“Did you come all the way from Paintrock?”
“Yep.” Wilbur eased a bulging pack from his shoulders and lowered it to the snow. “Set off just before dawn this morning. I’m right tuckered out, I don’t mind telling you. Twenty miles on skis in one day. Reckon I’ll still be aching by the time summer rolls around, and I still got to make it back to town.”
“Tomorrow,” Clyde said. “You’ll stay the night here—you and Mike both.”
Wilbur touched the brim of his hat. “Obliged. Truth is, if you hadn’t asked me to stay, I would have insisted on it. I ain’t fool enough to ski back to Paintrock in the dark. If I didn’t lose my way, the wolves would get me for sure, even with Mike at my side.”
Cora untangled the boys’ hands from her skirt and hurried down the steps. “So you came to this farm on purpose, Mr. Christianson.”
He touched his hat again. “Yes, ma’am. I guess you must be Mrs. Bemis.”
“I am.” The words came out as little more than a whisper. Cora’s throat had gone dry.
“You’re just who I come to find.” Wilbur lifted his foot from the snow and tapped his pack with the edge of a ski. “Mr. Bemis sent me all this way with gifts for you and the children. For everyone, in fact.” He looked up at the stoop and nodded. “Mrs. Webber. Awful sorry to hear about your husband’s passing.”
“For Heaven’s sake,” Nettie Mae said. Impatience—and no small measure of relief—had replaced her fear. “Come inside where it’s warm, if you aim to do so much talking. I suppose I must bring that great wet dog of yours inside, too. I can’t leave any creature out in this snow without proper shelter.”
Inside, Cora took Wilbur Christianson’s coat and several layers of scarves and sweaters. She laid them out before the sitting-room fire to dry while Nettie Mae assembled a hasty supper for the man and his dog. Both tucked in with obvious enthusiasm. The children lingered around the kitchen fire, eyeing the dog and Wilbur with equal curiosity.
When he had eaten his fill, Wilbur leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach. “That was a fine supper, Mrs. Webber. I’m obliged.”
“You’ve come a long way in dreadful cold. I hope you had sense enough to bring some food in that pack of yours.”
“I did, though stale biscuits and hard cheese don’t make for good eating.”
“Are you a peddler?” Benjamin asked.
Wilbur chuckled. “Laws, no, young man. I’m just an ordinary fella from Paintrock. But two years back, your daddy helped my daddy pay the doctor’s bill when my mother fell sick. I guess I owe your family a lot, and that’s why I’ve come.” Cora had taken the chair opposite Wilbur; he offered her a nod, deferential and sympathetic. “When Mr. Bemis put word out that he needed some goods carried down here to your farm, I knew I was the man for the job.”
“But to come all this way on skis,” Cora said. “It would have been a thing more easily done by sleigh.”
“That’s as may be. But now I’ve had a chance to repay the kindness your husband showed to my family. I don’t regret taking the journey, even if it was a long one.”
Cora lowered her eyes. Her cheeks and forehead burned with the force of her blush. “I don’t deserve the kindness you’ve shown me, Mr. Christianson.”
Wilbur slapped his thigh. “Drag that pack over here, Clyde, if you’re strong enough to lift it. Mr. Bemis may be shut up in jail, but he sure hasn’t been idle.”
Wilbur pulled a small folio from his pack and handed it to Beulah. She opened it, moved closer to the firelight, and read.
“Christmas is coming soon. I couldn’t let the happy day go by without seeing that you all got a little something special. I miss all my children terrible, every day, and long to see your sweet faces again. I pray that God will keep you safe from harm till I return to you. I have many regrets but my eyes is turned to the days to come instead of the days that is passed. Remember to be good and helpful and obedient always. Your loving pa.”
The children clamored around Beulah, laughing and exclaiming in wonder. Cora kept her gaze fixed resolutely on the tabletop. She could feel Nettie Mae watching—that accusatory stare like a needle digging into flesh.
When the ruckus had died back, Wilbur reached into his pack again. He produced a cloth bag that rattled when he shook it. Then he passed the bag to Charles. “What do you think’s in there, little man? Open it and see!”
