The Ordways

There is one more thing to be got out of that winter and it comes from Rachel Ordway, who was nineteen and was going to be married in April to Dean Mosher and who was the only friend Tessa Bright had in the Hollow.

It was the Sunday of that last week, the one I have already put down, and Tessa went down to the Ordways' in the afternoon to say goodbye and did not come back until after dark, and it took her two and a half hours to go a mile and three quarters and back, and the reason it took her that long is that she stopped on the way and stood in the road, twice, and Rachel told me about the second time, because Rachel had walked her to the end of the drive and had watched her go.

What follows is what was said in Rachel Ordway's bedroom that afternoon with the door shut, and I have it from Rachel Mosher in her own kitchen twenty-five years later, and she told it the way country people tell a thing they have held on to: slowly, and with an exactness about certain sentences that makes everything else in it credible.

Rachel Ordway's wedding was in the second week of April and the dress was hanging on the back of the closet door with a sheet over it, and Rachel said to me, with a completely level voice, that she had known exactly, that afternoon in March, what she had and what the girl sitting on the end of her bed did not have, and that in twenty-five years she has never once been able to talk about that afternoon without saying something about the dress.

She said: "I said come and live with us. That's the first thing I said. I said the house is big and there's the back room off the kitchen and Dean won't care and you can help with the house and go to the community college in Canton in the fall, and she said no, and I said why, and she said because your mother would have to explain me to everybody."

She said: "Then I said what about the Blaines, and I want to say for the record that I said it because she was my friend and I was nineteen and I thought I was being kind, and she looked at me for a minute and she said, 'You mean, would I marry him and be got off their hands,' and I said, 'That's not what I meant,' and she said, 'That is exactly what you meant, Rach, and it's all right, it's the true thing, it's what everybody means, and I'm not going to do it, because if I do that then the whole thing is that I was a problem and he was the solution, and then I have to sit at that table at Christmas for the rest of my life and know what I was.'"

Rachel Mosher stopped there, in her kitchen, and looked at me and said, "I was nineteen. I didn't understand that for about ten years. I want to be honest with you, because you're writing this down, or whatever it is you're doing: I didn't understand one word of it until I was thirty."

Then she told me the rest of it, which is the part she said she had never told anybody, and I asked her whether I could put it in and she thought about it for four days and told me yes, and I have her permission for the following paragraph and for nothing else.

Rachel Ordway had thirty dollars. She had saved it out of her wages from the drug store in Riggs Falls and it was in an envelope in the drawer of the dresser, and she took it out and she put it in the girl's hand, on the bed, and Tessa Bright gave it back.

She gave it back and she said — and Rachel Mosher has repeated this sentence to me three times, in three different years, in exactly the same words, and it has not changed in the repeating, which is how I know it has not been improved:

"Put it on your dress, Rach. I'll remember that you did that till I die, and I'm not going to take your thirty dollars, because if I take your thirty dollars then I'm the kind of thing that takes thirty dollars, and I've got something left and that's what it is."

And then Rachel Ordway cried, and then Tessa Bright put her arms round her and told her not to, and put her coat on and went down the stairs and out, and that was the last time the two of them ever spoke to each other, because the bride married Dean Mosher in April and went to the Ridge road, and the girl in the back room at the Kellehers' was in a hospital in Malone in April and in a bed in a house on the Hollow road from that May to the present day, and Rachel Mosher has lived a mile and a half from that house for twenty-five years and has been inside it twice.

I went to the second visit. She has never asked me why I wanted to go and I have never told her. It was in the last week of March, in the winter I was there, and Rachel Mosher went up the Hollow road with a plate of something under a towel, and I drove her, and we sat in the kitchen with the three of them for forty minutes, and Rachel and Verna talked about the state program and about a woman they both knew in Malone, and the back door was open, and at one point the voice came down the passage and asked whether there was company, and Rachel said, "It's me, it's Rachel," and the voice said, "Oh," and nothing else, and we left about ten minutes after that.

In the truck going back down the road, with the plate under the towel on her knees, Rachel Mosher said, out of nowhere:

"I gave her thirty dollars."

I said, "You told me."

"She wouldn't take it," Rachel said. "And I've thought about it my whole life, and I've decided I was right to offer it and I was wrong about why, and I can't get any further than that, and I'm going to stop thinking about it now. I'm forty-four years old, and that's all I've got to say about it."