Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The envelope was thicker than the others. Hannah felt it before she opened it — the stiffness of folded banknotes inside the paper.
With it came another letter containing train connections, instructions for the journey, and the date he expected her to reach Silver Cliff.
The letter was businesslike and thorough, and she could have left it at that, but she didn’t, because she was beginning to read Thomas Avery’s letters not just for what they said, but for what the hand behind them told her.
He had thought carefully about which trains connected and where to change.
He had set it all down so she would not have to ask a stranger on a platform.
He had done for her, in ink, what he could not yet do in person — he had looked after her.
She read the connections twice and copied them into her account book.
Then she read the final line.
If anything delays you, wire me. I will be at the depot.
There it was.
She was going.
Mrs. Sheldon stood in Hannah’s doorway while she packed, her arms folded, watching the trunk fill with the close attention of a woman who has opinions about folding.
“You truly mean to marry him the day you arrive?”
“That is what we agreed.”
“You haven’t even seen him.”
“No.”
“What if you don’t like the look of him?”
Hannah stopped with a folded chemise in her hands.
She had considered drunkenness, violence, debt, character, the ranch, the journey, Lucy, and half a dozen other practical matters.
She had written to a minister, verified a property, and put questions to a stranger that most women would not have put to a man they had known for years.
She had not once considered disliking Thomas Avery’s face.
“I suppose I shall have to hope he has an ordinary one,” she said.
Mrs. Sheldon laughed. Hannah put the chemise into the trunk, but after Mrs. Sheldon had gone downstairs the question stayed behind in the room like a guest who would not leave.
What did Thomas look like?
His advertisement had said nothing beyond his age.
Tall or short, dark or fair, whether he had a beard or good teeth or the kind of hands that showed the work they did — none of it.
A man’s teeth were not a sound basis for choosing a husband.
She knew that perfectly well. She hoped he had them anyway, and the hoping made her feel like a girl of sixteen instead of a woman of thirty who had checked a man’s references with a minister, and she folded the next dress harder than it needed folding.
Then it turned on her — the way these things did, always at the worst moment — that Thomas knew no more of her appearance than she knew of his.
Perhaps at this very moment he was standing in a house in Colorado wondering whether the woman on the train would be pretty or plain or somewhere in the middle, or perhaps he was not wondering at all, and she could not say which of those possibilities bothered her more.
Hannah owned a mirror. She knew what she looked like.
Brown hair that behaved tolerably well if pinned firmly.
Grey eyes. A straight nose she had never considered either an advantage or a defect.
She was tall enough that some men had made her conscious of it and sensible enough not to stoop for them.
Mrs. Corliss had once called her handsome, which Hannah suspected was what people said when pretty did not quite apply and plain would have been unkind.
If Thomas had imagined someone else, he would have to recover from the disappointment. She shut the trunk. She was not travelling to Colorado to win a beauty contest.
But she checked the mirror once more before she went downstairs, and she noticed, and let herself.
The clasp of the reticule was cold under her thumb.
The ticket. The letter with the train connections.
And underneath both, folded small, Mr. Danforth’s reference.
She had kept it. Choosing Thomas Avery did not mean making herself helpless in order to prove the choice sincere.
If Colorado proved impossible, Hannah Bell would still be capable of earning her living.
Ten years of proof of that fitted into a trunk that closed with room to spare.
The train pulled out with a wrench of iron and steam, and Peoria moved past the window — the steeple, the river, the row of elms along Jefferson Street where she had walked every Sunday for ten years carrying Mrs. Corliss’s prayer book because Mrs. Corliss could no longer manage both the book and the steps.
She watched it go and waited for the feeling she was supposed to have.
Regret, perhaps. Fear. The heaviness a person ought to feel when she is leaving the only place she has ever known to marry a man she has never met.
It didn’t.
When the last familiar buildings fell behind and the track opened out into flat country, something settled under her ribs that she had not felt since she was twenty and walking up Mrs. Corliss’s front steps with a pin in her hair and her boots still damp — before she knew how that particular errand would turn out.
She was going somewhere. Not being sent. Not being dismissed. Going.
She let it be what it was.
By the second day her back ached from the seat, which had been designed by someone who had never sat in one.
Sleep came in scraps — an hour here, half an hour there — between the man across the aisle who snored like a saw going through green wood and the baby three rows up who took shifts with him so that one or the other was always at it.
At Kansas City she bought a ham sandwich for twenty-five cents that she could have made better and cheaper in any kitchen she had ever worked in, and wrote the amount in her account book with a firmness that suggested she held the entire state of Missouri personally responsible.
