Olivia, Mourning (33 page)

Olivia woke early in the morning, damp with dew. There was no blissful moment in which she greeted the new day with no recollection of where she was and why. She knew the instant her eyes blinked open. Feeling weak, hollow, and alone, she climbed down from the mattress and moved away from the wagon to empty her bladder. After splashing water on her hands and face, she stood still, listening to the woods.

All she could think about was her room at home – the quilt Mrs. Hardaway and her friends had made, the way the late afternoon sun slanted through the windows, the stack of books on her nightstand. Then her stomach growled, prompting her to lift the lid of the bake kettle. Too stiff and tired to bother looking for a knife, she took the spoon from the pot of rice and jabbed it into the burnt crust, carving out large chunks of the soft inside. She smeared them with strawberry jam and went to sit on a fallen log, near the oxen. Dixby stamped a foot and pressed his nose against her back.

“I know, I know. I’m supposed to feed you first.” Olivia made a circle with her shoulder to nudge him away. “But you weren’t up all night packing, were you?” She turned to look into his placid eyes. “But I will say, you were both very good boys, not escaping into the night.”

She licked her fingers and wiped them on her pants before she rose, stretched, and bent to touch her toes while she counted to ten. Then she tended to the oxen, patting their backs and saying, “Happy now?”

The sun was barely peeking over the horizon; it was much too early to go to Jeremy’s. What should she do while she was waiting? She considered creeping back to the woods outside her cabin and watching for Filmore. Did they really expect her to be sitting there, waiting for him? How stupid could they be? If she lay in wait for him, she’d know whether he’d come carrying a weapon and what he did after he discovered her gone. But what did it matter? Besides, she didn’t want to have to look at him. I only need to see that hateful creature one last time, through my sights, right before I pull the trigger.

Anyway, she knew exactly what he was going to do – run from the cabin to the barn and back and then stand in the yard chewing his disgusting, smelly beard and scratching his head, looking like the imbecile he was. There was only one thing a man like him could do – run home to tell his wife.

Olivia longed for a cup of coffee, but didn’t dare light a fire. She climbed back onto her mattress and watched the sky, thinking about what she was going to do the next morning. Finally she deemed it late enough to comb her hair, put on a dress, and go bid farewell to Mr. Kincaid. It felt wonderful to get her aching feet out of her work boots.

Jeremy must have heard the wagon coming. He opened the door and came onto the porch and down the steps to greet her. Unshaven, he wore buckskin pants, a plain brown linsey-woolsey shirt, and moccasins.

“Well, hullo neighbor.” He took hold of the team’s harness. “This is a nice surprise.”

“Hullo Jeremy.” Olivia wound the reins around the post and climbed down. “I’ve come to say good-bye – I’m on my way to Detroit and then back home.”

“Back home? What happened? No bad news I hope.”

“No, nothing like that. Mourning and I just decided that farming isn’t quite what we expected. And Fae’s Landing …”

“Not a nice little town with lace curtains in the windows.”

“Something like that.”

“Where is the good Mr. Free?” Jeremy asked as he led the oxen toward his barn, looking behind him as if expecting Mourning to leap out of the back of the wagon.

“He left a while ago. Let’s see, it must be two, no, three weeks –”

“Left? You mean you’ve been all alone over there for three weeks?” He stopped walking.

“Now you sound like Iola. I just came from their place. Went to say my good-byes to them, and she went on and on –”

“Well, she’s right. I don’t know what Mourning was thinking, leaving you on your own. He should have waited until you were ready to leave too.” Jeremy left the team at the trough and pulled the barn door shut.

“Oh, I insisted he go. There’s a logging camp near home and they always do their hiring in the summer. Besides, I wanted some time on my own, to think about what I’m going to do now.”

She followed him onto the porch. Sheets of paper filled with cramped writing covered the table.

“I just finished a new article.” He nodded at the pages. “You’re welcome to read it while I get us some coffee. I was just about to make some.”

He disappeared into the cabin and she idly gathered up the papers and began to read. She glanced up when he came back out, bare-chested and with a towel draped around his neck. He set the coffee pot on the stove top and raised the straight razor he held in his other hand.

“You’ll have to excuse my bad manners,” he said. “Need to spruce myself up for the day.”

He went to the table by the tree, lathered his face, and began shaving, his mouth stretched into a tight O. She would have been inclined to sit and watch, but he glanced back at her so often that she felt obliged to continue reading. After struggling through all ten pages, she straightened them into a neat stack and then looked up to see him standing at the foot of the steps, waiting.

“So what did you think?”

“Interesting,” she said. She studied him for a moment. When he told her the things he knew about animals it was interesting, but he had a special talent for dragging one tiny bit of information out into the ten most tedious pages she’d ever read. “You do discover a lot of fascinating things. But does this journal you write for insist that it be so . . . so...”

“So what?”

“So … I don’t know, formal.” She wanted to say so long and eyes-falling-out boring. Since she was never going to see him again, she did allow herself to ask what she knew to be a tactless question. “Does everybody over there at the university have to write like that, like they’re trying to make it hard to understand?”

“You understood it, didn’t you?” His body had grown visibly tense.

She had gone too far. She didn’t need him hating her. “Yes, of course. And your article is quite fascinating. I just meant that it’s so much more … vivid when you talk about it.”

He seemed mollified. “Oh, I plan to give lectures too. Eventually. You hungry? I’m just going down to check my lines, see if there’re any fish.”

“Can I help?” The mention of food made Olivia realize how hungry she was. Any resentment she felt for him faded away. He was quite a nice neighbor.

“You could get a fire going. I’m such a duffer. Didn’t notice I was setting the coffee pot on a stone cold stove. There’s kindling and wood out back.”

