Not to us. Not ever. We're not We don't say her name at supper or ask questions because we figured out early that it makes him She stopped. Started differently. He goes very quiet, quieter than usual.
And then he works twice as hard the next 3 days, which means he's not sleeping, which means he's running on nothing, and we've all just we stopped. I think, Clara said slowly, that he's been trying to protect you from his grief. And you've been trying to protect him from yours. And nobody's been allowed to actually grieve. The silence that followed was the kind that has weight.
She used to sing in the kitchen, Mabel said, in the mornings. Not always real songs. Sometimes she just made them up. Nonsense things. She stopped.
I can't remember the words anymore. I can remember her voice, but not the words, and that I hate that I can't remember the words. Clara did not say that's all right or you'll remember them someday because those things were not necessarily true, and Mabel deserved better than comfortable falsehoods. "Tell me about her voice," Clara said, and Mabel did. She talked for the better part of an hour quietly, steadily, while they kept the cool cloth cycling on Sam's fever, and the candle burned lower.
She talked about Eleanor Holloway the way someone talks about a person they have been holding inside themselves very carefully for a very long time. Clara listened the way her mother had taught her to listen, without filling in the spaces, without rushing to toward the next part, just letting the story be the size it needed to be. Somewhere around 4:00 in the morning, Sam's fever began to shift. It did not break cleanly the way fever sometimes do in stories. It reduced by degrees, the heat under Clara's hand becoming slightly less fierce, Sam's restlessness settling, his breathing deepening.
She kept the cloths changing. She got more yarrow tea into him, slowly spooning it past his lips when he was enough to swallow. Mabel fell asleep at some point in the chair she'd pulled beside the bed, her head tipping forward onto her hand. Clara watched her sleep for a moment, the hard line of her jaw softening, the tight set of her shoulders releasing, and thought that this was what Mabel looked like when nobody needed anything from her. Young, bone tired young.
Clara kept watch Just before 5:00, James appeared in the doorway, already dressed. "I heard Pa leave," he said quietly. "I should have come sooner." "You're here now," Clara said. "He'll be back with the doctor within the hour."
James looked at Sam, then at Mabel asleep in the chair. "She never sleeps," he said. "She's exhausted," Clara said. "She's been exhausted for 3 years," he said. "Yes," Clara said.
"I know." He came in and sat on the floor beside the door, resting his back against the wall with the ease of someone who is used to being wherever he is needed and not requiring comfort to do it. "Tell me something," Clara said, keeping her voice low. "What?" He said.
"Something good," she said, "about this family." "Something that has nothing to do with what's been hard." He thought about it. "Pa," he said finally, "last spring we were fixing fence on the east side and I got it wrong. The post, the angle, I'd miscalculated and we had to pull up two days of work and do it over."