“I’m not a girl, I am your guardian,” Clara had reminded him.
“He cries, sometimes, at night,” she’d confessed to Asahel, so he’d let her in. And it was wonderful, far better than the windowless room allotted to him at the dark end of the narrow passageway in the house. “If I hear him crying,” Asahel had told her, “I will come and get you.” He had moved to touch her hand with his, but then retracted it. So it had happened, from the first day, that Hercules had been adopted into the all-male brotherhood of the barn, and Clara had unpacked her Icarus trunk, her father’s paintings and her mother’s embroidered linens in the room that had been built by Edward to consummate the future happiness and solace of his parents. On her first night there, she’d realized that the house, with this arrangement, was occupied, solely, by women and that if there should be an unexpected occurrence in the dark, an intruder or a bear or fire or a snake, there was no man inside to help. She’d unpacked Amelia’s tea set and placed it, ceremoniously and showily, on the center shelf of one of the highboys in the kitchen, and then she’d unpacked Amelia’s sewing basket and placed the razor-sharp steel scissors defensively beneath her pillow. Then on the third night there, before she’d accustomed herself to the natural terrifying sounds that a strange house makes, she’d been woken from a dead sleep by the noise of something moving in the kitchen. She’d closed her fingers on the scissors and had sat up, stopping her breathing so she could listen better. And there it was: a vocative murmuring, like a dove, perhaps, or an owl, and then the scraping of a chair leg or the bench across the stone floor, and then a precise and chilling clinking noise, one she knew inarguably, from experience, as the sound of a fine china cup striking a fine china saucer.
Not really thinking what she’d do if there were an actual intruder, Clara had made her way into the passageway in the dark, her bare feet stinging on the cold stone floor, her hand around the scissors, holding them as if their double blades were a single-edged knife, and was surprised to see the fluid shadows of a lantern’s light playing on the floor in front of her, coming from the kitchen. Still not weighing the consequences she burst upon the scene, scissors raised above her head, to discover the two Indians at tea, sitting at the long pine table with her mother’s cups and saucers in their hands, a jug of whiskey between them and, to her right, a redheaded man, tall, his suspenders down around his waist, standing at the copper basin, shirtless, shaving. He’d turned to her, his razor in his hand, his face and beard half lathered, and all she would remember would be the color of his eyes, a blue more honed, more steely and more deadly than the weapons both of them were holding. Edward, she had realized.
He neither moved nor said a word but his gaze, steady and unwavering, bored into her, showing no emotion, as if he were a pane of glass passively returning her reflection, and she suddenly realized she must look a fright, like a woman from a madhouse, her linen shift open at the neck, her hair in disarray around her shoulders. She brought the scissors down to her side and took a small step backward, uncomfortable in his gaze and suddenly aware that not only he but all of them, the Indians, too, were staring at her. I’m Clara. I heard a noise, she wanted to say, but couldn’t, her heart suddenly too large in her chest for her to catch her breath. She took another tiny step, lifting her feet from the cold stone to warm them, and her eyes involuntarily left Edward’s and fell once more on the Indians. She parted her lips, once more trying to speak, and turned back to Edward, the unspoken thought, she knew, flashing in her eyes: They’re using my mother’s china.
You’re using my house, his challenged.
“I’m sorry,” she finally spoke, and turned and fled.