She closed the book and looked up, and the window was full of sky.
She had expected to sit with her hands folded and her thoughts in order and arrive prepared, accounted for, sensible.
Instead she found herself watching the land the way a child watches, for what she did not know.
The fields gave way to country she had no name for.
The towns thinned out and the spaces between them grew wider and the sky pushed itself open until there was more of it than ground, and she had seen the same sky over Peoria for thirty years and it had never once occurred to her that there might be this much of it somewhere else.
Somewhere out there Thomas Avery was living under this same sky. She let that thought come.
Thomas’s letters were in her reticule. Late in the afternoon, with the light going long across empty grass and the snoring man finally asleep for a reason she could respect, Hannah took out the first one and unfolded it in her lap.
Not because she had forgotten what it said.
She had not forgotten a word of it. But there was a difference between reading a man’s words for their meaning and looking at the way he made them, and she held the letter open on her knee and studied the hand, square, plain, the ink bearing down on certain words.
Good to her. Will not tell you otherwise.
As though those words had cost him a little more pressure to set down.
She ran her thumb along the crease where the paper had been folded, and the paper was soft from being folded and unfolded too many times, and she knew whose hands had done that, and put the letter away.
An hour later she took it out again. She did not pretend she wasn’t going to.
She wondered what Lucy looked like.
That was the easier question, and she let herself sit with it — easier than Thomas’s face, easier than what he would think of hers.
Ten years old. Hannah had been ten once, in a house that still had her mother in it, and she remembered how large her mother had been in every room — large in presence, the way a person fills a house just by being the one who is always there.
The voice at the bottom of the stairs. The particular way the bread smelled on Saturdays.
The warm hand in the dark when a nightmare woke her.
Lucy had had all of that, and then it had stopped.
Thomas had written that he wanted someone who would be good to Lucy.
He had not written what Lucy wanted, and Hannah had not thought to ask, and of all the questions she had failed to put to paper — the money, the thread, the household account — this was the one she carried now, three-quarters of the way across the country, too late now to do any good.
She could be good to a child. She believed that about herself.
But a child who has lost her mother does not want good.
The particular is what she wants — the song, the braid done the particular way, the smell of the particular kitchen on the particular morning, and Hannah could not be any of those things.
Only the woman who came after, and she did not yet know what that meant, and she would have to learn it with the child standing in front of her and no letter to hide behind.
She put the letter away and looked out the window at the country going past, and left it there for the rest of the evening.
The window filled with mountains.
She forgot the Averys entirely.
For a long time she sat with her forehead near the glass and simply looked, because no engraving in any book or newspaper had prepared her for them.
They looked like nothing she had a word for.
They looked like something the earth had done on its own and was still doing, and the snow along the highest ridges had been there since before there were people to look at it.
The light was on them, and they were enormous, and Hannah sat in her seat and felt the size of the world she had come into, and for the first time in her life the size of it lifted her.
It was a door standing open onto a room she had not known was there.
A young man across the aisle grinned at her. “First time west?”
She sat back. “Is it so obvious?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She ought to have minded. She looked at the mountains again and didn’t.
They refused to become ordinary. She kept expecting them to, the way a new room becomes ordinary after the first hour, but they would not do it.
They only grew larger and closer and she gave up trying not to stare and stared, and if the other passengers thought anything of the woman pressing her face to the glass like a child at a shop window she had stopped caring about that somewhere around the third range.
But the mountains brought the valley closer.
And the valley brought the stations, and at each station the feeling changed.
That feeling folded itself up and put itself away, and in its place came something tighter, lower, behind her ribs, in the place where the lift had been when the train pulled out of Peoria.
She checked her hair in the darkened window and resented herself for doing it. She checked it again.
Thomas Avery was no longer a man in a letter.
Somewhere ahead of her he had put on his coat that morning knowing the train was coming. She wondered if he had checked his own mirror. In another hour she would know: his face, his hands, the way he stood, the way he looked at her when he saw her for the first time. Her mouth had gone dry.
She picked up her bag.
She put it down.
She picked it up again, because the station sign was sliding into view outside the window, and this time it was hers.
People stood on the platform. One of those figures was Thomas. She did not know which, and in another minute she would, and she was not ready, and she was, and the train stopped.
Hannah stood. She smoothed the front of her dress with both hands — a useless gesture, three days on a train could not be smoothed out, and she knew it, and she did it anyway, and walked to the door.