turned out, was everything.
He still came for supper. Everything was different, and nothing was.
He sat at the corner table because the family table, now, meant more than either of them could carry in front of the town.
They spoke of small things, carefully, like two people picking their way across new ice.
Twenty years ago they had talked all night, easy as breathing.
It was the talk of last Tuesday that kept failing.
One evening she set his plate down, and their hands touched.
Both of them said beg pardon, like strangers on a boat stage.
She went back to her kitchen and stood over the beans, furious at nobody.
Six years old, she had slept on this man’s shoulder.
Twenty-six, and she could not manage her own hands within a yard of him.
The children felt the strangeness without understanding it.
Cissy, who understood more than anybody allowed, took to sitting halfway between the corner table and the kitchen, like a small ferryman waiting on passengers.
Will watched the two of them the way he watched the river, reading water he did not like.
For she would look at him over the coffee pot and lose her footing between two men.
There was Toby, the boy of the bread, the coat, the story, whom she had loved with the whole undivided heart of a six-year-old.
And there was Louie Morritt, a quiet, weathered, grown stranger about whom she knew four months of suppers.
The boy she knew to the bone, and he was gone, twenty years gone. He had been worn away and made over into this man, the way a boy’s face is worn away inside a man’s. The man she hardly knew at all.
Which of them did she love? For she did love, that lay beyond arguing now. But a woman who could not say whether she loved a memory or a man had no business tearing up two children’s lives over it.
The fear grew in her all week, quiet and reasonable.
Perhaps what had knocked her flat that morning in the kitchen was only the past, dressed up in a grown man’s coat.
Perhaps if she reached for it, it would come apart in her hands like something long drowned.
Then she would have spent her children’s safety on a ghost.
She was not the only one afraid. She could see it in him, plain as weather.
He was gentler with her now, and further off, both at once. That very gentleness frightened her worst of all, for she recognized it. It was the care of a man handling something he expects to be taken from him.
They had the story now, and could not seem to find the life. That was the miracle’s trick. It had given them back everything except a plain road forward.
Down at Mrs. Hale’s, in the lamplit nights, Louie was fighting the oldest current he knew.
Finding her had been the whole purpose of his life, and the purpose was accomplished.
Never once, in twenty years of imagining, had he thought past the finding.
Now here he stood, past it. The search was over.
What came next had a name, and the name was staying.
Staying was the one water he had never learned to swim.
He caught himself, that week, doing the things a leaving man does. He found his bag half packed one evening with no memory of packing it. Twice, his feet carried him to the wharf boat to read the sailing lists, casual, the way another man might glance at a pretty face.
There was a berth going on an upbound boat, good wages, a mate’s berth even.
He stood looking at the notice a long while, hating himself the whole time.
The clerk at the wharf boat, who missed little, offered twice to put his name down.
Twice, Louie heard himself say not today.
The clerk looked at him the way rivermen look at a boat aground in plain daylight, with pity, and a certain professional interest.
It was not that he wanted to leave her. Wanting had nothing to do with it. Leaving was simply what his hands knew, the way they knew splices. Every place that had ever held him had ended, and every ending had hurt less when his bag was already by the door.
Roots, in Louie’s life, had only ever been the thing you were torn up by. A man could get to forty without one, provided he never stopped moving. Here was Camden Bluff asking him to stop, stand still, plant. Then he must wait to see whether this town too, in the end, would send him away.
And it might. That was the cold heart of the fear. She had not chosen him.
She had wept on his coat and said his name, his true name.
It had been the finest hour of his life.
But weeping is not choosing. There was a good man in a fine house four streets over, with an offer still standing.
That offer had land under it, a name on it, winters of certainty in it.
Everything Louie Morritt had to set against it fit in one canvas bag.
If she was sensible, and no woman he knew was more so, she would thank the boy from the train with her whole heart. She would cherish the story, and marry the mill-owner. That was what he would advise her himself, if she were somebody else’s Nora.