It was not the initial encounter with him that she had anticipated; and he was not the man she had expected—although, truth be told, she’d formed no image in her mind, nor any preconsidered judgment about Edward, save that he would most likely be a version of his brother, and that he had had the foresight, perhaps romantic, but most certainly optimistic, to build a room for his parents that was the most civilized, beautiful room in this largely uncivilized, not beautiful house. When she’d been unpacking her Icarus trunk, pinning her father’s paintings to the walls and rearranging the sparse furniture, she’d noticed details in the making of the room—a heart drawn in the mortar between beams, the initials “ESC” carved in wood—that had made her stop to consider just what kind of man this Edward was. She had thought he would be kind—easy to break into a smile, like Asahel. She had thought she would like him, without even trying. And he her—again, like Asahel. She had not considered that he might be cold or unfeeling or that he wouldn’t like her and what that would mean. What does it mean when a man doesn’t speak, when he holds himself bound in silence like those first Indians she’d seen selling badly made trinkets at the depot in Bismarck? She would seek him out in the morning, she had determined—seek him out and solicit a welcome or, at least, a new introduction. And though that helped her to sleep, she didn’t sleep well, knowing that he and the unnamed Indians were a small distance away, and near dawn it didn’t take more than a brief tap on her door to wake her: it was Eva. “Mother’s sick,” she told her through the door. Clara pulled on a shawl and followed her to where Ellen lay in the next room on her side in bed, her knees drawn up. “Pain,” she uttered. Her face was gray.
“Where?” Clara asked, and Ellen had pointed low on her back. Clara placed a hand on Ellen’s head, then felt along her jaw beneath her ears, prised her legs down and felt along her abdomen, rolled her over and pressed along her back, then accidentally bumped against Eva, standing next to her. “She doesn’t have a fever,” Clara whispered. “But where’s the nearest doctor if we need one?”
“Brisbane Island,” Eva told her.
“None over here?”
“Only for the animals.”
“Aunt Ellen, what kind of pain is it?” Clara asked. “Sharp or dull?”
“Sharp as the devil’s tooth, Amelia.”
“Did you urinate this morning?”
“Did I what—?”
Clara slid the chamber pot from beneath the bed, swirled the contents and offered Eva a whiff. Then she showed Eva how to administer a mustard pack to Ellen’s lower back and she made Ellen drink a beaker of water while she watched.
“She has to drink a beaker every hour,” Clara instructed Eva. “She’s passing a kidney stone.”
Eva squeezed Clara’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.
“Edward’s back,” Clara mentioned.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“When he’s here he draws two pails of water in the morning from the pump out in the yard and leaves them for us on the porch.”
“And when he’s not here?”
“I have to draw the pails myself.”
“What else do you do?”
“I’m sorry—?”
“Around here.”
“I do all the cooking. And the laundry. And the cleaning.”
“But then how do you—how does the household—how do we make money?”
“Couple days a week, Asahel and Edward job out at the sawmill.”
“And that’s enough?”
“For what?”
“Enough to pay for everything we need?”
“Well, look around. Does it look like we need much?”
Later that morning, when she and Eva had been in the kitchen cleaning vegetables, Clara took the subject up again. “What about a school? Hercules needs schooling.”
“Christian school on Brisbane, I believe.”
“None over here?”
“Nothing that I’ve heard of.”
“But there must be children?”
“Plenty.”
“Well where do they all learn?”
“To read, you mean?”
“To read, to write—”
“I never thought about it. I don’t know.”
“Maybe we could teach them.”
“You and me?”
/> “Why not? Teachers are paid.”
“Well, we couldn’t just start, now, could we? Wouldn’t we have to ask someone?”
“I don’t know. Is there a mayor or—is there any kind of government?”
“There’s the ministry. I suppose we could ask the reverend—”
“Anything besides the ministry?”
“The sawmill.”
“Do they hire women?”
“Have you ever seen a sawmill?”
Edward entered from outside without a word and poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot steaming on the stove. He was wearing doeskin pants the color of the core of the potato Clara was peeling, a starched blue denim shirt, a silk neckerchief the color of spring lilac and a rust-colored leather broad-brimmed hat. He was, she realized with surprise, altogether the most striking man she’d ever seen.
Eva stood and smoothed her skirt, silent and attendant on her brother. Then Edward turned and, looking only at his sister, asked, “How is our Mother?”
“Better.”
“Good.”
“Less pain.”
“Excellent.”
“Clara has ascertained it is a kidney stone.”
Awkward silence.