Charles loosened the drawstring and peered inside. “Soldiers!” He pulled one from the bag and held it up for all to see. The toy was no longer than Cora’s finger, newly carved, the wood still pale. She recognized her husband’s hand in the work—the fine detail and careful proportions. A hard lump formed in her throat.
“There must be ten or more,” Benjamin said, looking into the bag. “We’ll have a jolly time playing with these!”
“There’s more,” Wilbur said. He took another cloth-wrapped bundle from his pack and passed it over to Benjamin.
The cloth came away in no time, revealing three prancing wooden horses, each with a rider complete with military uniform. The boys gasped. They turned desperate, pleading eyes toward Cora.
“Run along to the sitting room and play,” she said. “But you must go up to bed soon.”
Miranda was clinging to Beulah’s hand, staring at Wilbur and his pack with wide, solemn eyes.
“Well now, little lady,” the visitor said, “your pa told me you like dollies. Is that so?”
Miranda nodded. She looked rather pale and frightened, but the fascination of the pack was too great to resist.
Wilbur extracted her gift: a miniature crib on rockers, its sides carved with vines and flowers. It was just the right size to hold the girl’s rag dolls.
As Miranda carried her treasure off to play, Cora dabbed her eyes with a kerchief. “You’re so kind, Mr. Christianson. You’ve brought so much joy to this house when it is sorely needed.”
“Well, Mrs. Bemis, I guess I’ve got more joy left to spread.”
He reached into his pack again. A set of wooden spoons came out, newly carved as the toys were, tied together by a length of twine. Cora leaned toward him, but Wilbur extended the spoons toward Nettie Mae.
“For the generous Mrs. Webber,” he said. “Mr. Bemis instructed me to tell you that he knows nothing can atone for what he done. But you are a kindhearted and respectable woman, and he didn’t like that you should go without something nice for Christmas.”
Nettie Mae stood with her arms folded, frowning down at the spoons. Her lips pressed together tightly, and for a moment Cora feared she would burst out with some vile curse. Then her chin quivered with emotion, quickly suppressed. Nettie Mae accepted the gift, murmuring, “Thank you.”
“This here is for Clyde.”
Wilbur held up a small round box, turning it so the firelight gleamed over the intricate pattern of bone inlay decorating its lid and curved sides. Clyde took the box and held it for a moment in his open hand. In diameter, it was the size of his palm, and not quite two inches high.
“It’s beautifully made,” Clyde said. “I had no idea Mr. Bemis was such a talented woodworker.”
Ernest knows, Cora realized. He has worked out—assumed—that Nettie Mae and I have joined together in order to survive the winter. Does he have any idea how difficult it is? How I suffer under the yoke of her hatred—and how she must suffer from my constant presence, the reminder of all she has lost?
I have no one to blame but myself. Nettie Mae has no one to blame but me. If I suffer, it is just. I have brought this pain down on my family and on the Webbers. On everyone I care for.
Nettie Mae turned away abruptly. She laid her spoons on the drain board, then excused herself to see to the children, for the boys had begun to squabble over their soldiers.
“And I’ve something for Miss Beulah,” Wilbur said. “That must be you, young lady.”
Grinning with anticipation, Beulah stepped forward, stretching out her hands before Wilbur had even reached back into his pack. He w
ithdrew another carved wooden box, but this one was large and sturdy, more than a foot long and a good eight inches deep. The lid and sides were carved with a checkerboard pattern, stained with walnut ink. The initials B. B. adorned the lid in intricate script.
Beulah examined her gift in silent awe, running a forefinger along the dark depressions of the checkerboard. She lifted its tight-fitting lid and peered inside, then bent over the box to smell the resinous perfume of freshly carved wood.
“Your pa said to tell you that he knows you’re a big girl now, and not much for playthings. He hopes you’ll put the things you treasure most inside this box.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Christianson. If you see my pa again, will you tell him I think it’s just about perfect?”
“That I will, miss. I promise.”
Beulah glanced at Cora, twisting her mouth in that thoughtful way she had. To Wilbur, she said, “Did my pa send along anything else for you to deliver?”
“There is one gift more.” Wilbur drew the final offering from his pack and slid it across the table toward Cora. It was yet another box, smaller than Beulah’s and not so fancifully carved.
