They Always Sat Her Nearest the Kitchen — Then One Rancher Carried His Plate to Her Table
Chapter 12
Christmas came to the Barr place on a Tuesday, in a year when the whole country west of Barrow Ford lay under a quiet white weight, and the house made its own holiday by main force.
Maren had cut evergreen from the creek bottom three days before and bound it over the kitchen door and the front window, the scent of it filling the house like a held breath, and Pearl had stood on a chair to hang the paper stars — saved, somehow, from some other December, folded thin and yellow with age, gifts of the previous housekeeper or of the woman before her, no one said which, some things never being asked. Emmett had brought the stars down from the attic shelf because Pearl could not reach and would not ask.
On Christmas Eve, after the children were in bed, Maren sat alone in the lamplight with her sewing basket and a reckoning.
She had nothing to give Duncan Barr.
She had given the household her work, which was a gift the way a river is a gift — necessary, honest, always moving — but the ledger did not balance, and she had learned in a hard school that a person who takes must give, and she had nothing she was allowed to give him, and so she sat with the problem of a man who did not want anything she knew how to offer, and while she sat with it, her hands did what her hands did: they sewed.
The rabbit’s coat came together out of the leavings of a winter dress she had not worn in four years — grey flannel, warm, the color of doves — cut small and stitched small, with a button from her mother’s — from the orphanage’s — scrap tin at the throat, and she sewed it with a care that surprised her, because somewhere between the cutting and the buttonhole she stopped sewing for a child and started sewing for the child.
When she was done it was past midnight. The house was dark and quiet and snowed around. And she sat with the small grey coat in her lap and let herself hold the thing she had been refusing to hold, which was this: she had made a coat for a cloth rabbit, and it was the most particular thing she had made in eleven years, and if she was honest, the rabbit was not the only one in the house she was learning to keep warm.
She heard him before she saw him — the kitchen door, the stamp of boots, the soft collision of a man who thought the house was asleep.
He had gone out to the barn at ten, “to check on things,” and it was after midnight now, and he came through the kitchen with snow on his shoulders and the package under his arm, the one that had been on the sill since the afternoon, and he stopped when he saw her in the rocking chair by the stove with the grey coat in her lap, and something passed over his face — the weather of it, the one he set aside carefully — and he set the package on the table between them and said, “You should open it now,” in the tone of a man reporting a fence repair.
She unwrapped it.
Charcoal pencils, a full tin of them, and a sketchbook with clean watercolor-washed paper — the good kind, the kind she had leafed through at the dry goods in July and put back, twice, because wants were expenses and she kept her ledgers honest.
“How did you know about my drawing?”
“You draw in the margins of that book,” he said. “I’ve watched you do it. The plate of ferns. You draw the way other people breathe.”
She could not look at him. Eleven years of walls, and he had read the margins of her books without being told they existed.
“The clerk said artists use these,” he said, and he said it the way he said everything, plainly, as though he were not handing her a signed deed to a room she had never owned.
“Thank you,” she managed. And then, because the ledger demanded balance and she had only one thing in her hands: “The children get theirs in the morning. I made — I’ll show you in the morning. Yours is in the morning.”
He looked at her a long moment, and she did not know what his face was doing, and she was afraid of it, and she was more afraid of it stopping.
“I’ve never been good at Christmas,” he said. “Ruth —” and he stopped his own sentence the way you step around a hole in the ice, and he looked at the floor, and he did not finish it, and she did not ask him to, because some things are allowed their unfinishedness. “I’m learning, thanks to you.”
He went to his room. She sat in the lamp’s glow with the tin of charcoal open in her hands, the clean edges of the pencils scoring neat dark lines against her palm, and it occurred to her that no one in her life had ever bought her a gift that was not an obligation, and that this man, who did not say much, had come back from town through the snow with her wanting wrapped in paper.
Upstairs — the room off the kitchen, its east window dark — she did not sleep for a long time.
She lay listening to the snow and the wind and the settling of the old house around her, and for the second time that season she did not name the feeling, and she was beginning to suspect that naming it was no longer the danger.
The danger was that it had named her.