Clara's Mail Order Joy (Home for Christmas Book 5)

by Natalie Dean

  He had wronged her. She knew that he didn’t think so, but it was his responsibility to build their home and it was her duty to manage it. She thought anew of the terrible weight of loss during the last months in Boston, when all that they had owned was either unpaid or had to be sold in order for them to buy something more necessary. Boston and Colorado were suddenly very much alike and she would not forgive him easily for sending her back into those perilous days.

  In fact, the more she thought on the matter, the more doubtful it was that she would be able to forgive him at all.

  Chapter 15

  The rhythm of the hammer pounding nails into the boards was an irritant to Clara, the noise a steady reminder of the chasm that had opened up between her and Peter. He had started working on the bed that evening after he came up from the mine; when she went outside to tell him that his dinner was getting cold, he didn’t look up from his labor.

  “I’ll be in shortly. I want to get this finished.”

  “Peter—"

  “I’ll have Gavin’s bedframe back to them by the end of the week.”

  “You know very well that Gavin isn’t in a hurry for it,” she said.

  “But you are, Clara,” he answered.

  “You shouldn’t work out here. It’s cold and getting dark.”

  “I have the lantern to see by.”

  “Peter—"

  “Just go inside before you catch cold.”

  There was nothing in his words or deeds onto which she could hang her anger and let it remain. After he came in to eat, they sat at the table in silence. There was nothing to say that could breach the moat between her words earlier in the day and his fortress-like response. She knew that she had hurt his feelings but she didn’t know why. Her family understood her character and did not react this way; they simply tolerated her temper.

  She wasn’t wrong in what she had said. She was sure of that. But Peter gave her no opening to make, if not an apology—why would she apologize if she had done nothing wrong—then an olive branch of some kind. She didn’t realize that he had this much resolve in his character; where was merry, easy-going, cheerful Peter Edwards, the man who seemed to see the good side of everything and who loved her so much that he tolerated her occasional sharp tongue? She would not be ill-humored without cause, Clara assured herself.

  “Peter . . . Long Sally is coming over tomorrow so that we can work on the list for the children. She sent word this afternoon to let me know.”

  He made a sound of assent as he concentrated on the beef stew. It was one of his favorite menu options. She had not made it to placate him, of course; it was a cold day and stew was the sort of meal that suited chilly temperatures. The bread was freshly baked and its aroma hung about the air in the house; Peter called it a food blanket when he smelled the meals that she had cooked. That was what he had said before. He had had very little to say tonight, except to compliment her on her cooking, which he always did.

  “She’ll be useful,” he said. “She knows the camp folks.”

  “Yes. . . will you have a carved toy for every child?”

  This time he did look up. His thick reddish-brown hair was in need of a trimming again, it was down past his collar. She had trimmed it with her scissors the last time and Peter had said she’d been as good as the Newton barber and a whole lot prettier. She hoped he would ask her to trim it again before her parents arrived.

  “Of course I will,” he said. “You don’t think I’d give to some and not the others, do you?”

  “That’s not what I meant!” she said it loudly, almost hoping to goad him into an equally intemperate response so that they could have an argument and then resolve it.

  But he said nothing.

  “Would you like another slice of bread?” she asked.

  “I’ll get my own,” he said. “You have enough to do.”

  There was nothing wrong with the words. But she felt as if he had rebuffed her. She realized that one of the reasons she enjoyed meals with Peter was because it gave her to opportunity to offer him the food that she had made with her own hands and to savor the satisfaction that he took in eating it.

  “It’s not any trouble to spread butter on a slice of bread,” she said.

  “Clara . . . any act that you or I do, if it’s not done with love, it might as well not be done at all.”

  “Is that why you’re making the bed now? Because you love me?” she demanded. “I don’t think that’s the reason. I think you want to punish me for what I said and that’s why you’re coming up from the mine, after you’ve worked down below all day, and then building the bed so that you can return the one we’re using to Gavin.”

  “Just because I want to return Gavin’s bed doesn’t mean I want to punish you, Clara,” he said.

  “That’s how it feels. It doesn’t occur to you that—"

  “Clara.” His voice was quiet but somehow, she knew that there was more danger in his low tone than if he had bellowed. “Don’t say what you can’t take back. I said I love you and I do. I said we’re married and we’ll have to fix it; we are and we do. I’ll do my part. You’ll have to do yours.”

  “What exactly do you expect me to do?” she confronted him, her anger coming loose from the fragile constraints she had tried to place upon it. “I am doing exactly what a wife should do, am I not? Is the house not clean? Are you not fed? Are your clothes not washed?”

  “Is that what marriage means to you?”

  His simple query felt like an ambush. “Is this not what a wife is supposed to do?”

  “I thought that a husband and wife are supposed to love each other.”

  “And so I do!”

  “I think you’re confusing what you do with what you feel,” he said, getting up from the table.

