He showed the finished rings to them for their approval and asked, “Anything else I can help you with this morning?”
“Yes,” Edward said. “Tell us where we need to go to find a judge so we can marry.”
It was the courthouse and within two hours, and without ceremony, they were man and wife. They had stood next to each other without touching but when the moment came they had turned to face each other, and had smiled.
When it was over Edward led Clara to a nearby restaurant and held her hand across the table as the waiter brought them glasses of ice water in leaded tumblers with real ice. It was thrilling, Clara thought.
“To ‘Rothi and Curtis,’” Edward toasted.
“Yes,” Clara concurred. She raised her glass. “And to us.”
She looked around the room and began to anticipate the excitement of their life together in this invigorating place. She squeezed his hand. “I have a single favor I must beg.”
He waited.
“Hercules,” Clara said. “I trust you will allow—”
“—of course,” Edward affirmed. “I already think of him as my own brother.” He pressed her fingers. “—even as my son.”
Thank you, she breathed.
She could not imagine greater happiness. At a nearby table a woman laughed and Clara turned in time to see the woman’s escort bring her fingers to his lips and kiss them and then press her hand against his heart. She felt Edward lift his hand from hers and by the time she turned back to him he had tucked a napkin in his collar and was lost behind the menu.
Through the meal he sought her advice on designing stationery and his business card and asked her help composing the notice he would place about his partnership with Rothi in the newspapers. He had determined he would stay on a few days and begin to work, begin to look for rooms for them to rent and when they reached the top of the entrance to the dock he asked if she needed him to walk her all the way down to the ferry.
“I can make it on my own,” she said.
“That’s my Scout.”
He took her by the shoulders then and kissed her on the check and when she turned to wave to him after several steps he was already gone.
The sun had still to set on her wedding day when she brought the mares to a halt before the house and Hercules came running from the barn.
“I shod my first horse—!” he cried. “All by myself! The farrier let me shoe her!”
Clara waved her finger with the wedding band in front of him. “I guess we both got shod today,” she joked.
He embraced her and she walked beside him as he led the horses.
“Edward bought a business.”
“—what kinda business?”
“Pictures.”
“—oh that’s nice. Like father’s?”
“Photographs.”
“—oh I’ve seen him do that in the barn.”
“Yes but now he’s going to do it in Seattle.”
Hercules stood still.
“No,” he said.
“Hercules, it’s a wonderful city — like St. Paul. You’ll meet lots of boys your age—”
“You were supposed to marry him so we could stay,” he said. “—so you would stay.”
“I’m not saying we will be apart…”
“I am.”
She blinked.
“I’m not going to Seattle,” Hercules said with grave finality. “You can’t make me.”
“Why are you behaving like this, Hercules?”
“I’m happy here—”
“—we will still be happy in…”
“I’m happy here where I can be with horses.”
“There are horses in Seattle,” she began to argue.
“—these horses.”
Clara took a moment to assess her brother’s mood.
“I talk to them,” he said.
She watched him smooth the fine soft hairs along the gray mare’s cheek.
“We can always visit—”
“—no I talk to them,” he told her.
She stared at him.
“—inside the horses,” he tried to explain to her.
“You talk to…?”
“—mother and father.”
“—inside the horses,” she finally repeated.
“—don’t ask me to explain it. I didn’t want you to find out.”
He began to cry.
“—no, no…” she comforted him. “It’s a good thing that you’ve told me, Hercules.”
“I can feel them. In the ponies. When I pet them. And I know they can feel me…”
She watched him lean his head against the horse’s flank and close his eyes and she laid her hand against his back and patted him.
“Tell me something,” she said after a while. “Which horse is it?”
“All of them.”
“—every horse?”
“Every one I’ve ever met,” he said. “They just know me. We just fall in love. There has to be a reason why…”
“—you’re a very special boy, is why. And we’ll have to find a way to make sure that doesn’t change.”
“—even if it means we have to be apart?”
That was a condition Clara did not want to have to think about — because unlike Hercules, she had not found an entity, other than herself, to act as a repository for her sorrow or in which to store the memories of what their parents were in life, the space that they had filled, the way they’d sounded. It had not yet been a year since their deaths and yet she found she had to struggle to recall the fleeting things about them — the shape of her father’s hand, the timbre of her mother’s laughter — and she needed Hercules at hand to validate the little she remembered and the sum of what they’d lost. If Hercules should be parted from her, if he should ever go from her daily life — as almost certainly, some day, he would — her diminishment would double.
But she was also on the brink of an enriched life, a potentially growing family, rather than a decreasing one, and she could not allow a yearning for the past to sabotage the happiness that was her future. Besides, she was not convinced that Seattle was the less enlightened choice than this backward rural one for Hercules’s education and well-being — until Mr. Silva, the farrier, paid her a visit two days later, bringing with him a tall stranger.
The Curtis women had, oddly, treated her marriage with gloomy passivity, Eva showing signs of nervous curiosity only when Clara told her of Edward’s partnership with Rothi. She gave scant notice to Clara’s wedding band and seemed interested only in knowing if this Mr. Rothi was a single gentleman. Asahel had made himself invisible ever since her return so she was alone, without counsel, when Mr. Silva stepped up on the porch and rapped on the screen door, his hat in hand, and introduced the stranger.
“This is Mr. Touhy, miss, he’s from Tacoma.”
Clara held her left hand up for the gentlemen to see and said, “It’s missus, Mr. Silva. Mr. Curtis and I were married just two days ago.”
“Which one, ma’am?”
“—Edward.”
“—oh well congratulations, I didn’t know. Mr. Edward, he’s a fine gent. Mr. Touhy, here, breeds fancy horses.”
“You’re a long way from Tacoma, Mr. Touhy. What brings you to the island?”
“Actually miss—missus—he’s come to take a look at Hercules.”
Clara asked the gentlemen to sit, which they did, not comfortably.
“I don’t know if Hercules has told you, but I’ve been coming by most every week to give him skills.”
“He has told me, Mr. Silva, and I’m grateful to you.”