Rose glanced at Belinda’s headstone
one more time. She didn’t take Emily’s hand, but she nodded and
picked herself up. The back of her calico skirt bore a big damp
spot, and a few of last fall’s dead leaves and twigs stuck to it.
She brushed at it futilely as they walked toward the road. Her
stockings sagged around her ankles and she wiped her nose on her
sleeve. “I was just . . . sometimes I stop by
to see my mama on the way home from school.”
Emily adjusted the basket on her
forearm. “I went to see my sister one last time before I left
Chicago to come out here. It was hard to say goodbye because I
don’t know if I’ll ever see her grave again. It’s nice that you can
visit here, once in a while.” She put a little emphasis on the last
part of the sentence. If Rose came here too often, she would be no
better off than Cora with her refusal to let Belinda’s memory rest
in peace.
Rose snuffled and dragged her nose
across her sleeve again. Emily cringed, but refrained from asking a
teacher’s automatic question: where was the girl’s
handkerchief?
“
No one knows about
it.”
Emily looked down at the dark,
downturned head. “Knows about what? That you come to the
cemetery?”
Rose nodded.
“
Why? You don’t think your
father or grandmother would mind, do you?”
“
No. Just that it’s my
secret between me and Mama.”
Emily understood. She was beginning to
believe that Rose thought she had no one to turn to. Emily knew
that Luke loved his daughter, and Cora, unpleasant harpy that she
was, loved her too. But neither of them seemed to really know how
she felt. Well, Luke had freely admitted that, but she’d thought
that Cora was closer to Rose. “Kind of like talking to
God?”
“
Yeah, sort of.” Rose
watched a flock of geese pass overhead, honking as they winged
their way toward a distant pond.
“
I still miss my own
parents. My father died when I was a very little girl, younger than
you are. Then my mother remarried a nice man, Mr. Cannon.” Well, he
had been nice enough, and he hadn’t treated Emily badly. But she’d
always known that he didn’t love her. Alyssa had been the one he
doted upon.
“
And your mama?” Rose
asked.
Emily swallowed. “There was a
fire . . . she passed away about nine years
ago.” She couldn’t think about it any more today. If she did, she
might actually break down in front of Rose. She understood a
child’s grief, and she would offer support to Rose in any way that
she could. Still, for years she’d struggled to keep her emotions
under control, to bury her own grief and not look back. Social
custom put a great premium on the rituals of mourning and Emily had
followed them unstintingly. But she felt so alone here, so
friendless, that to ponder her losses would undermine her strength.
She changed the subject. “How was school today?”
Rose gave her a sidelong
look. “I got in trouble.” The word
again
seemed to hang between them,
unspoken but implied.
“
Why? What did you
do?”
“
I pounded the tar out of
Billy Reed.”
“
Mercy!” Emily stopped in
her tracks and stared at small, delicate Rose. She couldn’t hide
her alarm this time. “You fought with a boy? Whatever would make
you do such a thing?”
Rose stopped too, apprehension
crossing her small features. “He said my dress looks like I got it
from a carnival sideshow.”
“
Oh, dear.” Billy Reed was
right, in Emily’s opinion. Belinda’s skill with the needle must not
have come from Cora. Rose was a beautiful little girl, but the
woman dressed her in the most ghastly costumes, and they were so
poorly made—seams crooked, hem fraying, and ruffles, ruffles,
ruffles. The dresses looked as if a child had sewn them. Emily’s
heart went out to Rose—enduring merciless teasing as a youngster
had been a daily occurrence for her. She could almost understand
why Rose had reacted as she had. In her girlhood, she too had been
dressed in well-made but unflattering clothes. Alyssa had gotten
the pretty colors and enhancing styles. Robert Cannon had felt that
considering her size, the less attention Emily drew, the better. So
Alyssa had gone about as pretty as a flower, while Emily had worn
the plumage of a plain brown wren.
Still, Emily couldn’t condone Rose
getting into a physical fight over it. She started walking again,
and the girl followed, scuffing her shoe against a rock in the
road.