  She washed the dishes in silence while Peter sat in the parlor, in front of the fire, carving. Her temper continued to send out sparks of anger that she could not douse and as she washed each dish and fork, each cup and pan, she could feel the layers of emotion piling on top of each other, built as if they were bricks connected by the mortar of her sense of injustice. It was Peter who had not been honest with her and not told her that he had furnished her home with borrowed things; it was Peter who had lacked the sense of responsibility that a man planning to become a husband ought to have shown; it was Peter who had allowed her to believe that he loved her and that everything was perfect.

  She had always been the most emotional of the three sisters; Minnie was stalwart but measured in her reactions; Hazel was a mediator by nature. For Clara, a sense of outrage was as much a part of her as her auburn tinted hair. Father had teased her for it; his mother had been a redhead, he told her, and it was like watching Independence Day firecrackers going off when she was in a tizzy. Clara knew how her grandmother must have felt.

  She finished washing the dishes, dried them and put them away, then emptied the basin of the water outside. She returned to the house, intent on having it out with Peter over his refusal to acknowledge his failings as a husband.

  When she stood in the entrance of the parlor, she stopped. Peter was bent over his carving. She could feel his tiredness, could detect it in the weary curve of his back. But he didn’t stop, because he was carving toys for the children and even though he would rather have gone to bed, he was here, still working, because she wanted to have a Christmas celebration for the mining camp children.

  Suddenly, Clara was overcome by an emotion she didn’t recognize. She felt the tears surging up from within, hot tears that seemed to burst from her eyes like fountains.

  “Peter!” she cried out, rushing over to him and pressing her hands against his bent-over back.

  He turned around and she saw the tiredness in his eyes. Peter never showed weariness and his eyes were always brimming with the vitality that branded him.

  “I don’t know what to say to you!” she exclaimed.

  She wanted him to hold her close and to assure her that everything was just as it had
always been, and that this episode was forgotten.

  Instead, she heard him sigh. “Clara,” he said. “I think you must be used to getting your way in just about anything and I suppose that standing up to you is like trying to stand up to a wildfire. The flames keep coming.”

  “Peter,” she said, her lovely face streaked with tears, “I just want everything to be the way it was between us.”

  Peter took his thumb and methodically wiped her tears away. But the gesture was not one of reconciliation.

  “That’s why folks need to watch what words they use against one another. Go on up to bed. I’m going to stay up a little while longer.”

  “I don’t want to go up without you.”

  “No, that’s not so,” he said. “You want me to act like going to bed will be like it always is for us. But there are words that can’t be unspoken and they’ll be with us in bed. You know it and I know it. Or maybe you don’t know it, Clara. I guess I can’t say for sure what you know; I’m bewitched by looking at you and I reckon that means that sometimes, I don’t pay attention to what I should.”

  “Peter,” she tried again. “Let’s not be angry. I don’t like being angry with you.”

  “Are you sorry for being angry?”

  “Am I—you know, it’s not as if I’m the only one at fault here,” she replied.

  He smiled sadly. “That’s a point you’ve already made. And I’m rectifying it. The bed will be made by the end of the week. It’ll take me longer to make a wagon; you’ll need the one Harley loaned us and I can’t expect you to ride Angel when you have some getting-about to do.”

  “You’re making this all about what you have to do because of what I said!” she accused him.

  “I’m trying to work my way to an apology,” he said. “I’m not there yet, no more than you are. I reckon we’ll get there. I hope so, because marriage is a long, cold lot of years if two people can’t forgive each other.”

  She turned on her heel and went up the stairs to the bedroom. If he wanted to be that way, then let him. He could work outside until the snow came and she’d just let him do it. If he wanted to freeze just to satisfy his own pride, then he could do it.

  It was hours later when she finally heard Peter’s tread upon the stairs. He undressed in silence, not lighting the candle to eliminate the darkness from the room. Together, the lack of light and the absence of his words seemed to create a growing hole between them, one which took on a form of its own when he got into the bed and stayed on his side so that their bodies did not touch.

  Clara remained on her side of the bed, pretending that she was already asleep. She hoped he thought that she was sleeping soundly and that their quarrel was not affecting her in the least. If he was going to refuse to recognize his own faults, then she was not going to be the first one to make amends. This should have been such a happy time for her, preparing for the Christmas holiday and a visit from her parents. But he was ruining everything!

  Chapter 16

  Long Sally had two of her youngest children in tow when she arrived the following day. One was an infant in her arms, the other was old enough to walk, but just barely.

  “I would have come for you,” Clara said in consternation when she opened the door to admit the miner’s woman standing there. “I didn’t know you were bringing your children.”

  “That’s no matter, although if you’re offering me and mine a ride home, I won’t say no. Henry here gets to be quite a burden after a bit; little Sadie, she’s too little to be a bother yet.”

  “How many children do you have?” Clara led the way to the kitchen, where a hot pot of coffee was waiting. She poured coffee into cups for Long Sally and for herself, then looked in confusion at the children.

  Long Sally laughed. “I’ll take care of Sadie,” she said with an earthy laugh, gesturing at her bosom. “And Henry, he’ll splash half of what he drinks all over him.”

  “I can draw water from the well for him,” Clara offered. “If he splashes it on the floor, it won’t matter, it’s only water.”

