“I won’t listen to this.” Mother’s voice is shaky but shrill. She rises, staring at Rosalie. Then she leaves the room, her shoes scraping against the wood floor as if she can’t even lift her feet, as if she’s forgotten how to walk.
“You can’t have him,” Rosalie repeats, talking to the air, and Mother returns, wringing her hands together. She barely makes the doorway before she leaves again. Again returns. Asia can see that if John doesn’t come home, all three of them will go mad. They will die of starvation here, in the house that Father built, each one madder than the next.
* * *
—
In the morning, the snow is no longer falling. The sun rises and that pink and yellow is reflected on the clean, white page of the yard. Icicles hang like teeth from the window frames. Asia is leaden with exhaustion. She melts a bowl of snow on the parlor fire, takes it upstairs to wash the night from her face. When she brushes her hair, a knot of it remains in the bristles. She feels as listless and limp, as resigned and hopeless, as the possum they’d trapped. She tries to think of the very last thing she’d said to John, but it was too ordinary to be memorable. Nor can she remember what he’d said to her. What she remembers is how he’d once said that she’d marked him for a martyr’s death. Would this be that, frozen to death while trying to feed his family?
She goes into John’s bedroom, lies on his bed. She can smell his muddy, smoky scent in the quilt she herself made for him. The antlers, still dripping with their weaponry, hang above her, casting shadows like bony fingers against the wall. She should get up. She should put on her riding clothes, saddle Fanny, and ride out to the cabins, get the men to go and search. But she’s too afraid of what they’ll find.
She makes it as far as John’s window. From there she has the best view in the house of the buried lane. She sees John, tamping down the snow as he comes, leading a cow and making his slow way home. She waits just long enough to be sure that he’s real, before running, sobbing, calling for Mother and Rosalie, downstairs to meet him, shoeless out into the snow.
* * *
—
It turns out that the women’s fears were not exaggerated. His escape was a narrow one. He’d walked for hours, the wind blowing into his face, snow coating his sleeves, encasing his gloves and boots, his hat and the scarf over his face until he must have looked like a snowman walking. The drifts were high. He must wade sometimes and force his way forward, never certain he hadn’t lost the road. Suddenly, chilled to the heart, he was overwhelmed with the need to sleep. It seemed like such a reasonable thing to do—rest for a bit, close his stinging eyes—that he had to deliver stern lectures to himself, saying that to sit down for even a moment would be his death. The argument in his head only stopped when, through the blur of snow, he thought he saw a light.
Fairyland, he thought, because he was just that far out of his mind, but the light turned out to be real, the Parker farm at long last. He was taken inside, so frozen he was unable at first to speak or think. Mr. Parker poured brandy down his throat and whipped him about the chest and shoulders with the flat of his hands until John came back into himself.
His plan to take the cow and leave for home immediately was forcibly overridden. While the women had been mad with fear, John had been tucked safely into a warm bed and sound asleep.
The cow is the most beautiful Asia has ever seen. They name her Lady Parker and crowd about her in the barn, drinking glass after glass of warm, foamy milk. Then Rosalie, Asia, and John take turns at the churn. How long since they had butter? Cheese? A cow. A cow. My kingdom for a cow, Asia thinks. And yet, joyous as Asia is, contented and full for the first time in days, she cannot forget that the kingdom they nearly paid for this cow was John’s life. A world without John! She can’t even bear to think of it.
* * *
—
They live through the winter. Spring feels like a season of plenty, summer the same. John goes about his grim farm work, the harvests as bad as ever. Each year they fall further behind.
The leaves turn color. Another terrible winter looms.
xvi
But Edwin gets there first.
* * *
—
Word has gotten out. Edwin Booth is returned from the gold country. A rich man has come to town. Neighbors are already gathered, waiting on the front lawn, when his carriage arrives, chased down the lane by young men, some of whom were only babies when he left. He swings lightly from the carriage to the ground, and into the cheering crowd. The boys quarrel for the privilege of wrestling his heavy trunks into the parlor.
It’s been four years since Asia saw Edwin and though still boyish, he’s also completely transformed. He’s wearing a velvet cape pinned shut at the top with a brooch of diamonds and nuggets—a parting gift, he will tell them later, from the ladies of San Francisco. His boots are red with swirling designs stitched over the vamp and the uppers. With his dark skin, black curls, and exotic clothes, he looks like a prince from The Arabian Nights. Asia can see how shabby and tattered poor John looks beside him. She knows she looks the same. She’s suddenly shy, too awed by his magnificence to throw herself into his arms when he comes to hug her.
She sees the effort he makes to adjust his face as he greets Rosalie. Is Rosalie so altered? Asia can’t remember when Mother stopped telling Rosalie to stand up straight, but it was quite some time ago. One shoulder is now permanently higher than the other.
The crowd in the yard, half of them black and half of them white, show no sign of leaving. Edwin moves among them, clapping the ones he knows on their backs, shaking hands with those he doesn’t. He pays particular court to the little Hall girls, who dance about his legs and stand on his red toes. Laughter and babble and through it all, Edwin looking pleased but abashed, and running his hand through his hair. When he laughs, he throws his head back, a mannerism Asia doesn’t remember from before.
Ann Hall appears with a buttermilk cake she’s whipped up for the impromptu party. She tells Asia to pass around cups of mint tea, which Asia does with a smiling face, all the while wishing she could make them all go away and leave Edwin to his family. Luckily their stores of hard cider are insufficient to the day or the men would never have gone home.
As it is, the party doesn’t end until dusk. Only then does Edwin make it the last few steps, up the porch and into the parlor. It’s the first time he’s been inside Tudor Hall. Mother takes him through so that he can admire the size of the rooms, the number of windows. The house looks to its best advantage at just this time of day when the fireflies blink in the grass outside and the time has come to light the lamps in the parlor.