They Always Sat Her Nearest the Kitchen — Then One Rancher Carried His Plate to Her Table
Chapter 20
The gifts went out in September, when the weather held fair and the roads were dry, and Maren Barr found herself, for the first time in her life, in the position of being able to give freely — not usefully, freely — and it changed the taste of the season.
A jar of the first run of plums went to the parsonage, carried by her own hand on a Saturday, and Mrs. Bell stood with it in her hands the way you stand with something delicate, and she said, “You made this? From the old tree?” and Maren said, “From the old tree,” and neither woman said anything further, because the transaction was complete in the one sentence.
A jar went to the Delaneys, who had returned in the spring and had seemed, ever since, to be looking for a way to close a moment that had never quite opened between them; Mrs. Delaney, upon being handed the jar on her own doorstep, behaved with the absolute excess of her nature, holding it up to the light, exclaiming over the color, demanding to know the boil-time, declaring it the finest looking preserve she had seen since leaving Boston, and pressing upon Maren in return a slip of paper for a new supplier’s seed list, and the two women stood at the doorstep a while in the scale of small-town economy, and the account was squared in the plainest possible coin.
A jar went to Walt, which required some diplomacy, Walt being a man of few words and fewer acceptances; Maren left it on the bench in the tack room without remark, and the next morning found an empty jar, rinsed and returned, sitting on the kitchen step with a folded piece of sacking under it, and no message, and the jar, upon examination, was not the same jar — he had swapped her a newer one, cleaner, as though in trade — and Maren stood on the step laughing, alone, in the morning yard, at the exact arithmetic of that.
And one jar — the fourth of the first run — went into the wagon two weeks later, wrapped in a cloth, into Barrow Ford, to a house on the west edge of town whose name she had said aloud only twice, and both times as a courtesy: the Oakes house.
She did not do it through the front door. She left it on the stoop like Walt’s jar, covered, unmarked, and walked away with her chin level, the way she had arrived in town with it, and if Vera Oakes opened her door that afternoon to find an anonymous jar of plum preserves on her step, and if she stood a long moment on her own threshold — which she did, which was reported later by a neighbor with the common decency to look the other way while she re-tied her shoe — then the jar was received, and the ledger, which runs longer than memory, was settled.
The October supper at the Farmers’ Hall came around the way it always did, with the cold coming down off the ridge and the lamps lit early and the whole town’s business conducted at exactly the volume of the room.
Maren Barr attended it this time from the other side of the hall.
She had taken Mrs. Delaney’s arm through the door, and the two of them had walked the length of the room to the center table, and if any of the room found anything remarkable in the woman from the side table taking her place among the families with land, then the room also found itself remarking nothing, because the seating order had been settling itself all year in stages, the way a fence settles, and no one had troubled to unbuild it.
And it was at that October supper, on the way out, that Maren saw her: the new woman.
She sat at the side table nearest the kitchen door — the one that had been hers — a woman of perhaps five-and-twenty, in a dress clean at the cuffs, with a carpet bag at the side of her chair that had not yet been opened anywhere, eating her supper with the careful attention of someone who has learned that a meal is worth respecting regardless of where you sit to eat it. Her back was straight. Her chin was level. She was between positions, or had just arrived, or had not yet explained herself to anyone’s satisfaction, and the room had filed her in the wary way of rooms, and she ate without looking up.
Maren stopped in the doorway and stood a moment, and something in her chest did the small work of translation that memory does — this was her, this was September, this was the shadow that had fallen across a table — and she let the moment stand.
Then she crossed the room, and the room watched, and she set her plate down — she had not been planning to sit — across from the woman with the carpet bag, and she sat down in the chair nearest the kitchen door, and the woman looked up, and Maren said, in the same plain tone, the same bill of sale tone, as though she were reading the weather that belonged to both of them:
“If you’re between positions, I know a ranch east of town that’s looking for a cook through the winter.”
The woman’s face did nothing at all, and held.
“The work is hard,” Maren said, “and the pay is fair, and the room off the kitchen has its own door to the yard, and the window faces east, so you get the morning light.”
“How do you know about the window?”
“Because I lived in that room,” Maren said, “and I married the man who fixed the step.”
Something moved at the corner of the woman’s mouth — a ghost of a thing, the beginning of belief — and returned to where it had been, and she reached for her plate, and she said, “I can cook. I’m not afraid of hard work.”
The room had gone very still, held in the particular attention of a people who recognize the shape of their own story being told to them for the first time from the other side. Maren Barr sat at the side table nearest the kitchen door in the Farmers’ Hall of Barrow Ford, in the second autumn of her new life, and she did not look at the room, and the room, for once, gave her nothing to read either, which was the truest compliment the town had ever paid her.