Grateful to have a task to perform, Olivia brought wood and lit the stove. Then she went inside to look for a rag to wipe the table and noticed the calendar on the wall by the door, with the days marked off.

“Is that calendar in there right?” she called to Jeremy from the porch. “Is today Friday?”

He looked up from the fish he was gutting on a flat rock by the river and thought for a moment before shaking his head.

“No. Must be Saturday. I always cross yesterday off when I get up in the morning, but I didn’t do that today, seeing as I got unexpected company and all. You go ahead and mark it off for me, will you? And there’s some bread in there somewhere, you feel like slicing it.”

She sighed with relief that it actually was Saturday and found a knife next to the cutting board. She heard Jeremy come up from the river and set a pan of oil on the stove, and soon the smell of frying fish made her feel faint with hunger. She was arranging jagged slices of bread on a tin plate, her back to the door, when a hand grasped her shoulder and her mind went black. She shrieked and blindly spun around, her clenched fist hitting the side of Jeremy’s head.

“Jesus!” he shouted and jumped back, hand to his ear. “What the …?”

Olivia blinked, disoriented. He staggered outside and fell into a chair on the porch. “Christ, Olivia, what was that?” he shouted.

“Oh Jeremy, I’m so sorry.” She followed him outside and knelt at his side. “I didn’t mean to hit you. I’m so sorry. Let me see.” She moved toward him, but he leaned angrily away.

He rose and brushed past her, strode down to the river, and stuck his head into the cold water. Olivia watched from the porch, mortified. She was not, however, too mortified to notice that those delicious fish were starting to burn and removed the pan from the hot stovetop. Jeremy got to his feet, leaned over to shake the water from his hair, and returned to where she was waiting, her eyes on the ground in humble apology.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she said. “It’s just … I was so startled … I didn’t hear you come in. It’s … it’s …” She paused, working out a plausible lie to tell him. “Last year I was in my father’s store one day, sweeping the storeroom, when a man, a stranger, came up behind me. He grabbed me and began touching me …”

“Where was your father?”

“He’d gone out on the sidewalk, trying to get someone to move his wagon away from the front of the store.”

“What’d they do to the man?”

“Nothing. I never told anyone. The whole thing only lasted a few seconds. He’d rushed out and ridden off by the time my father came back in. He wasn’t from our town. I’d never seen him before. I was too embarrassed to tell my father or anyone else. I felt like I’d done something wrong. Ever since … since that man … I’ve been real jumpy about anyone coming up behind me.”

“Yeah, I would say so.” He managed to smile at her. “I’m lucky you didn’t have that knife in your hand. I guess those fish are ready.” He glanced at the pan.

Jeremy moved the fish to two plates while Olivia put the bread and tin cups of water on the table. Jeremy added a bowl of cold boiled potatoes and they sat down to eat in silence. When their plates held only heaps of bones, Jeremy got up to pour coffee.

“I left some sacks of feed and seed in my barn,” she said. “Lots of other things too. You’re more than welcome to anything you find there that you have a use for. Or anything you can sell.”

“You don’t want to be giving everything away. What if you decide to come back?”

“I don’t think that’s likely. At least not soon. In any case, it will all go to ruination before I ever get back here. Trappers will clean it out in a lick. I’d rather you have it. So please, take whatever you want.”

“What will happen to your place?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It will still belong to me. Of course, to folks around here I suppose it will still be the old Scruggs place. Soon enough no one will remember that Mourning and I were ever here.”

He shook his head. “More like a lot of stories about you and your mysterious disappearance will get told around campfires.”

“There’s nothing mysterious about a person giving up and going back home.”

“But people like stories, don’t they? They’ll have you off robbing banks or running the Underground Railroad. Maybe turn you into a light-skinned run-away who was passing.”

“Well, you’ll just have to set them straight. It’s been ages since I robbed a bank. Let me clear up,” Olivia said as she rose and took the dirty plates to the table by the tree.

Jeremy went down to the river and sent a bucket of water flying up the hill on the hook. Olivia smiled as she tipped it to fill a washtub of suds, and Jeremy sent another one, for the rinse water. While she was busy washing and drying the dishes, Jeremy went into the cabin. He came out with a double sheet of newsprint and sat on the porch reading

This must be a little of what being married feels like
, she thought.
Except that hopefully the man and the woman actually like each other
.

“Listen to this – here’s one of the things that’re wrong with this country.” Jeremy rattled the paper and began reading aloud. “Not a road can be opened, not a bridge can be built, not a canal can be dug, but a charter of exclusive privileges must be granted for the purpose … The bargaining and trucking away of chartered privileges is the whole business of our lawmakers … A man should not be shut out of a certain enterprise because he possesses too little capital to be chartered by the State…” He put the paper down and looked over at her. “That’s William Leggett talking, but it might as well be Andy Jackson himself.”

Jeremy’s voice droned on for a long while.
Whoever he ends up marrying better like the sound of it
, Olivia thought. The next time he paused, he looked up to find Olivia standing in front of him. She noticed for the first time how close together his eyes were. How had she once thought him handsome?

“I’d better get on the road. There’s so much I have to do in Detroit,” she said, while he pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Thanks for the breakfast. It was good having you for a neighbor.”

“Well, I’m truly sorry to see you go. I was hoping to get to know you better.” He looked into her eyes and she thought she actually saw some regret in his. “I’ll look in on your place from time to time. Try to see that the trappers don’t tear up the floorboards. Where would I send a letter, if there’s anything to tell you?”

“That’s kind of you. Killion’s General, Five Rocks, Pennsylvania.” She moved toward the barn to harness the team.

“Let me do that for you,” Jeremy said.

He took his time, glancing at her often. When they were standing by the wagon he said, “I wish there was something could change your mind.” He offered his hand and did not release hers. “It’s been grand having someone to talk to.”