Chapter 9 #2
“And two opened sacks of sugar, and one nearly empty jar of salt pushed behind a full one, and dried beans in two different cupboards, and last year’s onions beneath this year’s.”
She was right. The pantry had been a mess for months. Sarah had kept it, and Thomas had put things on whatever shelf was nearest and closed the door.
“Sarah kept the onions there,” he said, and heard himself say it, and closed his eyes.
Hannah went still. She looked at him from the floor, her hands on her knees, and he could see her deciding what to do with what he had said: whether to defer to it, or argue with it, or set it aside. He watched her decide.
“Then I shall put them back,” she said.
“No.”
She waited.
Thomas stepped into the pantry. It was small, smaller with two people in it and everything on the floor, and he stood among the sacks and jars and looked at Hannah looking up at him.
“Put them where you want them,” he said.
“This is your house.”
“Ours,” Thomas said.
Hannah’s face changed — not much, but he saw it — and he stood in the pantry with the word between them and left it there.
“I know where things are because Sarah put them there,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they have to stay there.”
Hannah studied him. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Because once I begin, you may never find anything again.”
“I haven’t found anything in here for fourteen months.”
She laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her in the middle of his pantry floor with flour dust on her knees — and the sound of it went through him the way the coffee smell had gone through him that morning, through the walls.
He picked up one of the sacks. “Where?”
She pointed to the lower shelf. He put it there.
“What else?”
“You have work.”
“So do you.”
“I can lift a sack of flour, Thomas.”
“I know you can.”
Hannah held his gaze, and the pantry was very small, and there was flour dust on her forearms and her sleeves were pushed to the elbow and the strand of hair had come loose again, and Thomas stood there with a sack of sugar in his hands and kept them there.
“Go mend your fence,” she said.
He put the sugar where she pointed. Then he went.
By evening Hannah had changed the kitchen.
Not enough that Thomas could have pointed to any one thing and said it was different.
The table was where it had always been. The pots hung from the same hooks.
Sarah’s sampler was still beside the door.
But the room had shifted — the way a room shifts when someone has cleaned the windows and you cannot tell what changed but the light is different.
Hannah had moved the flour. He found that out immediately.
She had also moved the coffee.
“Where is it?” he said.
“Second cupboard.”
“It was in the first.”
“It was beside the salt.”
“It has always been beside the salt.”
“Now it isn’t.”
Thomas opened the second cupboard. The coffee was there.
He took it down and looked at Hannah. She was kneading dough at the table, her forearms dusted with flour, the sleeves pushed up, and he could not stop looking at her, and the looking sat in him alongside the coffee and the flour and the rearranged pantry as one more thing he was learning whether he meant to or not.
“You moved everything,” he said.
“I moved what needed moving.”
“The coffee didn’t need moving.”
Hannah looked up from the dough. “The coffee is in the cupboard nearest the stove. Where you make the coffee. Every morning. The salt is in the cupboard nearest the table. Where you use the salt. Every meal. They were in each other’s places.”
Thomas studied the cupboards. She was right. He had been going to the wrong cupboard for the coffee and the wrong one for the salt for years, and had never noticed, because Sarah had put them there and he had never thought to question where Sarah put things.
He closed the cupboard. He took the coffee to the stove.
Hannah was kneading bread in his kitchen with flour on her arms and she had fixed his pantry and she was right about the coffee and the salt, and she was right, plainly and practically right, and standing next to that was harder than he had expected.
He made the coffee. He took his cup to the table and sat down across from her and watched her knead the bread, openly, without pretence.
Hannah looked up. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Her gaze stayed on him. “You do that often.”
“What?”
“Look at me and then say nothing.”
Thomas drank his coffee. The answer was simple and he was not going to say it: he looked at her because he wanted to, and it had been getting worse since the platform and showed no sign of improving.
“You have flour on your face,” he said.
Hannah put the back of her hand to her cheek. “Where?”
“Other side.”
She tried again. Missed.
Thomas reached across the table and brushed it from her cheekbone with his thumb.
Her skin was warm. The flour came away and his hand stayed, a second, maybe two, and Hannah held still, the way she had held still in the kitchen last night, and her eyes were on his, and the dough was forgotten, and the kitchen was very quiet.
Then he took his hand back and picked up his cup and drank, and Hannah returned to the kneading, and neither of them spoke.
Hannah sat at the kitchen table with her account book and a pencil. Flour was low. Salt nearly gone. She needed thread for mending and soap for the washboard and coffee to replace what she had used. Household supplies — she could put those on the ranch account and Thomas would not question it.
She looked at the list. Every item on it belonged to his household. She was keeping his house, feeding his daughter, mending his clothes. The work was hers. The house was his.
She waited until Thomas came in for supper.
“I’d like a household allowance,” she said. “My own money. Separate from the ranch account.”
Thomas set down his fork. “Sarah kept the egg money. Butter too, when there was extra. That was hers.”
“How much?”
“Few dollars a month. Depended on the season.”
Hannah looked at him. “I worked ten years for Mrs. Corliss. Everything in that house belonged to her. Every cup I drank from, every chair I sat in, every sheet I slept under. I owned nothing. She owned everything. And when she died I walked out with eleven dollars.”
“This isn’t the same.”
“Isn’t it? The flour is yours. The stove is yours.
The house is yours. I can buy eggs and butter with your hens and your churn and sell them at your store for a few dollars a month, and that is not the same as owning something.
A woman who can sew can earn, Thomas, but not if every needle and every yard of cloth belongs to someone else. ”
Thomas was quiet a long time. Lucy’s spoon scraped her plate.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Hannah picked up her fork and ate, and the stone sat between them.
The kitchen was cold when Thomas came down. He stood a moment in the dark, then struck a match.
He filled the wood box. He pumped two buckets of water and carried them in. He built the fire and put the coffeepot on.
He heard her on the stairs. She came into the kitchen with her hair in a single braid over one shoulder, the early-morning version, the one she did for herself before she did the one she did for everyone else.
It reached below her shoulders. He had not seen it down before.
He had imagined it, lying on the other side of the wall, and he had been wrong about all of it.
Hannah stopped in the doorway. She looked at the wood box, and the water by the stove, and the coffeepot already heating.
He had done it for her. The way Mrs. Corliss’s cook had laid the fire and drawn the water and set the table, because those were the things a household did for the person who lived in it.
Except Hannah was not Mrs. Corliss. She was the one who had always laid the fire. She was the one who drew the water.
“Thank you,” she said, and the words cost her something, because the kindness and the account were the same problem. Thomas would carry water, buy flour, fill the wood box. He would take care of everything. And she would own none of it, and owe all of it, and the owing was a room with no door.
Thomas was watching her. “You’re angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry.”
“You look angry.”
“I look like a woman who asked a question last night and did not receive an answer.”
Thomas picked up his hat. The kitchen was very quiet.
“I said I’d think about it.”
“You did.”
He stood in the doorway a moment. Then he went out.
Hannah poured her coffee and sat at the table alone.
The wood box was full. The water was drawn.
The coffeepot was hot. Everything had been done for her, and she had not been asked, and she had not been given the means to do it for herself, and the difference between those two things was the whole of what she had come here to settle.
Outside, the morning was cold. Thomas stood in the barn with his hands on the stall rail.
The flour is yours. The stove is yours. The house is yours.
She had sat at his table and told him she owned nothing, and he had not known what to say, because it was true.
Everything on this ranch was his. He had built it.
He had paid for it. It had never occurred to him that the building and the paying might look different from the other side of the table.
He picked up his tools and went.