He doesn't usually do that, he said finally. Do what? Go himself. Tommy set the supply sack down near the cabin door and looked at it rather than at her. If something needs doing on a neighbor's property, he sends Jesse or me.
He's got men for that. That's what we are. Clara looked at him. Tommy was 20 years old and trying very hard not to say something directly, which was a skill he had not yet developed to its full potential. She recognized the effort and decided not to make it easier for him.
"Thank you for the supplies," she said. "Tell Mr. Caldwell, I'll pay him back when the garden is producing. He's not going to want Tell him anyway," she said. Tommy took the empty canvas.
He had kept the food and returned the sacking exactly as instructed. And he rode south with the slightly deflated air of a young man who had gone somewhere expecting to deliver something important and discovered the person he was delivering it to had already managed. She stood in the quiet aftermath of his visit and thought about what he had said. And then she made a deliberate effort not to think about it further because there was work to do and the child was sitting heavy and the garden needed turning and the west slope needed monitoring and she had a finite amount of attention to spend. She started the garden plot the following morning.
The timing was later than she would have chosen if she had been choosing freely. Midsummer planting in the Sanuans was already a race against the first frost and she was starting that race behind. But she had brought seed from Dango with exactly this in mind. Quick maturing varieties, root vegetables that stored well, herbs that did not require much coaxing from soil that was not yet familiar with her. She cleared the south-facing slope below the cabin where the drainage was good and the ground was softer than the rocky clay further north.
And she turned the soil by hand with a matic, working 2 hours in the morning before the heat arrived, and 2 hours in the evening when it retreated. The work was different from the cabin work. The cabin had demanded everything she had, every calculation, every ounce of concentrated effort. The garden asked for something steadier and less violent, a sustained attention rather than a crisis level one, and in the long hours of the late afternoon, she found that her mind moved in several directions at once, while her hands stayed in the soil. She thought about winter.
She thought about the birth, which was somewhere between 3 and 5 weeks away by her best calculation. She thought about what needed to be done before she could no longer do things, and she made lists in her head and worked through them in order. She also thought against her preference about Amos Caldwell. What she thought was not something she was prepared to call what it was. What she could say with precision was that the image of him coming down off that horse in the rain before it had fully stopped did not leave her the way she expected it to.
She had been looked after in her life by Henry, by her mother before that, by the general fabric of living with people who cared whether you were all right. She was not unacquainted with the feeling of being cared for. What she was unacquainted with was a man who expressed it exactly like that, with that economy, with that complete absence of the need to be thanked for it. He had not waited for her to ask. He had not made a performance of the helping.