The Mountain Man Started Buying Baby Clothes — But Everyone Knew He Lived Alone
Chapter 8
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"Up there with him all winter, alone, and her condition... With a husband not a year in the ground... They say the child is his... They say he has been writing to her for years..."Hannah stood very straight. Clara, with a bolt of calico in her arms, had gone white with temper, and some of it she knew was at herself.Hannah put one hand on the counter and said, in a voice that could cut glass, "I do not believe we have been introduced."The two women looked appalled."My husband, Daniel Whitmore, died in June. He once pulled Mr. Rourke out of a frozen creek. Mr. Rourke is giving my children a roof because he is a better Christian than anyone I have met in this town. I am sorry that does not make a better story."She paid for the flannel, took Lucy by the hand, and walked out into the snow with her chin high. She did not cry until they were three miles up the trail. Thad did not ask; when she was done, he held out the end of the green scarf.That night, when Lucy was asleep, she said, "I cannot stay."He kept his eyes on the fire."When the baby is born and I am on my feet, we must go. I will not have them say it of you; I will not have them say it of her." She looked toward the stable. She had planned where they would go, but not what they would leave behind. "You have been kinder than I knew a man could be. I cannot give them one more reason to talk."Thad did not argue: he knew how to argue over a price; he did not know how to ask someone to stay. He believed, as a man must who has watched people cross the street from him for 20 years, that a woman like Hannah would not choose this cabin if she were free to choose anything else."I understand," he said, and he went out to see to the stock and stayed there a long time.Lucy found out the next morning. She was sitting on the stable step with Mr. Bishop in her lap when her mother came out and told her: they would leave in the spring after the baby; they would find a little house in a town, and she would go to school.Lucy said nothing. She turned the wooden horse over in her hands. Then she asked, "But who will look after Mr. Thad?"Hannah had no answer."He cannot sew. He does not know how to make stew. When he is sad, he says 'Hmm' and goes to the barn. I counted: 11 times." Her lip began to shake, and she held it still. "I do not mind going. I only mind that he will not say."Hannah took her into her arms; it was the only answer she had.That night, with the lamp out and the stove low, Thad lay on his bunk listening to the wind in the pines. He heard something else, very faint, from the spare room: a child was crying. She was doing it softly, as children do who have learned that grown people dislike the sound. It went on for a long time.