July felt awkward and embarrassed. He hadn't meant to ask such a question just then — and yet the question would be asked. He didn't know what to do about the cake batter, but didn't feel it proper just to lean over and eat it off her finger. He reached out and took as much of it as he could on one of his own fingers before he sampled it.
"Tastes fine," he said, but Clara looked annoyed, or scornful, or somehow displeased. He could never tell what her looks meant — all he registered was how uncomfortable they made him.
"I don't think you're much of a judge of sweets," Clara said, heat in her tone but a coldness in her gray eyes.
She ate the rest of the batter off her own finger and went back to stirring the cake. A minute later Lorena walked into the room and picked up the baby. July was hoping she would take the baby out of the kitchen, but instead she sat down at the table and began to sing to him. Then, to make matters worse, both girls came in and began to make over the baby too. Martin was laughing and trying to grab a spoon away from one of the girls. Clara looked at July again, and the look made him feel a fool. He didn't get an answer to his question and soon had to go back to doing his chores.
That night he wondered if he ought to leave. He could not stay around Clara without nursing hopes, and yet he could detect no sign that she cared about him. Sometimes he thought she did, but when he thought it over he always concluded that he had just been imagining things. Her remarks to him generally had a stinging quality, but he would often not realize he had been stung until after she left the scene. Working together in the lots, which they did whenever the weather was decent, she often lectured him on his behavior with the horses. She didn't feel he paid close attention to them. July was at a loss to know how anyone could pay close attention to a horse when she was around, and yet the more his eyes turned to her the worse he did with the horses and the more disgusted she grew. His eyes would turn to her, though. She had taken to wearing her husband's old coat and overshoes, both much too big for her. She wouldn't wear gloves — she claimed the horses didn't like it — and her large bony hands often got so cold she would have to stick them under the coat for a few minutes to warm them. She wore a variety of caps that she had ordered from somewhere — apparently she liked caps as much as she liked cake. None of them were particularly suited to a Nebraska winter. Her favorite one was an old Army cap Cholo had picked up on the plains somewhere. Sometimes Clara would tie a wool scarf over it to keep her ears warm, but usually the scarf came untied in the course of working with the horses, so that when they walked back up for a meal her hair was usually spilling over the collar of the big coat. Yet July couldn't stop his eyes from feasting on her. He thought she was wonderfully beautiful, so beautiful that merely to walk with her from the lots to the house, when she was in a good mood, was enough to make him give up for another month all thought of leaving. He told himself that just being able to work with her was enough. And yet, it wasn't — which is why the question finally forced itself out. He was miserable all night, for she hadn't answered the question. But he had spoken the words and revealed what he wanted. He supposed she would think worse of him than she already did, once she thought it over.
It was three days before they were alone again. Some soldiers needing horses showed up, and Clara asked them to spend the night. Then Martin got a bad cough and developed a high fever. Cholo was sent to bring the doctor. Clara spent most of the day sitting with the baby, who coughed with every breath. She tried every remedy she knew, with no effect. Martin couldn't sleep for coughing'. July went into the sickroom from time to time, feeling awkward and helpless. The boy was his child, and yet he didn't know what to do. He felt in the way. Clara sat in a straight chair, holding the child. He asked in the morning if there was anything special she wanted him to do and she shook her head. The child's sickness had driven out all other concerns. When July came back that evening, Clara was still sitting. Martin was too weak by then to cough very hard, but his breath was a rasp and his fever still high. Clara was impassive, rocking the baby's cradle, but not looking at him.
"I guess the doctor will be getting here soon," July said uncertainly.
"The doctor might have been gone in the other direction," Clara said. "This will be over before he gets here. He'll have had the ride for nothing."
"You mean the baby's dying?" July asked.
"I mean he'll either die or get well before the doctor comes," Clara said, standing up. "I've done all I can. The rest is up to Martin."
