Adeline Rou could not abide that. Not for those three children. Not on that particular day. So, she did a thing she told no one about. On the morning of Christmas Eve, she asked Caleb, plainly, whether she might walk into Cottonwood Bend, the town being only 4 miles off and the day being fair, to see about a small matter of her own.
He thought nothing of it. A woman was entitled to her own errands. He offered her the horse, and she would not take it, saying the walk would do her good, and she set off in her thin cuffed coat down the frozen road. What she did in town, no one at the ranch knew until long after. She went to the store, Prudence Gale's store, and she took from her carpet bag the one thing of value she owned in all the world, which was a small gold locket on a chain, the only thing her own dead mother had left her.
The one thing she had carried through every hard place and every cold road, and never once been willing to part with, through hungers of her own that had been sharp enough to test it. And she sold it. She sold her mother's locket to Prudence Gale for what it would bring, which was not what it was worth to her, but was enough. And with the money she bought a small ham, and a sack of good flour, and sugar, and dried fruit for a pudding, and three small hard candies wrapped in twists of paper, one for each child, and an orange, one single orange to be cut in three, because she remembered from her own girlhood the particular wonder of an orange in the deep of winter. And she walked the 4 miles back with the whole of it in her carpet bag, and her mother's locket gone from around her neck, and she said not one word about any of it to anyone.
Christmas morning in the Hart house was the first happy morning that house had known since the fever. There were the three hard candies, which the children could not believe were truly theirs. There was the orange, cut in three careful pieces, and Grace held hers a long time before she ate it, just smelling it, her eyes closed. There was little Ruth singing, actually singing now, not just humming, her small tuneless Christmas songs restored to her. And there was Adeline in the kitchen from before light, and the smell that came out of that kitchen through the morning was the smell of a ham baking and a pudding steaming and bread rising.
The smell of a real Christmas, the kind the children had known when their mother was alive and had thought was gone from the world forever. Caleb did not ask where it had come from. He was not a stupid man. He knew there had been no food in that house for such a dinner 3 days before, and he knew she had walked to town on Christmas Eve on a small matter of her own, and he could add. But he also knew, watching her move about his kitchen with her sleeves rolled and her face flushed from the stove, that to ask her directly would be to make her account for a gift.
And a gift that has to be accounted for stops being a gift. So he held his peace. He told himself he would find a way to make it right with her later. Quietly, when the note was paid and there was money again, he let her have the giving of it because he understood by now that the giving was the thing she had, the way another person has money or land, and that to refuse it would be the one true unkindness. And so they came to the Christmas dinner.