THE LAMPS IN THE KITCHEN HAD BEEN LIT FOR HOURS. RAIN STILL pounded against the windows. Neither Imogene nor Sarah had mentioned Nate or his proposal of that afternoon.
“Wolf’s a little under the weather,” Sarah said, removing the boy’s place setting and putting it away. “I’m going to put him to bed with a dish of bread pudding. I think he’s taken a chill. That drenching Nate put him through seems to have aggravated it. He was feeling a little peaked before Mr. Weldrick came.” She scooped a bowl half-full of pudding and took a spoon from the drawer.
“Take a candle?”
“No need.” Slipping the spoon in her pocket, Sarah left the kitchen.
Imogene pushed the fried ham to the back of the stove, where it would stay warm, and took the potatoes from the oven. She squeezed them until their jackets burst open and put a chunk of butter in each.
Sarah returned, slipped into her place at the table, and said grace. Neither had an appetite, and after making a feeble attempt to eat, they cleared the dishes and went to sit by Wolf. The only light in the room spilled in through the open door from the living room. Wolf, round-faced as the moon, lay quiet, his arms at his sides.
Sarah smiled. “He’s asleep.”
“It’s a good sign.”
At the sound of voices, Wolf opened his dark eyes. “You sleep,” Sarah said, and he closed them obediently. Imogene laid the back of her hand against the curve of his cheek. “If the fever is not gone of itself by morning, we’ll call the doctor.”
In the morning he was worse; his eyes shone with an unnatural luster, and the skin of his face was drawn and hot. The bed gave him no comfort and he complained ceaselessly that there were rocks and spiders in it.
The doctor came at midmorning. It was influenza. People died of it in the winter. He’d seen whole mining camps wiped out. “Keep him warm,” he said. “As warm as he’ll let you. Sometimes the fever breaks.”
Imogene stood over Wolf. The little box bed came scarcely to her knees, and she loomed over it like a giantess. “I’ve been out in the rain, soaked to the skin a hundred times. When I was a girl at Elmira College in New York, I used to wash my hair Saturday afternoon before chapel. In winter it would freeze on the way across College Square and melt during prayers, dripping down my back. I never once caught cold.”
“Wolf’s a baby,” Sarah replied.
“Who would think a moment in the rain without a coat could chill him so much?”
“It was more than a moment; Mr. Weldrick made him go outside before you came home.”
Imogene shook as a tremor ran down her spine, and busied herself in the kitchen making strong broth.
They took turns sitting with Wolf, replacing the covers when he threw them off, and watching the fever consume him. Sarah grew pale and dark-eyed, mirroring the face of the child. She would not sleep even when Imogene sat with Wolf, and wouldn’t stay out of the room long enough to eat a proper meal.
Near midnight on the third night of Wolf’s illness, Imogene came in to sit with her.
“You ought to try to sleep, Sarah. You’ll get sick.”
Sarah shook her head. Her hair, plaited into one long braid, fell over her shoulder. She tied it in the sash of her robe to keep it out of the way. Wolf lay quiet in his little bed, the covers tucked up under his chin.
“He seems to be resting better,” Sarah said.
Imogene looked at the hollow eyes, their pupils twitching under the lids, and laid her hand on his chest. The fragile cage of flesh and bone trembled under her palm as Wolf labored for air. “Maybe.”
“Mr. Weldrick put him out in the rain with no coat.”
Imogene didn’t comment.
“I might have stopped him if I’d said something.”
“Don’t, Sarah. Nate Weldrick did what he did. You can’t blame yourself.”
In the early hours of morning, Imogene lay awake, the lamp turned low by her bedside. Sarah was sitting with Wolf in the other room. Too tired to concentrate on her book, Imogene lay listening. The rain had let up and the wind soughed through the wet and falling leaves. A low, piercing wail started. As if that had been the sound she was listening for, Imogene threw back the bedclothes and ran to the other room.
Hands clasped tightly in her lap, her shoulders hunched almost to her knees, Sarah keened a single, wavering, high-pitched note, and rocked herself. She looked up when Imogene came in.
“He’s just gone. Burned up.” She clawed at the air, trying to drag understanding from it. “Gone.”
Sarah turned her face against the familiar planes of her friend’s broad chest, and great gulping sobs tore out of her. Imogene held her, her own tears falling into the soft halo of hair.
Wolf was an Indian and so couldn’t be buried in the Christian cemetery. The Indian cemetery was on the outskirts of Reno, and the gravediggers grumbled at having to walk so far in the rain. Drizzle darkened and smeared the wooden tombstones, and around the grave the mud was ankle-deep. Imogene stood close to Sarah, with Lutie and Fred beside her. Mac was at Sarah’s other side, his grizzled old face as soft as a woman’s around the mouth and eyes. He’d carried the coffin from the wagon, he and Fred Bone; it was scarcely half the length of a man, and its toy-sized dimensions mocked the living. Across from them, over the open grave, the bishop and Mrs. Whitaker bowed their heads. Sarah, dead calm, stood between Imogene and Mac, her face drawn and sunken around the eyes, but composed.