Clara looked at him and then, to his shock, walked over and put her head against his chest. She put her arms around him and held him tightly. It was so surprising that July almost lost his balance. He put his arms around her to steady himself. Clara didn't raise her head for what seemed like minutes. He could feel her body trembling and could smell her hair.
Then she stepped back from him as abruptly as she had come to him, though she caught one of his hands and held it a moment. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
"I hate it when a child is sick," she said. "I loathe it. I get too scared. It's like . . ." She stopped a minute to wipe the tears off her cheeks. "It's like there's something doesn't want me to get a boy raised," Clara said, her voice cracking.
July lay awake all night, remembering how it felt to have her take his hand. Her fingers had twined for a moment in his before she let go. It had seemed she needed him, else she wouldn't have squeezed so. It made him so excited that he couldn't sleep, yet when he went back upstairs in the morning and stepped into the sickroom, Clara was distant, though it was a fine sunny day and the baby's fever was down. His breath still rattled, but he was asleep.
"I could bring you up some coffee," July said.
"No, thanks, I know my way to the kitchen well enough," she said, standing up. This time she neither hugged him nor took his hand; she walked past him without a look. All he could do was follow her downstairs. Lorena and the girls had already made breakfast and Cholo came in to eat. July didn't feel hungry. The fact that Clara was displeased took his appetite away. He tried to think why she might be displeased, but could come up with no reasons. He sat numbly through breakfast and went out the door feeling that it would be hard to get his mind on work. He needed to repair the wheel of the big wagon, which had cracked somehow.
Before he could even get the wheel off, he saw Clara coming toward the tool shed. Though it was sunny, it was also very cold — her breath made little clouds. July was afraid the baby might have taken a turn for the worse, but that was not it. Clara was very angry.
"You'd do better to talk to me when I'm mad," she said, with no preamble. There were points of red in her cheeks.
"I'm no talker, I guess," July said.
"You're not much of anything, but you could be," she said. "I know you're smart, because Martin is, and he didn't get it all from your poor wife. But a fence post is more useful generally than you are."
July took it as a criticism of his work, which he felt he had done scrupulously.
"I've nearly got this wheel fixed," he said.
"July, I'm not talking about chores," she said. "I'm talking about me. I sat there all night in that room with your baby. Where were you?"
July had been thinking that he probably should have offered to sit with her. Of course, now it was too late. He wanted to explain that he was too shy just to come into a room where she was, particularly a bedroom, unless she asked him. Even coming into the kitchen, if she was alone, was not something he did casually. But he didn't know how to explain all the cautions she prompted in him.
"I wish now I had," he said.
Clara's eyes were flashing. "I told you how sickness frightens me," she said. "The only times I've ever wished I could die is when I've had to sit and watch a child suffer."
She was twisting one hand in the other. July, seeing that she was shivering, took off his coat and held it out to her, but Clara ignored the offer.
"I sit there alone," she said. "I don't want the girls to be there because I don't want t
hem to get death too much in their minds. I sit there and I think, I'm alone, and I can't help this child. If it wants to die I can't stop it. I can love it until I bleed and it won't stop it. I hope it won't die. I hope it can grow up and have its time. I know how I'll feel if it does die, how long it'll take me to care if I draw breath, much less about cooking and the girls and all the things you have to do if you're alive."
Clara paused. In the lots a sorrel stallion whinnied. He was her favorite, but this day she appeared not to hear him.
"I know if I lose one more child I'll never care again," she said. "I won't. Nothing will make any difference to me again if I lose one more. It'll ruin me, and that'll ruin my girls. I'll never buy another horse, or cook another meal, or take another man. I'll starve, or else I'll go crazy and welcome it. Or I'll kill the doctor for not coming, or you for not sitting with me, or something. If you want to marry me, why don't you come and sit?"
July realized then that he had managed to do a terrible thing, though all he had done was go to his room in the ordinary way. It startled him to hear Clara say she could kill him over such a thing as that, but he knew from her look that it wasn't just talk.
