Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Alma Pryor lived in a narrow frame house on the eastern side of Silver Cliff.
Alma opened the door before Thomas had finished knocking. She had been at the window, and was not embarrassed about it, and she did not intend to pretend she had been doing anything else.
“You must be Hannah.”
“I am.”
Alma took Hannah’s hands in both of hers. Her grip was firm and warm and brief — a handshake disguised as a kindness, or a kindness disguised as a handshake, and Hannah could not tell which and liked her for both.
“Come in. You’ve had journey enough for one day.”
She was perhaps thirty-five, round-faced, plainly dressed, with sleeves turned back from forearms that had done work today and would do more before bed. Hannah liked her immediately, because she was sound.
Thomas brought Hannah’s trunk inside. Alma directed him toward the small room at the rear of the house.
“Not there. You’ll knock the wall.”
“I can see the wall.”
“You’ve struck it before.”
“That was Dell.”
“That was you.”
Thomas carried the trunk through without answering, and Hannah watched him go, and Alma watched Hannah watch him go.
“You’ll find he does that,” Alma said.
“Carries trunks?”
“Doesn’t answer when answering won’t profit him.”
Hannah glanced at her. Alma’s expression was perfectly sober.
Thomas returned. “Dell home?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll see him tomorrow.”
He turned to Hannah, and there was a formality to it that had not been there in the kitchen with Lucy — as though, now that they were in another person’s house, the rules had changed, and he was putting them on.
“I’ll come Wednesday morning. We’ll go over the terms at the ranch — anything that isn’t clear, you ask me then. If there’s anything you don’t agree to, I want to know it before Thursday.”
“All right.”
“And Thursday I’ll collect you for the wedding.”
“Yes.”
He had finished. She could see it in his hands, and that he did not know how to leave, and that the not-knowing was not something he was accustomed to.
Thomas Avery left rooms the way he entered them — directly, without lingering, because lingering was a thing other people did.
But he stood in Alma Pryor’s hall and did not leave.
“You’ll be comfortable here,” he said.
“I am sure I shall.”
He put on his hat. “Good evening, Miss Bell.”
“Good evening, Mr. Avery.”
Thomas left. Alma closed the door. Hannah could hear his boots on the porch and then the wagon moving away down the road, and she stood in the hall and listened to it go.
Alma went into the kitchen.
“You’ll want something hot.”
“I wouldn’t refuse it.”
Hannah followed her, and stopped in the doorway.
A treadle sewing machine stood near the window. It was a good one — Hannah had seen them in shops but Mrs. Corliss had never owned one, and it sat in the kitchen the way the range sat in Thomas’s, as the thing the room had been built around.
“Is that yours?” she said.
Alma glanced over from the stove. “The machine? Yes.”
Hannah went closer. She ran one finger along the edge of the table, the iron body, the wheel. The machine was well-used and well-kept — oiled, the bobbin case clean, a piece of calico still under the needle where Alma had left off.
“You use it often?”
“Near every week. I take in some sewing besides what I do for us.”
“My mother would have given a month’s wages for one of these,” Hannah said.
“So did I, near enough.”
Hannah turned to her. “Your husband didn’t object?”
“Dell thought it dear.”
Alma said it flatly, without apology — a fact she had settled for herself a long time ago.
“But you bought it,” Hannah said.
“With money I’d put by before we married.”
The machine belonged to Alma. She had wanted it, had the money, and bought it herself.
Hannah’s hands went still in her lap. Money after marriage. The question was still folded in her pocket, still unasked.
Alma lowered the cover. “Do you sew?”
“Yes. But not machine.”
“I’ll show you.”
“I’d like that.”
The next morning Alma showed her. Hannah sat at the machine with her feet on the treadle and her hands on the fabric and felt the needle pull the cloth forward at a speed she could not have managed by hand in an hour.
The seam ran straight and tight and finished before she had adjusted to the sound of it.
“Again,” she said.
She sewed six seams that morning. The sixth was better than the first. By the third her feet had found the rhythm of the treadle, and her hands had stopped gripping the fabric too hard, and she could feel the machine responding to her the way a good tool responds — not fighting, not dragging, doing what she asked it to do because she was asking correctly.
“You’re quick,” Alma said.
“I’ve been sewing by hand for twenty years.”
“Then you know what this is worth.”
Hannah looked at the machine. She knew exactly what it was worth.
It was worth not bending over a needle by lamplight until her eyes ached.
It was worth taking in mending from the valley and earning her own money.
It was worth forty-two dollars, which she did not have and might not have for a long time, but the number was in her head now and it was not going to leave.
“Show me the bobbin again,” she said.
Alma showed her. Hannah threaded it, set it, and sewed another seam. The sound of the needle going through cloth was the most satisfying sound she had heard since she stepped off the train.
Alma went to the stove. Hannah sat at the table, and Alma set a plate before her — bread, cold ham, a dish of stewed apples, and sat down across from her with the ease of a woman who has fed enough people to know that feeding comes first and conversation follows.
“Did Thomas show you the house?”
“Yes.”
“And Lucy?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think of her?”
Hannah cut the bread. “I like her.”
“That was quick.”
“She makes herself easy to like.”
“Most days,” Alma said.
Hannah smiled and ate, and for a while Alma let her eat, and the kitchen was quiet except for the clock on the shelf and the stove ticking, and the quiet was the quiet of two women sitting in a kitchen who have not yet decided how much to say to each other but are in no hurry to decide.
Then Alma said, “And Thomas?”
Hannah reached for her cup. “What about him?”
“You’ve travelled from Illinois to marry the man. I wondered what you thought when you finally saw him.”
“He appears much as Mr. Jessup described him.”
Alma waited.
“Quiet,” Hannah said.
Still Alma waited.
“Responsible.”
Alma’s mouth moved — the same not-quite-smile Hannah had seen on Thomas, and she wondered whether people in this valley learned it from each other or whether the mountains taught it to all of them.
“What answer were you expecting?” Hannah said.
“I didn’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“He seems a good father. And his letters were honest about the ranch.”
Alma nodded. She let a moment pass. Then she said, in the same level voice she had used for the sewing machine, “He’s a fine-looking man.”
Hannah set down her cup carefully. “I had noticed he wasn’t disfigured.”
Alma laughed. Hannah did too, and felt the heat come into her face and bent over her plate because Alma was watching her and Alma missed nothing and Hannah had known the woman for an hour.
She ate. Alma let her. They talked about the journey, and Peoria, and Alma told her about Dell and the mine and how long they had been in Silver Cliff, and Hannah told her enough to satisfy ordinary curiosity without unpacking ten years of her life over supper.
Afterward Alma showed her the room. Hannah opened her trunk and took out what she needed for the night. Her clothes smelled of railway smoke. She hung the brown dress and laid out another for morning.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the quiet room and unpinned her hair, and the pins came out the way they always did, one by one, and she set each one on the nightstand and felt the weight of the day settle on her as the hair came down.
This morning she had been on a train. She had met Thomas on a platform, stood in his kitchen, eaten his daughter’s candy, looked at his dead wife’s sampler, listened to Lucy say Papa slept in the chair.
Now she was sitting in Alma Pryor’s spare room with her hair down and Thursday three days away.
Three days.
She had come a thousand miles to marry a man she had met this afternoon. The desk in Peoria was a thousand miles behind her. The letters were in her trunk. The man was in the barn.
Hannah set the last pin on the nightstand and sat in the dark with her hair around her shoulders.
She suspected she already knew.