Cora’s heart leaped with sudden, painful force. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she had desired some small present from Ernest’s hand. His letter had mentioned only the children; she had already resolved herself to being forgotten, discarded—and deservedly so. Yet Ernest had not forgotten her. Nor had he cast her aside. These gifts, these treasures Ernest had made with his own hands, carving away one curl of wood at a time, were his offerings of peace. Cora pictured her husband with startling clarity, seated on the edge of a hard cot that would be his only furnishing in a bare and cheerless cell. Shaping with infinite care these small yet beautiful things, thinking all the while of the family he had left and the family he had destroyed. Cora could see him—those familiar hands running over smooth wood, the frown he always wore when he was concentrating on an especially worthy task, the shavings of pine and oak scattered at his feet, one thin twist of fragrant wood fallen across the toe of his old, worn-out boot.
The family he left. The family he destroyed.
But haven’t we made a kind of family, Nettie Mae and I, from the ruin of what we once were? They had fashioned themselves as one carves a stick of wood—shaping themselves from the rough, the useless, into something functional, if not good.
Cora scolded her own dangerous musings to silence. Nettie Mae wouldn’t be pleased to hear such a sentiment spoken aloud. Cora blushed again. I mustn’t make her life harder than it is, more difficult to bear. God knows, I’ve done enough already.
Cora took the box between trembling fingertips and pulled it closer. The sides were plain, though joined with tight, sturdy dovetails. The lid bore only a single flower—a prairie aster with a wide, dark-stained eye and six long petals. But when she opened the box, Cora’s hand flew up to cover her mouth. Tears came so suddenly to her eyes that she hadn’t a chance to blink them away. They spilled down her cheeks, running hot between her fingers.
Into the floor of the little wooden box, Ernest had cut two simple hearts, intertwined.
Early next morning, when dawn was still a dream—a half-formed idea of light, rosy and low on the pale horizon—Wilbur strapped his skis to his boots, hefted his much-lightened pack, and whistled to his dog. The children gathered on the stoop to wave good-bye, yawning and knuckling their eyes.
“Be safe,” Cora said as the young man touched his hat in farewell. “And thank you for all you’ve done.”
She wanted to say more. She ought to have said more. I’ve a set of fine china, come straight from the White House, and I want to find a buyer. Put the word out, won’t you, among the ranchers and their wives? But she bit her lip to silence herself, and watched the young man glide across the snow to the place where the road should have been.
She slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron and worried at a corner of the folio, bending and folding it over the side of her finger until the paper was soft and creased like the vein of a leaf.
There would be time enough to send the letter to Ernest. If indeed she was still set on leaving for the city after all. Cora thought of the hearts intertwined inside the box. No one could see that delicate carving until the lid was lifted, but she knew the hearts were there.
10
WE’VE FINISHED HERE
There are some seeds that refuse to grow until they’ve been tempered.
You can lick clean the most perfect apple seed, shiny and fat, and tuck it in the soil on a perfect spring day. You may tamp the soil down till it’s snug as a moth in a cocoon, and bathe your seed daily with sweet water from the well. You may whisper to your apple seed and sing it private hymns. And the sun will shine down, warm and coaxing, all the clear, blue months till autumn comes. But the sprout will not emerge. The seed sleeps on, patient in its dark sanctum, and maybe you’ll forget where you planted it. Maybe you’ll forget one day to carry the water and sing your songs, and the earth that surrounds your seed will crack and go dry; the worms and grubs and beetles will delve deeper into the soil and deeper still, abandoning the hopeless sterility near the surface, abandoning your seed.
It’s only next spring that you’ll remember, when you look down at the place where there should be only bare, wet ground, and instead you find twin leaves unfurling, long and slender, eager for the sun.
It’s winter that raises the apple from the earth. The bitter cold, the ice like knives, the crystals of ice underground that cut into the hard coat and breach the soft, pale place inside where root and stem and leaf are one. The apple won’t be coddled. Until it knows true suffering, the seed won’t sprout at all. The tree will never live.