“
Rose, ladies don’t even
acknowledge that kind of insult. And they certainly don’t engage in
fisticuffs.”
“
Yeah, that’s what my
teacher Miss Simmons said too. But she didn’t make
him
stand in the corner
like I had to. Why should he get away with saying those bad things?
How come can’t I stick up for myself?”
Emily was about to recite a platitude
regarding forbearance and propriety, then recalled her own
experience earlier with Fran Eakins and Clara Thurmon. Why, indeed?
Why should a person have to pretend that she was as insensate as a
lamp or a doorknob when others made rude or unkind remarks, or
played cruel tricks? She realized the path of her thoughts. God
above, she was questioning the very principles which she had clung
to for years. For a moment, Emily’s orderly, idealized world tilted
sharply. Then it righted itself again.
“
But Rose, if we ‘pounded
the tar’ out of everyone who said a bad thing, what would happen to
us all? We would have chaos and constant wars.”
“
Well, maybe it would teach
’em not to talk that way and then everyone would be
nice.”
For a moment, she thought that Rose
might have a point. Reconsidering, she eyed the girl. “Do you
remember how you talked about me the first day we met?”
The corner of Rose’s mouth turned down
but she said nothing.
“
I let it pass, didn’t I? We
have to live together in a civilized manner.”
“
So I just have to let Billy
say those things?”
“
When people like Billy Reed
or Fran—like Billy Reed break the rules we live by, they suffer far
more than we do.”
Rose’s dark eyes glinted up at her,
disbelief written in them as plainly as the letters carved on her
mother’s headstone. Even worse, for the first time, in her secret
heart Emily doubted her own words. There was no comfort in the
hollow bromide and she knew it. She tried another
approach.
“
What do you think your
father would say about what you did?”
Rose’s head came up. “You won’t tell
him, will you?”
“
I guess that means he
wouldn’t like it either.”
Her shoulders drooped.
“No.”
“
I won’t tell him. But maybe
you should.”
She pondered this, then replied, “No,
I don’t think so. Daddy is unhappy enough.”
Emily’s heart gave another little
twist in her chest. How much of Luke’s unhappiness was she
responsible for?
“
Here.” She reached into the
basket on her arm. “I seem to remember that you have a sweet
tooth.” She smiled at Rose and handed her one of the strawberry
drops. “But please, promise that you won’t get into anymore fights.
It’s just plain wrong. And you could get hurt, you
know.”
The sage green Becker farmhouse came
into view ahead, and Rose started to scamper toward it. “Naw, I’m
bigger than Billy.”
Despite her worry and disapproval,
Emily felt a bubble of laughter rise in her chest that she knew she
had to suppress. She couldn’t very well encourage Rose’s
behavior.
The girl ran ahead a bit, then stopped
and turned. “Thank you for the candy, Miss Emily.” She was off
again like a tree swallow, lithe, agile, and full of
energy.
For the second time since she’d come
to Fairdale, Emily’s heart felt lighter. She smiled at the pretty
little girl with tangled dark hair and sagging stockings. “You’re
welcome, Rose.”
CHAPTER SIX
Luke came out of the barn after
feeding the team and flexed his stiff shoulders. It had been a long
day but a satisfying one. He stood at the corral, one foot on the
bottom rail, and lifted his gaze to survey the arrow-straight
furrows in the fields, tinged green with seedlings reaching for the
sky. This section held the corn that he’d planted earlier in the
month—it needed a long growing season in this part of the country
where there were often more rainy spring days than sunny. It was
usually that way until mid-June.
Of all the things that had gone wrong
over the years, he’d been damned lucky with this farm. Oh, it
hadn’t come to him easily. He’d worked his fool head off in all
kinds of weather, reached into laboring cows up to his shoulder to
turn calves that didn’t know which end was out, and fought the
punishing east wind that blew through this river gorge and weakened
fence posts and permanently bent some trees to the west. He’d sat
up nights with the horses when they fell ill with a malady that
threatened to carry them off, and dosed the hogs with Bob Cook’s
sovereign remedy for the scours when their insides had turned to
water.