When it was over and the handfuls of wet earth had been dropped on the coffin, Sarah and Imogene rode home with the Whitakers. Ozi’s proud, matched bays, young and spirited, refused to suit their steps to the occasion and lifted their feet high out of the mud as if dancing. The cloud cover had begun to break and the sun came through in rainbowed fingers, touching the leaves back to gold.
“Will you come in for a bite?” Mrs. Whitaker asked as they drew abreast of the Whitaker house. “I’ll bet you’ve not had a decent meal in a while. Come in and eat.”
“Sarah?” Imogene asked.
“No thank you, Mrs. Whitaker, I couldn’t.”
“Won’t help to go hungry,” the bishop’s wife advised.
Ozi shook the reins. “Bishop?” Imogene laid a hand on the seatback. “I’d like to walk the rest, if you don’t mind. I need to get out and walk a little.”
“It’s wet. You’ll catch a chill yourself.”
“I’d like to walk too,” Sarah said unexpectedly. There was a sense of quiet authority drawn around her like a cloak, the same sad sense of self-possession that had straightened her back at the graveside. The bishop bowed to the dignity of her grief and helped them both from the carriage.
Late-autumn sunlight shone warm on their backs, and the morning’s drizzle sparkled on every leaf and blade of grass. The pungent smell of rain-washed earth and rotting leaves swelled up from the ground. A thin mist rose from the river and blew into translucent ribbons over the water. Arms linked, they walked side by side on the grassy bank, avoiding the mud of the path.
“Things aren’t real yet,” Sarah said. “Like Wolf’s not being home when we get there. No more. Something that can’t be fixed, won’t ever be better. I can’t believe that. How am I going to bear it when I do?”
“We’ll bear it together.”
“I should have married Mr. Weldrick like he wanted me to.”
“Why?”
“I had another chance. Mam says folks don’t often get more than one. Maybe God took Wolf because I wouldn’t take it. If there was a life to be taken, it should’ve been mine.”
“I can’t believe in a God who would kill a child to prove a point,” Imogene said.
“Imogene! Please don’t!” Sarah glanced nervously up at the clearing depths of the sky. “He does things like that in the Bible all the time.”
“So he does.”
Their skirts were wet and mud-spattered by the time they reached home. Wrapped in a dry robe, Imogene built a fire and arranged their petticoats over a chair in front of the stove, their wet shoes and stockings lined up like black attendants underneath. Sarah, clad only in bodice and pantalets, sat by the table, her eyes fixed on nothing.
By her chair, a picture book lay on the floor. Toys littered a corner of the room, a half-demolished castle of wooden blocks leaned against the bookcase, and a miniature jacket hung beside Sarah’s blue wool coat on a peg by the door.
“Why don’t you lie down for a while, Sarah?”
“Can I lay on your bed?”
“We can trade rooms if you like.”
Sarah stopped in the doorway and looked back. “Nate Weldrick put him out like a stray cat,” she said. “I might have married Nate. I wouldn’t have liked it, maybe, but I know I’ve got to right myself with things. But he put him out without a thought. Drowned him like a kitten.”
Imogene looked away, hiding her eyes with her hand.
Imogene boxed up Wolf’s toys and tidied the house while Sarah slept, and later the two of them sat at the table, Sarah reading, Imogene plying her needle to the hem of a pillow sham. Scented autumn air came in through the open windows, and a small fire burned in the woodstove to take the chill out.
Kate Sills came up the drive with a basket of preserves-gifts from the staff and herself. Wet leaves muffled her footsteps and neither Sarah nor Imogene heard her until she reached the house. Imogene put the kettle on and the three of them sat around the table, the two teachers talking quietly.
“Imogene, Bishop Whitaker and I have discussed it,” Kate said, “and we can get by without you for the first week or so of winter-term, if you’d like.”
Sarah spoke up before Imogene could reply. “Go back Monday, Imogene, you know you should. Teaching always makes you feel better.”
“I don’t want you to be by yourself in an empty house.”
“I’ll be all right. I have some things to do. I’ll have Addie and I can walk over to Mrs. Whitaker’s if I’m lonely.” There was a new firmness to Sarah and no trace of self-pity in her words.
Imogene stirred her tea.
“I think I would like to be alone for a while,” Sarah said, and it was decided.
