Page 21 of Ellen Found
To her delight, Mrs. Quincy didn’t hesitate. “Follow me, Gwen,” she said, after a slight raise of her eyebrow that spoke louder than words ever could. Ellen had an ally.
With an ache, Ellen realized that she knew nothing about addressing kindness. She took a deep breath and a chance, the same as when she answered the advertisement a few months ago. “Charles, thank you for the hot water bottle,” she said, her hands clasped together to keep them from shaking. “It made me a whole lot less sad.”
“Oh, I . . .”
Could it be that Mr. Penrose didn’t knowwhat to say either? Ellen felt herself relax, happy to know she wasn’t the only shy person. “You were kind,” she told him. “I needed that.”
To her delight, he seemed to relax too. He glanced at his daughter, busy with Carnation cans, and came closer, keeping his voice low. “After my wife died”—she saw sudden sadness cross his face—“I did that for myself.” He hesitated, then must have understood that since he had gone this far, he might as well forge on. “Clare liked to put her cold feet on my legs.”
No matter her inexperience, Ellen knew this was a charged, intimate moment, a contained man’s attempt that she understood: Loneliness is worse than almost anything. She spoke quietly to him alone, as if the room were empty. “I didn’t feel lonely.”
“Mrs. Quincy said she would make sure you had it every night.”
“I hope you didn’t use your only hot water bottle.”
“I have another one. That one’s yours now.”
Such a memory. Mrs. Quincy had not forgotten the water bottle tonight. “Stay here atOld Faithful, Mrs. Quincy,” Ellen said softly. “We need you... I need you... here at the inn. Mrs. Child can wait. Please?”
Besides themselves, Mrs. Child had brought along burlap sacks of onions and carrots, and even celery. The next day Harry Child had Charles’s crew unload a heavy cache from Mr. Colfitt, ironworker extraordinaire. Straining and sweating, even in below-zero weather, the freighter hauled in crates of Colfitt’s best efforts, including iron bands crafted to Mr. Reamer’s specifications to wrap around the inn’s stone front desk.
Even more remarkable were the electric lights shaped like candles. Charles held one up, turning it to catch the early-morning sun, at least what there was of it.
“Four crates of these, with more to come,” he said. “Our electrician arrives in March to wire this whole building. You’ll see these everywhere in the lobby and halls.”
“Winking little stars among our lodgepole pines,” Ellen said, enchanted. “How does Mr. Reamer do it?”
“He has a vision of what can be.”
So do I, Ellen thought much later, warming her toes against the hot water bottle after a long day’s work. It was still her more-modest vision of wanting something more, but what? Her life had trained her to expect nothing, so the matter required some thought.
Warm from the water bottle, tired from the work, safe with her door closed, and free finally from an aching shoulder, Ellen closed her eyes. Before she slept, she wondered what Charles was going to do with the little iron fish that she saw Mr. Colfitt hand him. Perhaps he had requested it from Mr. Colfitt for his daughter because Christmas was coming. A fish?
She was still thinking of the pretty thing next morning when she opened the back door of the kitchen that led to the massive bear-proof garbage cans, ready to dump in breakfast scraps.
As always, she looked down at Plato’s grave, which lately had become a repository of magpie feathers, a shell or two from someone, even a sardine can that made her smile.
There rested the iron fish.
I admire Sergeant Dan Reeves. He’s careful with his men, and he is fair, if firm. He is a peerless horseman, something I am not. He’s equally adept on skis. We trust his judgment. Lately, though, I wish he could find another diversion besides Ellen Found. How is it that Ellen grows more lovely by the day? For a man of at least a little experience with women, I know nothing.
CHRISTMAS CAME, AND for the first time in Ellen’s life it meant something besides serving clam chowder—Mr. Linson’s one concession to the holiday—to sad-eyed men who had nowhere else to go except the Mercury Street Café.
She wouldn’t have told anyone about that, but for some reason, Sergeant Reeves had instituted a nightly walk among the geysers of the upper basin that fronted the inn. It usually began with a view of Old Faithful from the newly completed second-floor porch, with its overhang of roof that kept off the snow.
Provided the weather cooperated, she bundled up in her shabby coat. It didn’t look so bad in the dark. Sergeant Reeves—Dan—knew where to walk safely among the geysers and hot pots, and he kept a firm hand on her arm.
He wasn’t a talkative man during the day—what she saw of him and his patrol—but the dark made him voluble. He told her about growing up on a farm in Connecticut, a state so far away that she could barely imagine it. “I wanted something more adventurous, and I joined the army,” he said. He had more recently finished a tour of duty in the Philippines, and she learned about the insurrectionist Moros, humidity that did wretched things to wounds, and jungle fevers.
“Do I talk too much?” he asked one night.
She assured him he did not. “No. All I ever knew before Yellowstone was Butte,Montana,” she said. “I hope you’ve never been there.”
He laughed at that. Nights like this, she found it easy not to think of Butte. Plato was seldom far from her thoughts, but they had mellowed, as Charles Penrose had earlier suggested that they would. “I won’t say grief vanishes, but it changes, or so I have discovered,” was all Charles said about the matter. She knew he meant more than he could express, and she honored that.
“We won’t forget Christmas,” Mrs. Quincy said one morning. She said it with considerable finality. “I will requisition a suitable tree. Shouldn’t be hard to find one.”
It wasn’t. Ellen asked Dan Reeves to locate a tree, but not a big one. By the week after Thanksgiving, there it was, modestly resting under theporte cochère. Decorations proved to be no problem either, and they came from a surprising source: One-Eyed Wilson, a.k.a. Mr. Fred Wilson. “I’ve been collecting them for years,” he told Mrs. Quincy. “Never had a tree before, but I’ve been hopeful.” And that was all he said as he gave Mrs. Quincy his carefully wrapped box.
