Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Winter had come into every part of the ranch. Hannah had written to Mrs. Sheldon — the house was sound, the work familiar, Lucy was a good child. She did not say she was happy. Mrs. Sheldon could make of that what she liked.
There was flour enough into January. She had put up what remained from the garden, added dried beans and salt pork to the stores, turned two worn sheets, and discovered that Lucy had grown enough since spring that one winter dress could not be persuaded through another season merely by lowering the hem.
Hannah was washing dishes when Thomas set four silver dollars on the kitchen table behind her.
She dried her hands and turned around. The coins sat on the wood between his coffee cup and the lamp.
“Egg money,” he said. “I sold what you’ve been putting up. Eggs, butter, the extra preserves. Four dollars this month. It’s yours.”
Hannah picked them up. The silver was warm from his pocket. Four dollars she had earned with her own hands, from hens she fed and butter she churned and preserves she had put up from Sarah’s garden.
“Thank you,” she said.
Thomas’s face eased. He thought the stone between them had moved.
It had not moved. Four dollars was earned, not given, and that mattered. But her name was nowhere in the ranch book, and egg money did not change that. She put the coins in her account book and closed it.
Thomas came through the kitchen door stamping mud from his boots and found Hannah bent over the table with a pencil and three columns of figures.
He removed his coat. “What are you doing?”
“Finding out how much your daughter costs.”
Lucy looked up from her book. “I’m not expensive.”
“You require boots. A winter dress. Stockings before Christmas unless I can mend the ones you have into something approaching permanence.”
Thomas reached for the paper. Hannah put her hand over it.
“I haven’t finished.”
“I can see what things cost.”
“So can I. That is why I am the one adding them.”
Thomas pulled out a chair and sat beside her without washing his hands first. He turned the paper enough to see the figures.
“What else?”
“Lamp oil. Coffee. Flour by January. Sugar sooner.”
“We’ve sugar.”
“We have less than you think.”
Thomas frowned. Hannah pointed toward the pantry. “You may go and look if you doubt me.”
“I don’t doubt you.”
Hannah’s pencil stopped. She looked at him across the table — the same table where she had asked for an allowance and been told he would think about it, the same table where she had watched him not understand what she was asking.
He was looking at her figures with an expression she had not seen before: attention without control.
He was reading her work and finding nothing wrong with it.
He tapped one line. “Why so much flour?”
“Because three people live here who eat bread and one named Harlan who apparently consumes it without chewing.”
Lucy laughed. Thomas did too. Then he looked at Hannah’s columns again, slower, and his face changed.
“You keep this every month?”
“I always kept Mrs. Corliss’s household accounts.”
“This isn’t Mrs. Corliss’s house.”
“No.”
Thomas rose, went into the small room off the kitchen, and came back carrying a broad ledger bound in brown leather. He set it on the table in front of her and stood back, the way a man stands back after he has put a thing down and is waiting to see if the other person will pick it up.
Hannah let it sit.
Thomas opened it. Pages of cattle numbers, feed purchases, payments, dates in his square hand. The ranch was in this book, every year of it.
“Household goes here,” he said, and turned several pages.
Sarah’s handwriting. Hannah saw it and her hand went still on the table. Smaller than Thomas’s, rounder, the letters careful. Egg money. Flour. Lamp oil. Cloth. Soap. Small entries set down by a woman who knew what things cost.
Hannah ran her finger beside them without touching the ink. Sarah had sat at this table with this book and this pencil and written these numbers, and now Hannah was sitting in the same chair.
“She kept this part?”
“For a while.”
“What happened?”
“She got sick.”
Hannah looked down the page. The entries stopped mid-month, mid-line, as though Sarah had put the pencil down one afternoon and never picked it up again. Below them, Thomas’s hand began. The same items, less neatly kept. His numbers were rougher. The lines uneven.
She could see it in the handwriting — a man holding the household together with one hand while the other held his dying wife’s, and the book had suffered because the wife mattered more than the book. The unevenness was not carelessness. It was love, written into the ledger in crooked lines.
“You kept everything after?”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
Thomas pushed the ledger toward her. “Now you keep what you’re already keeping.”
Hannah turned back to Sarah’s page. Near the bottom, a smaller column. Eggs. Butter. Preserves. Sarah’s egg money. Four dollars a month, the same arrangement Thomas had brought her last Tuesday.
