Chapter Text
Charlotte Vale’s hands were dainty and soft. A lady’s hands, or “your father has money hands,” as her brother Alexander said in jest once or twice. Yet the biggest sin of Charlotte Vale, and then later Balfour’s hands were that they betrayed her dull and uneventful life. Needlework and embroidery gave her only pricked fingers, and once she may have fancied them battle scars and wounds. Once, she thought a lot of things. But even with the little pinpricks here and there, they were still soft, privileged hands that had not lived.
Cal liked her hands. In a crowd of people at the Palmer House, he first held them in his broad palms. They were soft yes, but harder than hers still, she recalled thinking. She was dressed in blue silks, a gift her father brought from a Paris salon, and Cal smiled at her and asked not with his words but with his coffee-colored eyes if she may take off her lacy glove off, so he may bestow a kiss to her bare skin, like she was a lady-fair and he was a knight. He noted and commented then how her eyes lit up at the mention. He bragged he took her for a reader of stories of old when he first laid eyes on her. An adventurer, different from other ladies.
Perhaps I’m not so different, she said. Perhaps everyone longed for some sort of adventure. She just sought hers in books, dreaming of knights and discovery away from the frivolity she was born into, because that was all she had. He said he was the same. The city bored him, and books thrilled him. The idea of adventure thrilled him. With that, she let him hold and kiss her hand. His first of many. Six months later, Cal, after asking her father for permission on a rainy Sunday in their town home, asked Charlotte if they could be their own sort of different together. On their wedding day in early spring, another few months later, she took his hand and said softly she was forever his.
He held her hand as it rained outside, in their little cabin north of Annesburg called Willard's Rest. Charlotte held his longer after, even after it went limp. The man held some semblance of Cal but it wasn’t Cal. Her Cal had rosy cheeks and merry eyes. The man that she was left with was only a husk—a body, Cal gone somewhere else. She hoped heaven, prayed for heaven, ironic as it was, because when they left Chicago she thought they were going to a heavenly paradise, though truth to be told, it was more his dream than hers. Willard's Rest and the woodlands nearby, the river looked as she imagined a haven to look when they first arrived months before they finally moved. At last something real, they said when they declared they would have it to the previous owner, an elderly couple whose children were gone and off to the city. With their hands joined and clasped together, because they were always joined, they vowed that they had something that was theirs. They had something real.
Something real. Those were her bitter thoughts when she dug his grave south of their home and brought him there, felt the earth and soiled her once dainty and elegant hands. In a moment of irony, with the earth in her palms and between her fingers, she thought of how she always wanted to play in the dirt as a child, but her father always stopped her. It would ruin her dress, he always protested. What sort of woman runs around in a soiled dress? Even in Charlotte’s young mind she detested the grand buildings, the fine antique imports from Europe her father collected. She preferred flowers and grass and trees, thinking those real when everything else wasn’t.
It was real, to feel the earth in her hands, where life grew. She had no coffin for him, only the earth. She had no cross either, but she took two wooden planks and a hammer and she made a makeshift cross as best she could. She had no garland of flowers, only wildflowers. Even as the tears still pooled and stained her ruddy cheeks, and they didn’t cease at all during those three days, some part of her that never let those books and novels go took that realest feeling of hurt and loneliness she had ever felt and kept it close to her heart.
On the cross she had it carved—Cal Balfour, husband, proving he was real. She hoped, even if it was a hundred years from then, that a kind stranger would find her and bury her next to him, and carved on her cross that she was real too. At least then, she wouldn’t be lonely anymore.
She felt loneliness in Chicago, but it was a different kind of loneliness. It was being in a crowd of people and screaming on the inside with no one else coming to comfort her. She could scream and scream, she realized. No one would hear, but she didn’t anyway. She was a lady after all, Charlotte Vale Balfour of Chicago. Miles removed from her father, she still kept his stern teachings reluctantly close. She didn’t scream. She only wept silent tears that no one would hear.
No one heard. No one heard, save one.
He startled her at first. She could not see his face or his eyes, only his brown and blonde colored whiskers and that there was nothing in his hands. He wore a tan and worn jacket, a blue collared shirt underneath with the color washed away. Her sister in law warned her and Cal of outlaws and thieves after her original warnings of wild animals didn’t deter either of them (Charlotte still had to send the letter, she realized, with the grim and ironic truth of the matter of the bear that ended him.) Either way, she heard stories, and when there he was, an outlaw or a wanted man, she all but threw her hands up in the air and admitted that if he killed her, she would have died anyway. Her food rations of canned peaches, strawberries and salted meats were dwindling, and her and Cal had not thought to buy a horse to travel to Annesburg. Not that it would do any good if they had one. When they toyed with the idea of getting one in the Van Horn stables, she got up on a Tennessee Walker and couldn’t even begin to ride because she was too high off the ground. She couldn’t hunt and her only talent was finding poison berries that burned her insides and would not go away until she drank a tonic. Perhaps it would have been a better way to die, gunned down near Cal’s grave than to slowly deteriorate from starvation. Either way, she wasn’t going back to Chicago, and when he offered to take her to a train station, she told him no.