"Would you ever marry me?" he asked. "You never said."
"No, and I'm not about to say now," Clara said. "Ask me in a year."
"Why in a year?"
"Because you deserve to suffer for a year," Clara said. "I suffered a year's worth just last night, and I guess you were lying at your ease, dreaming of our wedding night."
July had no reply. He had never known a woman who spoke so boldly. He looked at her through the fog of then-breath, wishing she would at least take the coat. The cold made goosebumps on her wrists.
"I thought you were a sheriff once," Clara said. The stallion whinnied again, and, still watching July, she waved at the horse. He had the eyes of a sweet but bewildered boy in the body of a sturdy man. She wanted the sturdiness close to her, but was irritated by the bewilderment.
"Oh, I was a sheriff," he said.
"Didn't you ever give orders, then?" she said.
"Well, I told Roscoe when to clean the jail," July said.
"It ain't much, but it's more than we hear from you around here," Clara said. "Try telling me when to clean something, just for practice, once in a while. At least I'd get to hear a sound out of your throat."
Again, she refused the coat, though it was clear to him that she was in a somewhat better temper. She went over and rubbed the stallion's neck for ten minutes before going back to the house.
Then the other man, Dish Boggett, had to come, bringing the news that Augustus McCrae was dead. He had picked his way along the Platte River in a January blizzard. Both his horses were exhausted, but Dish himself seemed no worse for wear. He treated blizzards as a matter-of-fact occurrence.
It seemed to July that Clara took an instant liking to Dish Boggett, and he couldn't help feeling resentful, although he soon perceived that Dish had come to court Lorena, not Clara. Lorena had hardly spoken since she learned that Gus was dead. Clara immediately offered Dish a job — it was a hard winter and they were always behind. The colts would start coming soon, and they would be farther behind, so of course it was only sensible to hire another man, but July hated it. He had grown used to working with Clara and Cholo, and he had a hard time adjusting to Dish. Part of it was that Dish was twice as competent with horses as he was himself, and everyone immediately recognized Dish's value. Clara was soon asking Dish to do things with the horses that she had once let July do. July was more and more left with the kind of chores that a boy could handle.
To make matters worse, Dish Boggett was standoffish and made no attempt to make friends with him. Dish knew many card games and could even play charades, so he was a great hit with the girls. Many a night through the long winter, July sat against a wall, feeling left out, while Clara, Dish and the girls played games at the big kitchen table.
Dish tried every way he could to draw Lorena into some of the games, but the most Lorena would do was sit in the room. She sat silently, not watching, while July sat just as silently. He could not help but wish that Dish Boggett had got lost in Wyoming or had somehow gone on to Texas. Hardly a day passed without him seeing what he thought were signs that Clara was taken with the man. Sooner or later, when Dish gave up on Lorena, he would be bound to notice. July felt helpless — there was nothing he could do about it. Sometimes he sat near Lorena, feeling that he had more in common with her than with anyone else at the ranch. She loved a dead man, he a woman who hardly noticed him. But whatever they had in common didn't cause Lorena to so much as look his way. Lorena looked more beautiful than ever, but it was a grave beauty since news of the death had come. Only the young girl, Betsey, who loved Lorena completely, could occasionally bring a spark of life to her eyes. If Betsey was ill, Lorena nursed her tirelessly, taking her into her own bed and singing to her. They read stories together, Betsey doing the reading. Lorena could only piece out a few words — the sisters planned to teach her reading, but knew it would have to wait until she felt better.
Even Sally, usually so jealous of any attention her sister got, respected the fact that Betsey and Lorena were especially close. She would let off teasing Betsey if Lorena looked at her in a certain way.
Clara felt no terrible stab of grief when the news of Gus's death came. The years had kept them too separate. It had been a tremendous joy to see him when he visited — to realize that he still loved her, and that she still enjoyed him. She liked his tolerance and his humor, and felt an amused pride in the thought that he still put her above other women, despite all the years since they had first courted.
