The entire process was undermined, at its root, by the fact that he was not truly capable of consoling Isabelle, as they both knew. This was the man who had spent her father’s funeral not at her side, in the chapel, but feeding downed apples to the horses that had carried the coffin; a man who had caused her great anger early in their marriage when, in the dead of a winter’s night, after embracing her with the heat of his body, had decided it was too cold after all, made a fire, and happily dozed off sitting before it by himself. His words, however he might form them, would be sincere, but they were bound to be rejected as so misaligned with the man his wife knew that they did not bear serious consideration.
“Won’t you eat?” he asked. “May I bring you a bowl?”
He let some time pass, and only when he could no longer withstand the silence did he walk downstairs to eat alone. He wondered how long she would last in there. An apology might do. But it was unclear if his delay in telling her was even the cause of her seclusion. Perhaps she simply needed time, a night to herself, but the desire to do something for her that might assuage his guilt was so crushing that he could barely sit still. He added kindling to the fire. He paced incessantly, the floorboard creaking where the wood was polished with wear, and no matter how unbearable he found it to wallow in his wife’s misery, he knew that it was the better option than making contact with his own grief, that place of darkness he’d ignored ever since August had delivered the unwelcome news. The quiet of the evening pushed up against him. Against the far wall the shadows of tree branches dipped like fingers playing keys on an organ. He withdrew from the evening to his armchair before the fire.
It was not until the following morning that his ponderings reached any sort of conclusion, and by then he was resigned to what lay ahead for him and felt only ridicule for his actions the day before. His footsteps on the stairwell, his knock on Caleb’s door, his invitation to eat: it had all reached her as a disappointment; the boy she wanted to see, the one who might mend her heart, would never appear there again. And if that was so, why had he ever thought she’d open the door at all?
*
It was three days before the flowers started appearing on the front porch. Some visitors came by foot, others by carriage, and the sound of horses clopping was enough to send him to the back of the house. He would wait out these visits as he’d waited out the temper of his quarreling parents when he was a boy, hidden in the cool shadows of the chicken coop, ignoring whatever noise did not suit him. These were all Isabelle’s friends, garrulous women wearing hats as tall as flowerpots.
Isabelle, for her part, refused to answer their calls as well, and he thought perhaps that they had a shared desire to ignore them and their gifts. Yet it took only a trip out to the barn to water Ridley for him to realize things were not entirely as they seemed, when he returned to find a pot of carnations that had been left on the front porch suddenly placed upon the dining table. The next day an arrangement of lilies found their way to the fireplace mantel. The small shelf above the stove was the next to be decorated, bearing enough pots that the room smelled more like a garden—soil and perfume—than a kitchen.
It felt, meanwhile, as if he were living with a ghost. Isabelle had appeared downstairs on occasion, but only as a spirit might, in the hours he was asleep, when her presence might have been no more than a part of his dreams. The couple of times he did awake in his armchair, his attempts to speak to her were scorned, and he was almost afraid to look her in the eye, as if her days of pain and isolation might have brought on some actual ghoulish transformation.
He was preparing a plate of eggs for himself one of those mornings when a rapping on the door would not quit. The eggs hadn’t fried through, and the pull of his attention between these two things—the cooking of the food and the aggressive knocking—became so bothersome that he picked the skillet up, went to the front door, and began telling off the visitor who had intruded upon his meal before he saw who it was. Then he looked upon Mildred Foster and knew that any peace the morning had brought him would soon vanish.
“George,” Mildred said. She wore slick-shined leather riding boots, and her horse was tied to the front gate of the cabin, where it was now grazing freely.
“Mrs. Foster, I really do not have time for this. We are in mourning.”
“I know how much you both loved the boy,” she said. “And I’m forever sorry for your loss. I know how fortunate I am that my sons have already returned, and I could not bear the suffering had they not, so I sympathize with your position.”