He Paid Two Dollars for the Bride No One Would Bid On—By Winter the Whole Town Owed Her Their Lives

Chapter 6

The meeting house had been a church before it was anything else, and it still smelled faintly of old hymnbooks and beeswax under the lye and the coal oil, and in that smell two women stood at three in the morning while a sick town breathed around them.

Myra Crane’s hands had stopped shaking. They were red and cracked from the scalding water, and she held them in front of her like something she did not quite recognize.

“I was there,” she said. “That night. The fire. I was in the street.”

Hannah Bowman folded her rag and set it down.

“I remember,” she said.

“You carried out two little girls. I watched you carry them out, one in each arm, with your face already —” Myra’s voice broke and she caught it and held it. “With your face burning. And you went back in, and I thought, she’s going back for my Sarah, she’s going back for her.”

Hannah was very still.

“I tried,” she said.

“I know you tried.” Myra’s voice came out thin, the way the auctioneer’s had when he said two dollars, the way a voice sounds when it is carrying more than it can hold. “I stood in that street and I screamed at you. I screamed that you’d chosen — that you’d saved two strangers’ girls and left mine, and I said things, terrible things, and you were standing there burned and bleeding and I — ”

“You were a mother,” Hannah said. “You have nothing to ask my pardon for.”

“I hated you,” Myra said. “I hated you for years. Not for the fire. For the choosing. I told myself you looked at my daughter and judged her, and judged me, and passed us over. And I carried that hatred all the way to Kansas, and I fed it, and it turned into —” She gestured, helpless, at the walls of the meeting house, at the town outside it, at everything. “It turned into that. Into a woman who stands in a mercantile and speaks about another woman in the third person.”

“The worst thing grief does,” Hannah said slowly, “is make us believe we are alone in it.”

Myra Crane looked at her.

“You knew,” she said. “All along. You knew who I was the day I stood in that store — you knew, and you never said a word, and you took everything I gave you — the third person, the skirts, the — and you never once — ”

“I didn’t know it was you,” Hannah said. “Not at first. I knew your face the way you knew mine — the way you remember a face you have screamed at, or a face that was screamed at. But I didn’t know your name, or your child’s name, or any of it. Nobody ever told me. I only knew that a woman lost a daughter that night, and that I could not reach her in time, and that I have carried that girl’s face with me ever since.” She paused. “I still do. I carried it into that fire every night for a year. I would have traded both those little girls I saved for the chance to have tried for yours first.”

The silence that fell between them was the largest thing in the room.

“I’ve thought about that night every day for six years,” Myra whispered. “I told myself if I could just find the woman with the burn — if I could just find her and make her tell me why — ”

“Why I chose?” Hannah said. “I didn’t choose, Mrs. Crane. There was no choosing. The fire took the rooms one at a time, and I went where I could reach, and I could not reach your daughter’s bed. That is the whole of it. There was no judgment in it. There was no arithmetic. There was only a fire, and a child I could not get to in time, and a grief that has followed me the way it has followed you.”

Somewhere in the ward, a child coughed — a thin, terrible, barking cough — and both women turned toward the sound, and the moment, whatever it had been, was over.

“Rosalie,” Myra said, and her voice had steadied into something harder. “My Rosalie is not going to die.”

“No,” Hannah said. “She is not. We caught her early, and she is strong, and I am going to keep her alive if I have to sit on her chest and breathe for her myself.”

“Good,” Myra said. “Because I have decided, Mrs. Bowman, that I am not through being angry at you. I have been angry at you for six years and I am not through. But I am going to be angry at you while I help you save my daughter, and when this is over I am going to figure out what to do with the rest of it.”

Hannah Bowman almost smiled.

“That sounds fair,” she said.

And they went back to work.

The diphtheria went on for three weeks, and it was not clean and it was not easy, and Hannah Bowman did not save everyone. She would have been the first to tell you that. Two children died in that white meeting house — a Swedish thresher’s boy named Lars, who had come to Kansas with his father for the harvest and never went home, and the mail rider’s little girl, Emmy Trask, who was four. And Hannah sat with each of them at the end, so that neither of them would be alone, holding a hand while it went cold.

Then she went and washed her hands in the scalding water until they cracked, and she went back to the ones she could still save.

Because that is the work. And the work does not stop to let you grieve.

The town watched her. It watched her go without sleep until her eyes were hollow and her hands shook when she thought no one was looking. It watched her hold dying children and bury two of them and never once break in front of the living. It watched her husband, the quiet rancher, look at her across the meeting house by lamplight with something on his face that was worth a great deal more than two dollars.

And on the night the ward almost lost Georgie Peavey — the night the gray membrane closed the boy’s throat to a slit and his small chest heaved and found nothing and his lips went the deep, terrible blue of a child who has stopped getting air — a town that had laughed behind a freight office held its breath, and watched the burned bride kneel down beside the storekeeper’s son with a boiled blade in her steady hand.