Clare took his field glasses and eased up the stairwell, where he had watched Aldine’s legs and hips as she rushed away in her nightgown and thin robe, up the stairs and out of sight, throwing her attic door closed behind her so everyone could hear. Then it had fallen quiet up there. He thought he would go up to her room. He would tell her in a quiet, solemn way that his mother was being bad-mannered to her. Worse than bad-mannered even. Monstrous. A declaration along those lines might coax her into tears, and tears might require comforting.
But when he reached the upstairs hallway, he was checked by sudden sounds exploding from the attic room, thuddings and reverberations, hard and furious seeming. She must have put on her thick lace-up shoes and was stomping here and there, slamming drawers, scraping the bedstead out of her way, perhaps even throwing things; that was anyhow what it sounded like. She didn’t need comforting. She needed calming, and that was a different task altogether.
All at once her door flew open. Clare stepped back into the shadows of his own room as her hard footsteps quickly descended and her form rushed by; then her shoes were again clacking hard on the wooden stairs and across the parlor floor. The mud porch door slammed closed behind her. Of all these sounds one was missing. She had not closed her attic door. Clare went to his bedroom window. He could see her marching through the low mist toward the barn, a kind of fierceness in her manner. She was going to quit. He could see it in her walk. She was going to demand to be paid and then she was going to quit. Smoke was rising now from the stack on the barn wall, so his father was definitely inside, working on something probably, tinkering, and then she would come in and he would look up and see her and she would demand her money and then whether she got it or not she would quit and then she would leave.
He took out his binoculars, adjusted the focus, and trained them on her moving form. He didn’t like it very well, though. Her walk was all grace and smoothness when you watched with the naked eye, but the glasses made her jumpy. But at the mouth of the barn she stopped and peered in and he could see her face in profile. Her tight, smooth face seemed so suddenly close that he held his breath. His watching now seemed almost intimate.
And then a surprise. Her face, which had been hard and determined, suddenly relaxed into a kind of softness. But why? What had happened?
Clare lifted his eyes above the field glasses. She was just standing there at the barn door looking in but even from this distance he could see that something had gone out of her. Her body was no longer rigid; her fierceness was gone. She stayed like that for a few seconds, just standing and looking in, and then she turned and walked beyond the barn past the empty pigpen, through the mist along the cut toward the creek. Artemis stole up behind her and began to amble alongside.
Clare watched them until they slipped down the cut and into the low fog and trees.
He set his field glasses into their case, put on his boots in the mud porch, and walked out to the barn.
His father was bent over the barrel stove, feeding in scraps of wood. Clare came closer until his father heard him and turned.
“Well, well,” he said. “Son One.”
His father’s little joke. There had never been and never would be a Son Two. Clare looked around. “What are you doing?”
His father cast his eyes off into the dimness. “Oh, there’s always something needing doing.” Then: “How are things indoors?”
“Kind of gloomy.” He waited a second or two. “Did you see Aldine?”
“See her where?”
“She came out to the barn. Mom in a real mean way told her to go put some decent clothes on her body and Aldine ran upstairs and put on her heavy clothes and marched out here like she was going to quit teaching and leave or something but she looked into the barn for a few seconds and then she just walked on.”
His father looked over to the barn door. Finally he said, “No. I didn’t see her.”
It fell silent. Clare was trying to make sense of the barn and his father but there was nothing to see or hear. A dove coo-cooing in the rafters was all. “Need me for anything?” Clare asked.
His father raked his fingers through his beard. “You might clean the water pan for the chickens. But otherwise stay or go as you please.” He smiled an unhappy smile. “It’s Christmas Day after all.”
Clare found the pail.
His father said, “Went on walking where?”
Clare had two pails in hand. “What?”
“You said the girl went on walking. Where did she go?”
“Oh. Toward the creek.”
Clare pumped and hauled water to the chicken house, then cleaned the mash residue from the pan, which Neva should have been able to do at her age but nobody asked her to. Cleaning the mash sludge made his fingers dirty and cold. Since Aldine had come, he didn’t like wiping his hands on his pants so he just put them in his pockets. On his way back to the house he walked past the barn without looking in so that his father wouldn’t think of something else he might do.
He tugged off his boots, then stood in the front room, still hot from the fire, too hot, he thought. He could hear the clinking of dishes in the kitchen, the dull movement of sullen bodies. They were all in there, he was almost sure. He padded up the stairs. What he was doing was less a decision than a response to a persistent hunger—he felt himself pulled up the stairs in the same way he would move toward the smell of bread baking in the kitchen.
The door was wide open. Her room was a mess. Inside, he took a deep breath and could smell her smell. It was as warm in the room as it might be in summer, but it wasn’t summer—through the window he could see the mist-covered corral and, beyond the gray ground fog, the stand of stark cottonwoods. The heat made the smells of her keener, and he felt almost as if he was no longer the Clare he had been until this moment but someone else, less tethered, who was moving in a wondrous dream. He picked up thrown bedding and smelled it before putting it neatly back into place. He pulled smooth the corners of the quilt. He smelled the pillow and pressed it to his face. He closed drawers, then opened others. He saw her threadbare underthings and stared at them a long time lying there in the drawer, and willed himself to close the drawer, but he could not. The slip was soft and had holes along the waistband and smelled of washing soda and borax. He wished he could buy her a new slip, and other things, too. He slid a finger through one of the holes and made it slightly bigger and then he folded it carefully and set it back just as it had been. When he eased open her flowered satchel he saw the Riverside Shakespeare. And then he was holding it. She’d marked her place in The Merchant of Venice, which he supposed she was reading. The bookmark was funny, though. All of the flowers, the letters on the petals . . .
It was quiet in the room and yet something made his whole body stiffen and turn.
Charlotte stood in the doorway staring at him.
Her eyes were bright. It was the cat inside her and he was the mouse. She said, “And what are you doing?”