But still, he’d been lucky. The place
had thrived and he hadn’t been plagued by the multitude of
disasters that could occur on a farm: accidents, fires, floods,
pests that ate crops right down to the dirt, diseases that wiped
out whole herds of livestock. He was proud of what he’d
accomplished. Not bad for a kid who’d started his life in a shack
down on the river, a kid everybody had expected to fail, especially
his old man. If Luke wasn’t happy, well, hell—who really had much
happiness? He didn’t think about it too often, although he had to
admit that he’d hoped Alyssa Cannon would bring a little with
her.
In the end, maybe it didn’t matter. He
knew what his job was—to make a decent home for his girl. He’d
learned by his old man’s example what a man’s job wasn’t. He wasn’t
supposed to lie around, drunk half the time, in jail the other
half. He shouldn’t tell his sons that they wouldn’t amount to a
pile of horseshit, or his daughters that they’d better not end up
pregnant and crying on his doorstep. A man wasn’t supposed to make
his wife so miserable that the only way she could escape was to
die, the way his own mother had.
The way Belinda had.
Luke glanced at the oak tree in the
front yard, the low afternoon sun gilding its top branches. There
was no going back, and there seemed to be no going forward. There
was just the farm and Rose and Cora. And now Emily. He sighed and
flexed his shoulders again, then unhooked his boot from the bottom
fence rail. Dragging his mind away from the painful memories, he
headed toward the pump behind the house, intent on getting washed
up for supper. It would probably be another stiff, uncomfortable
meal, with Cora continuing her war of silence. Since the episode
with Belinda’s tablecloth, when she’d threatened again to go to her
own home and he’d called her bluff, she’d tried a different
tack—instead of harping, now she rarely spoke. But her wordless
demands for an apology were as loud as shouting. Damn it, he
wouldn’t apologize. She’d treated Emily like a stray cat, and he
was tired of living this way.
He kicked at a dirt clod, frustrated
by the situation. He sensed that Rose was still the pawn in the
tug-of-war between himself and Cora. Rose already had enough to get
used to without giving her the added burden of losing her
grandmother. At least for now. But he hoped that after Emily
settled in and the girl got used to her, he could tell Cora to go
home. For the time being, he felt like a bogged calf, stuck in the
morass of Cora’s bitterness.
When he rounded the corner, he halted
in his tracks, unprepared for the sight ahead of him. Emily stood
at the wash tub, her sleeves rolled up to expose slender pale arms.
She worked hard, scrubbing something white up and down the
washboard. Her dress front was wet from neck to waist and molded
itself to her upper torso. The same low rays that turned the oak to
gold made her hair gleam like the sun itself. Behind her, the pair
of clotheslines held the black dress she’d worn to the chicken coop
and some white unmentionables. The chemises, petticoats, and a
corset flapped in the breeze with scraps of pink and blue ribbons
dangling from them. Mixed in with them were his own clean shirts—he
supposed that Cora had done those earlier because they looked
dry.
Luke thought it was a homey scene, one
that he realized he’d missed. The hot water in the tub raised
enough steam to stick strands of curls to Emily’s face and make
them coil at the back of her neck. She didn’t look nearly as stiff
and formal as the woman who had met him on the dock in
town.
Suddenly, Luke’s throat was as dry as
a field in August, and he swallowed hard, completely captivated by
Emily’s appealing dishevelment. He stood and watched her as she
worked, scrubbing, wringing, rinsing.
She looked up. “Mr. Becker! I didn’t
see you—I didn’t know you were—what are you doing?”
“
I just came around back to
wash up for supper.” He nodded at the pump to her left.
She glanced at the pump, then looked
over her shoulder at the clean wash hanging in plain view.
Obviously flustered, she plunged the garment in her hand into the
water again.