Then Eva prompted, “You’ve met Clara. Clara, this is Edward. Edward, Clara.”
And to her own amazement, Clara stood.
He stared at her, still not speaking a word, his eyes so blue above the denim shirt she thought her heart would burst. She cleared her throat. “I—my brother and I want to thank you, Edward, for—”
“Express to Mother my concern,” he addressed Eva, interrupting. “I will,” Eva had replied.
And he was gone, bounding down the porch steps in a single jump, racing across the open compound in long, urgent strides as if he were the only Greek at Marathon—disappearing into the barn. That was the way that he appeared to Clara through the following weeks and months—running, always running, on the move and in a hurry to escape, to be somewhere else, to disappear, to light out, to be gone. He never took his meals with them and only rarely came inside the house for longer than a brief, perfunctory but daily visit. Several times he disappeared for a week at a time and Asahel would let her know, Gone again, but he’ll be back. You’ll see. He always comes back home.
As the winter wore on and the rains increased, she began to feel more trapped in the aimlessness that was the Curtises’ communal life. Isolation, too, began to take its toll. Except for the two Indians who came several times a week looking for work from Edward, visits from anyone were rare, and except for the buckboard ride every Sunday to the Baptist Missionary church house on the island, Clara and the Curtis women had nowhere else to go. Clara had struck out on foot with Hercules looking for a neighbor or a place where people gathered, a general store or a trading post but between the Curtis homestead and the sawmill there were only two other houses, each a mile apart and occupied by kind but largely backward and illiterate Russians. She went several times with Eva and Ellen to the Baptist Missionary ministry, hoping to meet other men and women of some education and social purpose, even if only driven by their missionary zeal, and she had tried to inaugurate a few acquaintanceships that foundered swiftly on her inability to commit her soul to their beliefs. There was a school, but it was a Sunday school, lessons administered by the reverend’s wife, and Clara soon found herself solely responsible, and underprepared, for Hercules’s education. The books she’d brought with her were those curious and intricately illustrated books in Dutch, French and Italian she had acquired with the Icarus trunk and some of her father’s former volumes on the art of painting, for which Hercules exhibited no evidence of inherited skill. His skills, it developed, first to her disapproval, and then with her slow acceptance, were in the outdoor life, a husbandry of animals both large and small, following Asahel and Edward through their chores, growing stronger, more robust with every passing month, even as she grew more pale, despairing and alone. Her initial attempts at kinship with Eva reached a level of polite ease but never ignited into a bond of shared ambition. Eva’s ultimate desire in life, Clara had determined, was to be a wife, a wife and then a mother, to continue her present routine, an existence that was distinguished by its service to others, and Clara had watched her flirt shyly but convincingly with every unmarried man at the Sunday services. Asahel, alone, afforded Clara the opportunity for conversation beyond the mere exchange of pleasantries and domestic business, but there were not enough leisure minutes in the day to accommodate shared discourse. They were always working, it became clear to her, at something that would never have a lasting meaning or lasting effect. Her life, their lives, seemed to be being abraded by the daily drudgery, diminishing away. She had never known such physical labor, nor guessed the price that it exacted on the mind, not only was her body taxed in ways she’d never experienced before, but her ability to engage in playful thought was fleeting. Her skin grew rough, her mind grew dull, her hope grew dim, and the only happiness she knew was in watching Hercules radiate the natural joy of his existence. Work was what defined each day—tending the stove, heating water, carrying the chamber pots to the outhouse, cleaning them, cooking, slaughtering a chicken, cleaning it—and work, the labor of it, was what drove her into dreamless sleep each night. Then one day in late March a false spring broke from the coastal winter gloom, the sky was clear of clouds from early morning and the sun shone in a bright and faultless sky. Clara decided to hang laundry on a line stretched between two fir trees beside the house and as she was wrestling a wet bedsheet through the mangle, Edward suddenly appeared in the yard with a leather ball and kicked