Eli came in for the midday meal with Tom Greer and Walt Aldridge. They were trail-worn and cold and said little at the table, eating with the focused efficiency of men who had a great deal more work waiting for them outside. Tom Greer was somewhere in his 40s, lean and sun-browned, with a straightforward manner and no visible opinion about Clara one way or another. Walt Aldridge was younger, maybe 25, and he looked at Clara with the open curiosity of someone who had heard the story from Harold Briggs's side of things and was still forming his own opinion.
Clara served the meal and sat at the far end of the table. She said nothing that wasn't asked of her. After the men went back out, Jesse leaned toward Cole and said in a stage whisper easily audible to everyone in the room, "I think Walt likes her." "Jesse," Eli said from the doorway.
"I'm just saying what I see," Jesse said. Eli looked at Clara very briefly. Not an apology exactly, but an acknowledgement. Then he was gone.
The afternoon brought the real trouble. It started with Cole. Clara was in the kitchen with Ruth, working through a pile of mending that Ruth's hands couldn't manage, when she heard a sound from upstairs. Not a crash.
Not a cry. A particular quality of silence that followed some small accident and preceded either tears or an attempt to hide the evidence. Clara went to the stairs. Cole was sitting on the top step holding his left hand in his right.
There was blood on his palm. Not a lot, but enough. He looked at her without saying anything, with the expression of a child deciding whether to admit what had happened. "Let me see," Clara said.
He held out his hand. A small cut, maybe an inch across, on the heel of his palm. Clara sat down beside him on the step and looked at it carefully. "What were you doing?"
Silence. "Cole?" "Trying to fix my knife," he said very quietly. "The blade came loose from the handle."
"Do you have the knife?" He produced it from his pocket with the caution of someone surrendering something they expect to lose permanently. Clara looked at it. A small folding knife.
Old. The kind a man gives a boy when he decides the boy is old enough. The blade had worked loose from the wooden handle, which was why it had slipped.
"Whose knife?" she said. Cole's jaw tightened. "My mom's dad gave it to my dad. My dad gave it to me."
Clara held the knife carefully in both hands. "It can be fixed," she said. "The pin that holds the blade just needs to be reset. Do you have a small hammer and a finishing nail?"
Cole stared at her. "You know how to fix a knife?" "My husband had a shop. I watched him work a lot." She stood up.