  “If he’s thirsty or hungry,” Long Sally said, “he’ll let me know. You asked me how many children I have. I’ve got five; bore eight, but lost three.”

  “Three! I’m so very sorry for your losses.”

  Long Sally accepted Clara’s sympathy with a matter-of fact expression. “I suppose a mining camp isn’t the best place to bring a child into the world,” she said, looking quickly at Clara to determine her reaction.

  After her quarrel with Peter, Clara was less likely to spout out words without putting thought behind them. “If that is your home,” she said carefully, “that is where your children will be born. It is a pity that Newton lacks a doctor, though. Perhaps a doctor could have helped.”

  “I lost ‘em at birth,” Long Sally said.

  “These two look very healthy,” Clara noted. And they were clean, too, she saw, wondering if their mother had made sure that they were washed and dressed in clean clothing before she left.

  “The ones that lived are healthy,” Long Sally agreed. “These two, they’re too small to be in your play.”

  It was not a play, Clara wanted to say. One could not reduce the story of the birth of Christ to the form of a play. But Long Sally didn’t know any better, she supposed.

  “What about your other children?”

  “Gert, she’s seven,” Long Sally said. “She’ll do whatever you tell her to do. No talking, you said? No reading? Gert can’t read. None of my kids can read.”

  “They won’t need to read anything,” Clara said. She felt relief that the children would not insist on having speaking parts. If they could not read, they could not ruin the story with a miscellaneous assortment of accents and bad grammar, she reasoned.

  “Who’ll be doing the speaking? That narrator that you mentioned . . . who’s doing that?”

  “I haven’t decided yet on a choice for narrator.”

  “You doing it?”

  “No, I shall be singing. Singing out of doors can be demanding on the voice, so I don’t wish to tax mine by speaking.”

  Long Sally sipped her coffee. “I reckon Pete would do it if you asked him. He reads proper. When my last baby before Sadie died in my arms, Pete came over to our tent and read Scripture. The Reverend buried the baby, but to my mind, Pete’s reading of the Good Book was as good as anything the preacher said.”

  “I . . . haven’t discussed it with him.”

  “He’s a good man. Worked every spare moment he had on this house,” Long Sally recalled. “Course the men teased him about it, going to such lengths to build a fancy house like that. He said he didn’t want his Boston bride—that’s what he always called you before you got here, his Boston bride—to miss seeing what she was used to seeing, so he’d make her a little bit of Boston right here in Colorado. It’s a mighty pretty house,” Long Sally said, looking up at the ceiling, down at the floor, over at the walls as if she were studying the design.

  “Yes. Yes, he did it very well.”

  “I’ll wager you didn’t expect to see nothing this fine when you got here, not in Colorado, did you?”

  “I—did not know what to expect,” Clara said honestly. “I had never been this far West before. My family’s travels were either along the East coast, or across the Atlantic.”

  “Fancy ways over there,” Sally said. “I hear they got inside privies in those fine homes. Pete didn’t want you to feel that you’d come to some backwoods shantytown, so he put his back into making an outhouse that would be a comfort to you. The men joshed him, told him that his fancy privy was bigger than most miners’ tents. Pete don’t take no mind of teasing, he just keeps going along on his own way. Nothing ruffles his feathers.”

  Clara did not correct this impression. Her feelings toward Peter were very confusing today. She longed for everything to be as it was before, for him to make jokes and steal kisses the way he always had. At the same time, she needed for him to admit that he was the one who had done
wrong and that she was not at fault. He gave no indication that he intended to do either. He had gotten up earlier than usual, before she rose, and had kissed her perfunctorily on her cheek while she lay in bed, pretending to still be asleep. His conduct, she realized, was beyond reproach. But without the leavening of his affection behind his actions, even a kiss was no more than a courtesy.

  She realized what she had not known before and that was the way intimacy changed a woman. The comfort of Peter’s body and the wholehearted pleasure that he took in her were things she had taken for granted until suddenly, they were missing. It was like being under the blankets on a cold morning and then suddenly, all of the covers were pulled away and all that was left was the chill.

  “We should make the list now,” Clara said, “of the children’s ages.”

  “Will there be parts for all of ‘em in this play?”

  “That was not my original intention, I thought it would be beneficial for the children to watch the re-enactment of the Christmas story. If there are younger children in the camp, they would not be of an age to take part. How many are young?”

  “Depends on what you call young,” Long Sally said, finishing her coffee with an appreciative slurp. “My Sadie and Henry, they’ll stay with me and my man. But Gert, she’s old enough to stand where she’s told to, and Clyde, he’s almost nine. Martha, she’ll want the biggest part,” Sally said. “I reckon that’s Mary.”

  Clara cringed internally at the thought of the role of Mary being portrayed by the daughter of someone like Long Sally, undoubtedly a good woman but not a refined one.

  “How old is Martha?” she asked politely.

  “Thirteen. She’s tall for her age, tall like me. I have to slap the men; they think she’s sixteen and old enough for what they want, but my Martha isn’t going to end up some miner’s own personal soiled dove, not while I have strength in these two hands.”