It was, by the measure of that hard country and that hard year, a feast. The ham, the bread, the last of the good potatoes done right, the pudding to come after. Four places set at the long table, and the children scrubbed and seated and nearly beside themselves, and Caleb at the head and Adeline at the foot, and for the length of that meal the empty chair where Sarah Heart had sat was not a wound, but only an empty chair. Because the room was full of life again, and the living have a duty to go on living, which is the last and hardest gift the dead ask of us. Caleb said a grace.
He was not a church-going man by habit, but he found that day that he had things to be thankful for that wanted saying. And he said them plainly and briefly. And when he came to the part about the stranger who had come up the road 4 days before, his voice was not entirely steady. And he moved on quickly, and no one remarked on it. And then they ate.
And it was during the eating that Caleb, glancing down the table, began to notice the thing he did not understand until later. He saw Adeline serve the children. That was natural. He saw her cut little Ruth's ham small, and see that Grace had bread, and quietly moved the choicest piece onto Samuel's plate when the boy was not looking. Because a growing boy of nine is always half-starved, and she had marked it.
All of that was natural, the ordinary business of a woman seeing to children at a table. But he noticed, without quite noticing, that her own plate never seemed to get any emptier. That she was always serving and never quite eating. That when Grace worried, asked her whether she did not like the ham, Adeline laughed and said she liked it so well she was saving it the way you save the best of a thing and put a little more on Grace's plate as she said it, and the child was satisfied and turned back to her own meal, and the small slate went by. He thought at the time that she was simply a woman who ate little, or who was too busy serving to eat, as women at tables so often are.
He did not understand. The meal ended. The pudding was brought out and exclaimed over and demolished. The children, stuffed full and glowing, were got down from the table and set by the fire, where Grace fell asleep almost at once in the deep boneless sleep of a child who is warm and full and safe. And Samuel sat with an arm around little Ruth and let her for once be small.
And Adeline began to clear the table. And Caleb, carrying the lantern through to fetch more wood, passed back through the kitchen doorway and looked at the cleared table where one plate still sat waiting to be carried to the wash, her plate. And he stopped. Because he saw it then. All at once.