From the cradle, young Henry made a sound of increasing urgency. Not quite a cry, the preliminary to one, the conversational announcement that his tolerance for being ignored had reached its limit. They both looked at him. He looked back at both of them with the absolute democratic attention of an infant who has not yet learned that some conversations do not include him. "Can I?" Amos started.
"Yes," she said before he could finish. She watched him pick up young Henry with the careful, concentrated attention of a man who had held a child before and who understood what it meant. He settled the boy against his arm. Young Henry looked up at him with the serious unfocused gravity of the very young. "He looks like his father," Amos said.
"Around the eyes," she said. "You'll see it better when he's older." "I'd like that," Amos said quietly without performance. "Just the true thing," said plainly. She did not answer immediately. Outside, the wind moved.
A hawk called once from the timber north of the creek, and went quiet. I'm not looking for anything to complete me, she said finally. I have 40 acres and a child and enough sewing work to get through winter. I don't need completing. He nodded.
He was listening. But I'd like to know, she said, "Whether you're going to keep riding this creek line or whether one of these mornings you'll just come in the front way and say so." He held her eyes for a long moment. Something in his face came loose from where it had been held. Not entirely, not permanently. He was not that kind of man, but enough to see what was underneath it, which was something that had been quietly surviving for a long time and had not been entirely sure until recently that it still knew how.
The front way, he said. If that's all right. It's all right, she said. Young Henry made a sound from Amos' arm. A small satisfied sound.
The sound of a person who has been present for something and found it acceptable. Clara looked at her son, and then at the man holding him, and then at the walls of the cabin she had built with her own hands, from nothing but tools and refusal, and the specific love of a woman who does not stop things she has started. The window glass was clean. The door stood true. The fire was low and warm in the stove.