He didn’t laugh or mock, think her insane for remaining alone. Instead, he offered to teach her how to hunt.
“No funny business,” she ordered. “I know how I look, but I can defend myself.”
“I don’t doubt it ma’am.”
He kept a respectful distance as he led her away from Cal’s grave. She watched him as he watched the land he took her too, a good spot for hunting, he said. Though he wore a hat she could get a better look at his well-worn face, slightly pink from the sun. Like her he hadn’t seen a tub of water in months. But he killed a rabbit for her, and showed her how to skin it for the pelt and for the meat. He didn’t laugh when her first and second tug did nothing, nor did he laugh when she shut her eyes tight and pulled with all her might, all but jump for joy when she finally removed the pelt. He escorted her home and listened to her talk of privileges and the money her and Cal’s family had, and how they wanted to abandon it all for something real. He didn’t laugh when she insisted she didn’t want him to take her to the station again, the idea of getting on a horse again not the only reason, and when she spotted two grey wolves on the top of the hill, he defended her.
“It’s alright,” he called, Charlotte hiding from behind a tree when they wolves descended the hill. “They’re dead now.”
It was useless to say she would have died had he not been there, but she did anyway, and she thanked him again before he led her back to the cabin. He suggested he start using her husband’s rifle. She agreed.
“This is a good spot,” he said on the way back, the two climbing the hill. “Remote, and a good water source. You could survive here all right.”
“I have no doubt one could,” Charlotte replied. “Whether or not Charlotte Balfour can is another matter entirely.”
He didn’t dispute it, but his manner indicated that he held some semblance of faith, something too many didn’t have in her, even Cal sometimes. Are you sure you want to do this Charlotte? He asked the day before they left. You’ve never left the city. Unfortunately his childhood summers spent in remote Maine left him as prepared as Charlotte in the end.
Her kind stranger however had not once argued with her, insist that she leave or suggest she couldn’t do it. She suspected he may have had more faith than she did. He held something few men in the city ever held, a respect that made her think he had lived in the outdoors all his life. In the indolent city where one didn’t have to think about what the next meal would be, or even if one would have a next meal, there was time to assign and play roles. Here, were there were no roles to play, he saw her as only another being that needed help.
Even then, he didn’t need to help her. He did.
“So, you came from Chicago?” he asked, making polite conversation. He had a gravely voice that should have been unpleasant, but she enjoyed listening to it all the same.
“Yes,” she replied. “Have you been there?”
“Just passed through.”
“Oh. Business or pleasure?”
“Business you could say. Banking mostly.”
Cal was in banking. She wondered if they had ever crossed paths. “I doubt it,” he replied, and she couldn’t see his eyes underneath his wide brimmed hat. “I was more on the withdrawal side.”
She froze before coming back, understanding. “Oh. You’re teasing me.”
“Something like that.”
He was sheepish. She may have been privileged but she wasn’t naïve. Vaguely too, she recalled an incident at Cal’s bank a few years prior. When her stranger finally looked at her, the two engaging in a stand-off of sort, his eyes asked when he didn’t if he was going to judge her. Maybe once she would have. But there, in a place that looked like heaven but could be certain hell, there was no time for judgement. He was only a person who helped her.
“I’d invite you in,” she said as she opened her door and he stood by the steps. “But I’m a little dead on my feet, if you’ll forgive the pun. With some food and washing, I’ll be a new woman. But do call again sometime, please.”
“I’ll try ma’am.”
She didn’t go in, not yet. He didn’t leave, not yet. He cleared his throat. He told her he was sorry for her loss.
“He would have wanted me to stay,” Charlotte said.
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” she said, without a moment’s pause.
He might have questioned if she was too prideful or if she had no common sense. Yet he only smiled and asked if the city was really that bad.
“Yes, it is that bad,” she said, chuckling, and the sound was so foreign to her after not hearing it for so long.
He chuckled too. “I don’t doubt it.”
He tried to hide his small cough before he turned to leave. Yet before he left the premise she recalled one thing. She didn’t know his name.
“Arthur,” he replied when she asked, and when the name conjured images of knights and round tables, she proclaimed he was like King Arthur then.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied, and for the first time since they made acquaintances, he took off his hat. It struck her then how young he was, but how this place that looked like heaven could but be as brutal as hell had worn and whittled him, yet he still stood tall and proud. Handsome in a certain sense, not classically so like she would have called Cal, but one an artist would choose as a subject to paint, because something lay ingrained underneath his eyes. And his hands, Charlotte noted, gaze darting there, they showed a life that lived.
“I do,” she said.
When she closed the door behind her, and went to bed with a full belly, she looked at her dirty hands in the candlelight. Even though there were marks and calluses, dirt underneath her fingernails, she had never been prouder of them and what they had accomplished.
Both she and Arthur had hands that had lived.