She looked at the rest of the ledger. The cattle. The feed. The land. Everything Thomas owned.
“I don’t want egg money,” she said. “I want to be in this book the way you are. Not on a separate page. Not in a corner. My name beside yours on the accounts that matter.”
Thomas was quiet. Lucy had stopped reading.
The kitchen was still except for the stove and the wind outside the window.
Hannah could feel the weight of what she had asked — not the words but the years behind them, the will and the eleven dollars and every kitchen she had worked in where nothing on the shelves belonged to her.
She had carried this question across the country. She was not going to soften it now.
Thomas turned to the front of the ledger. The ranch accounts. Cattle. Feed. Income. Expenses. He picked up the pencil and wrote at the top of the page, beside his own name: Hannah Avery.
The pencil made a sound on the paper, a small scratch, and Hannah watched the letters form and felt something shift in her chest that had been locked since Danforth’s parlour.
Her name on the page. Not a reference someone else had written.
Not a will that excluded her. Her name, in her husband’s hand, on the book that held his life’s work.
“That’s where you are,” he said. “Same page. Same line.”
Hannah looked at the two names side by side. Thomas Avery. Hannah Avery. The ink was still wet on hers.
“What did the cattle bring last year?” she said.
Thomas’s eyebrows rose. “That isn’t household.”
“No. But you said I could know the rest.”
His mouth moved — the almost-smile — and he turned the ledger around.
For the next twenty minutes he walked her through the ranch in figures.
How many head had gone to market. What feed cost. What Harlan earned.
What remained after expenses. She could see the year Sarah got sick — the numbers thinning, the calves sold short.
“You did all this while caring for her?”
“I did what needed doing.”
“You should have had help.”
“I had Harlan.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Probably,” he said.
Hannah closed the ledger and rested her hand on the cover.
Lucy came around the table. “Can I write in it?”
Thomas said, “No.”
Hannah said, “Why not?”
“Because she’s ten.”
“I can write,” Lucy said.
“You can’t spell Wednesday.”
“Nobody can.”
Hannah opened the ledger to a blank corner beneath her new column. “Write your name.”
Thomas looked alarmed. Hannah waited. He closed his mouth.
Lucy took the pencil and formed each letter with painful care. LUCY AVERY. The Y leaned badly to one side. She looked at Thomas.
He studied it. “Y’s crooked.”
Lucy scowled.
“Still says Lucy,” he said.
Hannah smiled. Thomas’s eyes stayed on her.
Hannah was darning stockings by the stove when Lucy came and sat beside her.
“Can you teach me to do that?”
“Darning?”
“All of it. Sewing. Properly.”
Hannah set the stocking down. “Why?”
“You said a woman who can sew can earn.”
Hannah had said it — to Thomas, in the kitchen, the evening she asked about the allowance. Lucy had been at the table with her arithmetic, and Hannah had not thought she was listening.
“I’m saving for a treadle machine,” Hannah said. “I asked Rooker the price. Forty-two dollars.”
Lucy was quiet, working it through. “When we have it, we can take in mending.”
“We?”
“You and I.” Lucy looked at her. “You teach me everything.”
Hannah looked at this child — ten years old, fierce and practical — and saw something in her face that reminded her of no one so much as herself.
“Everything,” Hannah said.
The gate was new.
Hannah pulled up the horses and sat in the wagon looking at it. Pine, fresh-cut, sanded smooth. Burned into the wood in Thomas’s square hand:
T. with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
Hannah closed the Bible and set it beside the lamp. The reference into the desk. The account book beside it, with its column for eggs and butter and the number forty-two written at the top of a clean page.
The trunk was empty. She ran her hand across the bare bottom and closed the lid.
A thousand miles to marry a stranger, and the stranger had become the man she loved.
Thomas came to bed and saw her things spread through the room as though they had always been there. The trunk closed.
“All of it?” he said.
“All of it.”
He put his arms around her. Hannah rested her cheek against his chest and listened to his heart.
“Good,” he said.
Hannah closed her eyes. In the morning she would check the hens, add the week’s eggs to her column, and write to Alma about the mending. Forty-two dollars was a long way off, but the number was in the book, and the book was hers and Lucy’s both.
The house was quiet, and Hannah was home.