So she fell to wondering how his dread was different from Doane’s, in those days when he began to realize that he had no way to look after them, stragglers who had no claim on him at all except that they had always trusted him. What would he have done with the hens that dog caught him stealing except to pluck them and gut them and roast them, handing the drumsticks around to the young ones as if it were just any ordinary supper in ordinary times, nothing so wonderful about it. He did have three silver dollars in his pocket, too, and he wouldn’t say a word about where they came from. He never did anything with what he had except to keep things together as well as he could. But stealing is stealing, Doll said, especially if you get caught at it.
Now here she was again, worrying over people who were long past help. You can’t even pray for someone to have his pride back when every possible thing has happened to take it away from him. She thought, Everything went bad everywhere and pride like his must have just drifted off the earth, more or less, as quiet as mist in the morning, and people were sad and hard who never were before. Looking into each other’s faces, their hearts sinking. If she ever took to praying it would be for that time and all those people who must have wondered what had become of them, what they had done to find themselves without so much as a good night’s rest to comfort them. She would call down calm on every one of them, on the worst and the bitterest ones first of all. Doane and Arthur walking away; Mellie, too, never looking back, leaving her an orphan on the steps of a church. Without the bitterness none of that would have happened. If Boughton dropped a lamp and set his house on fire, what would the Reverend say about that? He was looking at her then with as much fear in his eyes as she had ever seen anywhere, even counting those poor raggedy heathens who never thought the Almighty would have the least bit of interest in them.
That wasn’t a pain, but he saw her pause over it, consider it, whatever it was. It was like listening for a sound you might only have thought you heard. She said, “He’s frisky today. I guess he wants to be out in the snow.”
He smiled at her. “I hope he can wait for another day or two.”
That wasn’t a pain, either. She said, “I might just go upstairs and lay down a while.”
He stood up. “Yes.” He said, “It’s really cold up there. Those leaky old windows. I can put more blankets on the bed, but they’ll be cold, too. I should have thought to bring them down by the stove. I don’t know where my mind has been. I could have set up a cot here in the kitchen. This kind of weather — I didn’t give it a thought. You’d think I’d know better.” He might have said that if the child came then, he’d be earlier than they expected, or than he expected and she let on that she did. No, he’d never think that way.
“Well.” She stood up from her chair, and that felt better. “I’m just thinking I might lay down.”
“Yes.” He put his arm around her and brought her slowly up the stairs to his room. He took off her slippers and found a pair of his socks to put on her feet and then helped her into his bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin. His, she thought, because it reminded her of that old gray sweater, when she loved how his it was. Loneliness and mice and the wind blowing and then that woolly old thing against her cheek, smelling like him. She’d put her head on his shoulder that one time when he hardly knew her name. She laughed to remember.
“What?”
“Nothing. It just does feel good. Cold and all.”
“I’ll put the skillet to warm on the stove. I can use it to take some of the chill off. There used to be a warming pan around somewhere. A perfectly useful thing. But I suppose it’s ended up in the attic.”
“Don’t you go up in that attic.”
“No, I won’t. The skillet should work well enough.”
“I’d rather you just crawl under the covers here until I get warm. That’s the best thing you can do for me.” The windows were rattling and the curtains drifting a little on the cold air, and the room was full of the light of a snowy afternoon.
So he did. “Here we are,” he said. “It’s as if we’ve floated out to sea on an iceberg. The two of us all on our own.”
“The three of us.”
“Oh, my dear.”
She said, “Reverend, it seems to me you’re about to cry.”
He laughed. “I won’t if you won’t.”
“Fair enough.”
They were quiet for a while. He said, “I guess you’re all right?”
“I think he must be sleeping.”
Then he said, “It’s all a prayer. You don’t think to say, Let tomorrow be like today, because usually it is. For all purposes.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind if tomorrow was a little different from today.”
“That’s a prayer, too.”
“Now wait. It has to be different
