I would carry her trunk down the inn’s front steps every summer when she went to visit a sister in the east, and up them again when she returned. She would bring me three or four times a year a square of gingerbread wrapped in a clean cloth. She would speak to me kindly whenever we passed in the street, wishing me good morning and good evening as a matter of plain civil habit.
And I would do the same in return. That was the whole of it for seven years. Two single solitary people across one small street in the smallest possible weave of daily small kindnesses and nothing more. And in those seven years, I had loved her every single day. And I had never by any sign that my own conscience would let me give breathed a word of it.
I think I loved her from the first morning she stepped down off that stage. From the steady way she met the strange new town and the strange new schoolhouse and the strange new room at Miss Pierce’s all alone with that calm, patient kindness that turned out to be the deep settled way of her whole soul.
But what was I of such a thing? I was a widowerower of 53 who had not so much as looked sideways at a woman in 30 years. I was a plain dusty livery man with hay on my sleeves and stable boots on my feet. the most ordinary fellow on the most ordinary street of an ordinary small town. And she May Talbot was the school teacher, a finer, gentler creature than Salt Creek had any right to have consent, and a woman who, for all I knew, had refused better men than me in better places before she ever came west to us. So I told myself every day
for 7 years that whatever I felt for the lady across the street was my own private business, and that the kindest thing I could do for her was never to embarrass her with it. I would tip my hat. I would carry her trunk. I would have her mare ready in the cold mornings. I would never never look too long, never say one word that her quick, gentle mind might catch the wrong meaning of.
To declare myself to court her was to risk her embarrassment, her refusal, the loss of even the daily small civilities that were the most warmth I had known in three decades. So I kept my eyes on her trunk straps and on her mayor’s bridal, and I let seven years go by, loving her in silence and counting myself foolishly, the luckier for it.
And then that autumn, the news came that Miss Talbot had accepted a position in a school in Pennsylvania, closer to her sister, better wages, a town with a proper academy and a library, and the small civilizing comforts that Salt Creek had never been able to offer her, and that she would be leaving on the eastbound stage that ran from town the morning after the school year ended.
I heard it first from Miss Pierce, who told me without much feeling as she crossed the street to my livery one evening for a piece of harness mending. Mast Talbot is leaving us in the spring,” she said, going east to take a better school. I said something appropriate, that we’d miss her, that it was a fine opportunity, and I went on with my harness mending after Miss Pierce had gone. Only after dark.
When I’d put up my tools and gone home to my small rooms behind the livery, did the full weight of what she’d said come down on me. May Talbot was leaving Salt Creek. I would not, after seven years, see her pass my door every morning, or wave at me from the schoolhouse steps in the long summer evenings, or stable her mayor with me through another winter.
The small daily warmth of having her across the street from me, the thin thread that had been the secret center of my whole quiet life for seven years was going to be cut, and I did not eat much that night, or for many of the nights that followed. I went on with my work and tipped my hat as I always had. And I never once, never one time gave her any sign of what was breaking quietly inside me.
I told myself this was the proper, the manly, the only honorable thing. She had earned a better life. I would not encumber her partying with the foolishness of a 53-year-old livery man who had not had the courage to speak in 7 years. I would let her go with grace and wish her well. And so we came to the long late afternoon I have to tell you of the day before she was to leave Salt Creek forever.
She came across the street to my livery as the gold of the autumn afternoon was beginning to deepen towards sundown. She had on her dark traveling coat and her small carpet bag was packed and waiting at Miss Pierce’s, and she carried in her hand the small brass key to a trunk I had lent her one spring when hers had broken.
She had used the trunk all that summer and returned it the following autumn, but the key had stayed in her writing desk by oversight. And now, being a woman who left nothing undone, she had come to return it to me. I would not have you left without your key, Mr. Westfall,” she said with that small, gentle smile, holding it out to me on her palm. I took it.
I felt the smallness and warmth of it from where her hand had been, and I could not for a moment think what to say. We stood awkwardly in the wide door of the livery. There were a great many things I could have said, and a few that I should have said, and I said none of them. We made the small final talk of two people parting about her sister’s house in Pennsylvania, about the new school teacher coming, about my keeping her mayor for a final season until she could send for it, about the long road ahead in the morning. And then she said she
had better get back to Miss Pierce’s and finish her packing. And she turned to go. And it was as she turned that the thing came up in me that I had been keeping down for 7 years. And I could not let her walk out of my door without saying it. Not the truth of what I felt, but the next best thing.
the wish for her good. “Miss Talbot,” I said, and she stopped at the door and turned. “I just want to say I hope you do well in the east. You have been a fine teacher to this town and a finer neighbor across the street, and we are losing more than we deserve to lose. And I pray, Miss Talbot, that you will find a good man one day in Pennsylvania or wherever you may go to make for you the home that you so deserve.
” She stood very still in my livery door with the long gold light falling on her brown coat, and she looked at me with eyes I had not really looked into in seven years. Her face was very steady. Her chin came up a little, the way it did when she was bracing for something hard, and she let out one small breath, and she said so quietly that I had to lean forward a step to catch it.
He is standing right here, Theo Westfall. I did not understand for a moment. He has been standing right here for seven years, Malbett said. and I am leaving tomorrow because I cannot bear to stand across the street from him for one more year and have him not see me. That is the whole of it. Forgive me. I had not meant to tell you.
But you must not pray for me to find a good man somewhere far from here when I have stood within sight of one every day of these seven years. And he has not. He has not. And now I am going. Goodbye, Mr. Westfall. Goodbye. And she stepped out of my livery and closed the door behind her. And I stood alone in my own stable with the brass key warm in my hand and the dust.
Moes turning in the long gold light and I could not move and I could not speak. I tell you that I stood there a long time before I could make my legs carry me back to my rooms. And I tell you that somewhere late in the sleepless night that followed, sitting at the small table in my dim rooms with the key still in my hand, what May Talbot had said to me at last came clear in my dim, slow mind, and I understood.
