They Always Sat Her Nearest the Kitchen — Then One Rancher Carried His Plate to Her Table
Chapter 13
Christmas morning arrived the way winters arrive in that country: graciously, with its hand out, full of light.
Pearl came down before the sun and stood at the foot of her father’s bed — Maren heard it through the wall, the six-year-old’s stage whisper — and the house assembled itself in the kitchen by degrees, in the order of its hungers. The stove was going when Duncan came in; the coffee was made; the air was running with the smell of bread and the evergreen and the particular clean cold of a white morning.
The gifts went around poorly wrapped and precisely meant.
Emmett, older, watched the proceedings with the solemnity of a boy who has decided to become a man and is practicing: he had given Maren a strap he had tooled himself, under Walt’s tuition, working in the barn after supper for a week, and he handed it over without a word, and she handled it the way you handle something fragile, and she said, “You’ve learned the stitch,” and the boy’s face did a thing that tried hard not to be a smile. Pearl unwrapped the grey flannel coat and stood absolutely still for three full seconds — the longest suspension of six-year-old judgment Maren had ever witnessed — and then she buttoned it carefully onto the rabbit, and she placed the rabbit’s paws on the button as though testing evidence, and she said, in the tone of a woman rendering a verdict, “It’s a good coat. Bears’ are warm.” The house understood this to be the highest praise available in that particular economy.
Duncan gave the children a sled — bought in town on the errand — and gave Emmett the bridle repaired properly in leather, and gave Pearl a small pressed-tin box with a mirror for the rabbit’s things, and then there was the last package, the one Maren had made in the dark of the week: for him, a pair of mittens, lined, from the scrap of the same grey wool, knit in secret in her room after the lamp had gone down in his.
He looked at them a long time. The weather moved across his face and was set aside.
“I didn’t know you knit,” he said.
“There are a good many things about me you didn’t know last Christmas,” she said, “and you haven’t complained once.”
“Last Christmas,” he said, “I didn’t know I was missing anything.”
The kitchen went very still, the way it did when true things were said aloud, and Pearl rescued the moment by announcing that Bunny would require a place at the table for Christmas dinner — “or it will be a sad Christmas” — and the table was laid with five places, and the light coming in off the snow made the whole kitchen look like a painting of itself.
They spent the day in a conspiracy of small utilities: Duncan and Emmett cleared the lane and brought in wood; Pearl and Maren made the Christmas sweet — a loaf with dried apple and last autumn’s honey, and the house was warm and full of the sound of work and the sound of bread and the sound, growing, of a family making its noise around its edges without deciding to.
Late in the afternoon, Maren found herself alone with Pearl at the kitchen table, the child dividing the sweet loaf into graves — portions made equal by scale, the rabbit getting a crumb the size of a pea — and Pearl, without looking up, said: “Did you have a mama?”
The question went through Maren the way winter went through a chink in the wall.
“I had the girls’ home,” she said, which was not an answer and was the fullest one she had.
Pearl considered this, and offered the verdict her judgment of the matter produced: “Our house is better now,” she said. “Bunny says so.” And she returned to her dividing, and Maren stood at the stove with her back to the child, and she learned that a chest can hurt and hold at the same moment.
Out in the yard, against the south wall where the sun fell in the short afternoons, Duncan had built a bench. She noticed it on the way in from hanging the wash, days later — plain planks, sturdy, new, in the one spot on the place where the winter sun went down warm. He had not mentioned it.
She sat on it, once, in the afternoon, with her charcoal and her book, and it was the first time in her life she had sat on something built deliberately for her to sit on, and she thought about the step, and the latch, and the harness-room door, and the mittens she had knit, and the rabbit’s coat, and the bench that caught the sun, and she understood that somewhere between the first of these and the last, without any agreement being signed, the word ours had gotten into the house, the way mice get into a barn: silently, without permission, and there to stay.
She did not tell him she had found the bench. She simply began, of her own accord, to sit on it at the same hour each day, and when he came to the yard on those afternoons he walked within a certain distance of her chair, not close enough to be visiting, not far enough to be passing.
It was the nearest thing to a courtship she had ever been party to, and it was conducted entirely in lumber and silence.
The deep cold came in the first week of the new year, sealing the country in and the house in with it, and the week of confinement told her a thing the season had been preparing her for all along: that she had stopped counting the days to April