it high into the air. Hercules, followed by Asahel, ran to retrieve it, and a game of kick-and-catch ensued among them. Clara heard them call to one another back and forth as she stretched the bedsheet on the line and pinned it. Then she heard Hercules begin to laugh—it was a sound as bright and sunny as the day—and she peeked around the sheet to watch. Hercules was running with the ball while Edward and Asahel ran after him, dodging and faking, and all the while Hercules was laughing, laughing as if sadness had never touched his life, as if he were a tiny child again and innocent of death’s swift thoroughness. She wondered briefly if he would have ever been so happy in St. Paul, if their parents hadn’t died, and she was suddenly overcome by a grief so sudden and weighty that it knocked the air out of her chest and shook her shoulders as she cried. She hadn’t cried this way when her parents had died and now she cried as much for the loss of them as for the loss of her former self. She hung onto the sheet so she wouldn’t fall but her pity for herself bent her over and she couldn’t catch her breath between her sobs. It was as if she’d saved up all the grief of the last months for this moment and she couldn’t bring herself under control—nevertheless, she was aware that the leather ball had suddenly bounced past her and when she turned to look, wiping at the tears flooding her vision, there stood Edward only inches from her, staring at her with those blue eyes. Again, he didn’t speak. But as another wave of weeping overwhelmed her he stepped to her and pulled her head onto his chest and held her tightly in his arms. She could feel the whole length of his body pressing against hers, and she could smell him. There was a vein pulsing in his neck where his shirt was open and she watched it for a few beats then put her lips to it and closed her eyes.
A few seconds later she was calm and she felt him lessen his hold on her, and then he backed away. Asahel was there, a look of quiet desperation in his eyes, and then Hercules was running past her with the ball and both Edward and Asahel ran after him.
So, in the end, it was love that saved her.
Un-named, unrecognized, at first; and certainly, for a long time, unrequited.
The feeling came unexpectedly and unannounced—an unheralded quickening in the air around her, an excitement of the mind, and, unmistakably, she began to look forward, rather than to dread, each new day. She began to look forward to what each new day might bring—a glimpse of him, or an encounter, a look, perhaps a word. She
began to recover a sense of well-being, a sense of purpose, even if it was only to engage in a fantasy of doing something that would make him stop and notice her or saying something that would make him smile. But in the same week of their embrace Edward had disappeared again and she was left to daydream and to draw ungrounded and wildly optimistic assumptions. When he returned he barely noticed her, which only fueled what she now acknowledged had become a full-fledged infatuation. It wasn’t him, she told herself. It wasn’t specifically for him that she pined, but for the embrace, that moment when, surrounded by another’s arms, her body had seemed less of a burden, had, in fact, seemed light. But then she’d see him and she’d realize her obsession was not an abstract passion like an artist’s, like her father’s passion for his work, but that it was a lover’s passion for the object of desire, for the object of her love. She was in love, and she had no one in whom to confide, no one from whom to seek advice and counsel, so she sought her mother in her mind, her mother’s ghost, her mother, who would have no doubt approved enthusiastically, encouraging her along the most reckless and outrageous path. He had embraced her, hadn’t he? And that stood for something, didn’t it? Despite his silence and his distance. But his silence and his distance stood for something, too, she knew. Stood for something far more certain and established in the man than any rare signal of emotion. Still her inclination to delude herself was too attractive: to know the physical embraces that her parents must have known, to breathe the scent of someone’s skin and feel his pulse against her lips—that was a seductive, even necessary, self-delusion. If it had happened once, surely it would come her way again. It would have to.
But it didn’t.
Edward stayed to himself, a revered but inaccessible cipher on the family’s periphery, until one day in May when he rode into the compound with a large contraption wrapped in blankets and strapped onto the back of the buckboard. The Curtis women came out on the porch, followed by Clara, as Asahel and Hercules helped Edward grapple the mystery item to the ground and unwrap it.