Often she sat out on her upper porch at night, wrapped in Bob's huge coat. She liked the bitter cold, a cold that seemed to dim the stars. Reflecting, she decided there had been something in what she and Gus had felt that needed separation. At close quarters she felt she would have struggled bitterly with him. Even during his brief visit she felt the struggle might start, and if it did start, gentler souls, such as July and Lorena, might have been destroyed.
In the dark nights on the ice-encrusted porch she occasionally felt a cold tear on her cheek. In Gus she had lost her ultimate ally, and felt that much more alone, but she had none of the tired despair she had felt when her children died.
Now there was July Johnson, a man whose love was nearly mute. Not only was he inept where feelings were concerned, he was also a dolt with horses. Loving horses as she did, Clara was hard put to know why she could even consider settling in with a man who was no better with them than Bob had been. Of course, the settling-in process was hardly complete, and Clara was in no hurry that it should be. Closer relations would probably only increase her impatience with him.
It amused her that he was so jealous of Dish, who, though friendly, companionable and an excellent hand, was not interested in her at all. His love for Lorena leaped out of every look he cast in her direction, although not one of them penetrated Lorena's iron grief. Clara herself didn't try to touch or change Lorena's grief — it was like Martin's fever: either it would kill her or it wouldn't. Clara would not have been surprised by a gunshot if it had come from Lorena's room. She knew the girl felt what she had felt when her boys died: unrelievable grief. In those times, the well-meaning efforts of Bob or the neighbors to cheer her up had merely affronted her. She hadn't wanted to live, particularly not cheerfully. Kindly people told her that the living must live. I don't, if my boys can't, she wanted to say to them. Yet the kindly people were right; she came slowly back to enjoyment and one day would even find herself making a cake again and eating it with relish.
Watching Lorena, as she sat blank with grief every day, scarcely stirring unless Betsey urged her to, Clara felt helpless. Lorena would either live or die, and Clara felt it might be die. Lorena's only tie to life was Betsey. She didn't care for sweets or men or horses; her only experience with happiness had been Gus. The handsome young cowboy who sent her countless looks of love meant nothing
to her. Pleasure had no hold on Lorena — she had known little of it, and Clara didn't count on its drawing her back to life. The young cowboy would be doomed to find his love blocked by Gus in death even as it had been in life. Betsey had a better chance of saving Lorena than Dish. Betsey worried about her constantly and tried to get her mother to do something.
"I can't make Mr. McCrae alive again, which is all she wants," Clara said. "What do you think I can do?"
"Make her not so sad," Betsey pleaded.
"Nobody can do that," Clara said. "I can't even make you not sad when you're sad."
Yet one day she did try. She came upon Lorie standing in the hall, her hair uncombed. She had the look of a beaten dog. Clara stopped and hugged her, as suddenly as she had hugged July Johnson. In him her hug had stirred a fever of hope; in Lorena it stirred nothing.
"I guess you wish you'd gone with him," Clara said. "It would have given you a little more time."
Lorena looked surprised — it was the one thing she had been thinking since the news came.
"I should have," she said.
"No," Clara said. "You. would have had a little more time, I grant you, but now you'd be stuck in Montana with a bunch of men who don't care that you loved Gus. They'd want you to love them. Dish wants it so much that he rode to you through the blizzards."
The thought of Dish merely made Lorena feel cold. "He wasted his time," she said.
"I know that, but don't expect him to realize it," Clara said.
"He bought me once, when I was a whore," Lorena said, surprised at the word on her tongue. She had never used it before.
"And Gus didn't?" Clara said.
Lorena was silent. Of course Gus had. She wondered if Clara would ask her to leave, knowing what she had been.
"Dish loved you and took the only way he had to get your attention," Clara said.
"He didn't get my attention," Lorena said. "He didn't get anything."