There are seeds that will not open till they’ve been cracked by fire, till the mother plants that gave them birth are burned away to ash. Others refuse to grow unless a bird has swallowed them down, or a mouse or a coyote, till they’ve found their way through a churning dark labyrinth, the body of another being. I have seen the tracks of cattle and buffalo through acres of mud, the land scoured and lifeless in the wake of floodwaters. But wherever the animals have stepped, their hoofprints burst with green—islands of new growth in a barren world, brought to life by the pressure, the crush of weight from above.
I will not lie and tell you that the winter passed with ease. We suffered, all of us—the children from confinement, and Clyde from uncertainty. It fell to me to watch and deflect, to guide the little ones away from Nettie Mae’s temper, to guide my ma toward patience and acceptance of her place in the world. The watching made me tired, for it seemed I never could shut my eyes, even while I slept, and so it was a kind of suffering, though I did the work gladly.
But none of us struggled more than my ma and Nettie Mae.
The gifts my pa sent at Christmastime seemed to resign them both to their fates—for the winter still to pass, if not for the months that waited beyond the thaw. But though they tried to maintain a tenuous accord, I could see how both women fought against their respective natures for the sake of a fleeting, fragile peace.
My ma worked harder than I had ever seen her do. She was first to rise from bed every day and last to rest at night. Whichever of Nettie Mae’s burdens Ma could take upon herself, she bore without complaint, and without Nettie Mae needing to ask. Stoking the fire, cooking the morning porridge, baking the daily bread. What meager laundry was done in the dead of winter, my ma washed and dried herself. She scoured the floors and washed up after supper; she trudged the hard-packed, slippery path to the outhouse and emptied every chamber pot, every morning. Any task my ma could take was one fewer for Nettie Mae, and so Ma worked till her fine hands cracked from the hardship and the cold, and the red-raw splits in her dry, callused skin made her wince with pain.
Nettie Mae was left to tend the children—a duty she preferred—and to teach my brothers their lessons. When she bundled up the boys and let them outside to play, or to help Clyde tend the animals, she retrea
ted to her spinning wheel and turned the last of the autumn fleece into countless bobbins of smooth, perfect thread.
But though spinning seemed to bring Nettie Mae some comfort, and though her duties were light compared to Ma’s, still I saw the pain that afflicted her. You couldn’t miss it, if you stood long enough in Nettie Mae’s presence. Whatever my ma did, no matter how mundane the work—kneading dough, carrying dry wood from the barn, scrubbing the kitchen floor on her knees—Nettie Mae would watch with a stricken, far-off, desolate expression. Sometimes I’d look up from my patchwork sampler to find Nettie Mae silent and staring, the treadle of her wheel gone still. I would follow the path of her eyes and there would be my mother, sweeping the ashes from the hearth, her sleeves pushed up to reveal the skin of her forearms, white and smooth as marble. You couldn’t help but notice how gracefully she moved, even when her back cramped from weariness, even when her face was smudged with soot. Sometimes Nettie Mae passed by the kitchen, pretending not to look, but I would catch the sideways dart of her eyes, and I, too, could see how the downward angle of Ma’s face brought out the delicacy of her small nose and the thick dark fringe of her lashes—how the candlelight by which she worked in the deepest part of winter never made her coloring sallow but golden as a locket, and the natural curls of her hair were like filigree.
I think Nettie Mae suffered worst of us all.
Many people who’ve met me think me a fool, and I can’t say I blame them, for I speak little and don’t fret much, even when others are beside themselves with worry. But I am not witless. I knew Nettie Mae harbored a powerful dislike for me. If my ma and I were the sum total of Bemises left behind when my pa went off to jail, no force on earth or in Heaven above could have induced her to extend her charity. What she did—what great sacrifices she made—she did for the sake of my brothers and Miranda. She loved little children. She ached every day for those she had lost, the trail of tiny graves she had left behind as she and Substance Webber had moved west. It was only for the sake of the boys and my little sister that Nettie Mae choked back her hatred, tolerating my ma’s presence and mine. It was Nettie Mae’s determination to maintain our precarious harmony—even in the face of her daily agony, the constant reminder that Cora was a prettier, lovelier, more desirable woman than she herself could ever hope to be—that kept our queer, ragtag family together.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 35