The last few days of the week, neighbors came and went, bringing things they thought would be needed. Lutie brought fresh linens from the Broken Promise so that Imogene and Sarah would be spared the bulk of the week’s laundry, Mac brought a load of wood cut to fit the potbellied stove-though he’d brought them a cord in September-and Mrs. Whitaker brought over more food than the two of them could eat in a week. It was a relief when, in the evenings, there was time for the two of them to sit together, quiet with each other and their grief.
Trusting to the strength Sarah seemed to have found in her loss, Imogene left for school early Monday morning. Sarah walked with her to the river path. The sun hadn’t been up half an hour, and shadows stretched long over the moving water. Their breath came in clouds, and the frosty air brought blood to their cheeks and noses.
“I’m afraid winter is here,” Imogene said as they reached the path. “You’d better get back inside before you catch cold.”
“I will,” Sarah promised. “Let me walk with you a little further.”
Pleased, Imogene slowed her steps, though she had been late leaving the house. Sarah hooked her arm through the older woman’s and they walked without speaking. The storm had torn the last leaves from the trees along the river’s edge, and bare branches painted a winter scene against the blue November sky. The two women walked on a carpet of mauve and purple. Sarah kicked a clump of leaves, but they were heavy with water and wouldn’t take to the air.
“We used to make great piles of them when I was little, and dive into them. I like remembering then,” Sarah said.
“My father didn’t abide leaf-diving.” Imogene hardly ever mentioned her childhood; all her talk of memories suggested she had entered the world through a schoolroom in her late twenties. “Not for young ladies anyhow.”
They had come to the foot of the hill leading up to the school. Sarah detached her arm from Imogene’s and laid the schoolteacher’s gloved hand against her cheek, but said nothing.
“Thank you for walking with me,” Imogene said. “I enjoy things so much more when you’re with me.”
Sarah watched Imogene until she vanished from sight behind the school door. Then, running lightly over the sodden ground, she hurried home. In Imogene’s room she dragged a chair over to the closet, climbed up, and rummaged through the boxes on the top shelf until she found the one she was looking for-a battered blue hatbox with an ill-fitting lid. She carried it to the bed and dumped off the top. Inside was the Colt.45 that Mac had insisted Imogene keep.
“By the authority of Judge Colt,” Sarah said.
Using both thumbs, she pulled back the hammer and a mechanism clicked, holding it in place. She held the gun away from her and fired. A bullet smashed into the wainscoting and the pistol bucked backwards. Without hesitation, she pulled the hammer back again and turned the pistol around. She pushed the barrel of the.45 against her breast, feeling the cold metal through her bodice. Steadying the gun in her two hands, she tried to imagine life draining from her, pumping out with her blood, leaving emptiness and peace behind: a quiet, permanent stillness.
She would be with Wolf.
Never again would she see Imogene-not in the heaven that Sam’s Bible set forth.
Suddenly the Colt was heavy; it required too much effort to hold her wrists rigid. Sarah set the gun down on the bed, stroking the metal with her fingertip. “God,” she whispered, then slid to the floor and steepled her hands like a child. “God,” she began again, “what do you want of me?” In the silence she could hear the pendulum clock in the front room. “Damn you, answer me!” she cried, and with an angry gesture, swept the.45 off the coverlet. The gun slammed into the wall and the hammer fell. The sound of the gunshot rattled the window glass and the bullet shattered a pitcher on Imogene’s dressing table.
The silence in the room seemed palpable until a loud drip-drip ended it; water from the ruined pitcher had made its way to the table edge.
Sarah pulled herself to her feet and stole from the room. She stopped long enough to gather her coat and bonnet before leaving the house.
The day had warmed and she was flushed with walking by the time she reached the Indian cemetery. She stopped at Wolf’s grave. Loosing her bonnet strings, she pushed it back and let the air dry her temples. “Wolf, my dear baby, I love you very much,” Sarah said, and looked from the dark earth of the grave to the sky. “But I love Imogene too. Maybe more than’s good. Maybe more than God.”
She stood for a moment, searching the sky, before she looked back to the pathetic mound of earth. “Is that why you take my children, Lord?” she breathed. Her throat filled with tears and choked off the words. Hardening her mouth, she scrubbed her eyes with the tail of her coat. “If there is a God,” she said defiantly. “Maybe there’s only love.” She looked into the depths of blue beyond the Sierra and grew afraid and lonely.
“Dear God,” she prayed, “I know you mustn’t tempt the Lord thy God and this isn’t that, it’s just business. If you could show me it wasn’t true that Nate killed Wolf-in a way-I’d put Imogene behind me, marry again. Marry Nate Weldrick.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and willed the words to heaven. When she opened them she was alone and small under the ring of mountains, the little grave at her feet. “If not, Lord, I’m going to cast my lot with love.” The defiance returned and she added, “Half a year. I’ll listen half a year.”
For minutes she stood still, expecting to be struck to the ground, but there was nothing.