He fell asleep over these thoughts night after night. Each morning he got up, and did not take the berth. It was the hardest thing he had ever done, doing nothing. Waiting was his one gift. He spent the whole of that week finding out how much heavier waiting weighs when the answer matters.
He mended his way through those days the way other men drink.
Mrs. Hale’s gate stopped sagging. The wharf boat got a new fender nobody had asked for.
Ada’s dock grew a neat handrail at its outer end.
If Camden Bluff had held still long enough, he would have shingled every roof in it, to keep from thinking.
On the first Sunday of October, Everett Shaw called at the eating-house after church, correct as ever, kind as ever, knowing nothing.
Ada’s letter had bought a week, and he had granted it without one question, which was Everett all over. Now he sat in the parlor, hat on his knee, not pressing, and pressed by not pressing.
“I’ll not ask what arose,” he said. “It’s not my affair unless you make it so.
I’ll only say what I came to say. The offer stands.
It will go on standing. Nothing has arisen on my side, nor will.
The house is warm, the schoolroom’s painted, my regard is what it was last month and last year.
Whenever you’re ready to be sensible, Ada, I’m ready to be sent for. ”
Even now, there was no meanness in him to catch hold of and resent. He asked after Will’s lessons. He compared the price of winter flour with her, soberly, usefully. At the proper time he rose, bowed over her hand, and left her standing in a parlor that felt twice as quiet, half as certain.
“You look worn, Ada,” he had said at the door, with only kindness in it. “Whatever it is, don’t carry it alone longer than you must.” Then the door had closed on the one man in Missouri she could not tell.
Because it had never once looked more sensible, his offer, than it looked that Sunday.
The week had worn her thin as a scraped hide. She was tired in a way sleep did not reach. Tired of weighing. Tired of standing in her own kitchen between a memory and a man, between a ghost, a house. Verena’s three questions ticked in her like a clock.
People, land, name. Everett had all three. Toby, Louie, whoever God finally meant him to be, had none of the three. Loving him, if this drowning feeling was love, changed not one word of that.
And the children. Always, at the end of every circle her mind ran, the children.
All Sunday evening the house was very quiet. Will read. Cissy dressed Louisa for winter. Twice, Ada opened the account book, looked at it, closed it again. Sense would not come on its own, so at last she went hunting it the old way, with cold reasons, counted on fingers.
At the little window she stood a long time, making herself think it through once more, the way she balanced the year’s books.
Suppose she reached past the safe road for the boatman, and someday his nature won out. When the river took him back, it would not be her heart alone on that boat.
It would be Will’s, who had given his trust twice now in a young life that had no business needing to give it twice.
It would be Cissy’s, whole and unguarded.
Her children were rich in nothing but safety.
She had made that safety with ten years of her hands.
What kind of mother bet it on a man that every fact, every letter, every gray head in the county said would not stay?
A tired mind is a downhill road, and by full dark hers had run all the way to the bottom of it.
Send him downriver. The thought came gently, terribly, in her own most sensible voice. Not in anger. In kindness, even. Thank him. Bless him. Tell him the finding mattered, that the story would be told whole in this house forever, that the six-year-old was his till the world ended.
Then let him go back to the water, the only thing that had never once failed him. Marry Everett Shaw before October was out. Be, for the rest of her days, sensibly, safely, almost happy.
Almost. She was twenty years practiced at almost. A person could live a long time on it. She had.
Ada stood at the dark window with her candle, and down the hill the lamp burned in Mrs. Hale’s top window, patient as ever, and she looked at it for a long, long time.
Then she went to the writing desk that had been Henry’s. She sat down and took out two clean sheets of paper.
One for Everett, naming a day.
One she would carry down the hill herself in the morning, to put into a boatman’s hands. Some things could not be said across a supper table, and this thing least of all.
She dipped the pen. Outside, faint and far, a downbound boat blew in the dark, the long mournful note the river kept for partings. And Ada Baldwin began, in her small square hand, to write the sensible thing.