Read Waltzing In Ragtime Online

Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

Waltzing In Ragtime (31 page)

“Matthew, do you mean it?”
“Sure I do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “You don’t have to, not yet. We got us some time. I’ll show you.”
Matthew got used to Olana’s silent presence among the women. As the days grew warmer they all brought his dinner when he was pruning the apricot trees. Sometimes they walked to the shore with him afternoons. They spoke among themselves as he swam with Possum. He even caught them all laughing once, but Olana blushed and Annie shooed him off on another task when he asked to be let in on it. He went about their bidding without complaint, but wished he could earn his way off his elders’ probation lists sooner.
He and Olana were not alone until Possum’s fourth birthday. The women took his little girl into town for some finery, leaving Olana in the house alone. They charged him to look in on her, but not when. Matthew tried to concentrate on the trees, but after nicking his knuckles the third time, and hearing the gracious sound of the noon Angelis bells, he put down his tools. Noon, that was a good time, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t scare her if he came home with the bells, would he?
Olana was in the kitchen, on her knees, weeping, her apron smeared with the same dark matter that was dripping from her fingers. Not blood. God, please, not blood. He couldn’t will his limbs to move. She raised her head.
“I’m so clumsy!” she yelled at him, pushing the curls off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I wanted everything perfect.”
“Perfect?” he repeated, stupidly.
“Everything went together fine. Then I couldn’t get the stove fired up properly, then I knocked over the bowl of c-cake batter — stop it! Stop laughing, you hateful man!”
But he couldn’t stop, even as she flung fistfuls of flour at him, because he was so flooded with relief. Cake batter. Not blood.
“I’m useless, ignorant, ungainly, stupid —”
“You are the envied woman of this household,” he told her sternly, dodging the assault unsuccessfully.
“What?”
“You heard me. Envied! With a sacred trust. We are honored by your presence among us.”
She looked stunned. Didn’t she know that already? He smiled, wishing he’d told her sooner. The delicate blush complimented her already heightened features.
He knelt on the floor amid the flour and chocolate batter and broken crockery. “Let’s see what we can salvage, shall we?”
“All right,” she whispered, joining him. He took her wrist in a gentle hold and brought it to his mouth, licking the batter dripping from her fingers. “Hey. This is good!”
“Really?”
“Sure. Look. There’s enough left in the bowl. We can rescue a little cake for Possum out of it. Would you like that?”
“I like … this,” she said softly.
“What?” His tongue stroked along her finger more slowly. “This?” She giggled. Like the girl who still lived inside her. The one her husband had damaged badly, but hadn’t killed. Matthew feasted on her laughter as well as the sweet chocolate. He dipped her finger in the batter and started again, his tongue harder as it glided along her palm’s lifeline.
“No …” her protest ended in a deep sigh. His heart thumped wildly. She wasn’t pulling away. He caught the faint scent of rosewater from her skin. She returned her hand to the bowl,
sighed again, then skated her batter-drenched fingers along the contours of his face, down his neck. He kissed into her palm.
“Matthew.” Her voice burst over the syllables of his name. She leaned down.
The commotion at the front door made her leap like a startled deer, knocking over the sack of flour. He looked up through the white dust to see his grandmother’s familiar, fisted-up waist.
“Well, well. Who won?” she asked.
 
 
She came to his room that night. From deep in a dreamless sleep Matthew saw only her face edged in darkness. His eyes adjusted, and the outline of her nightdress appeared.
“’Lana?”
“Yes.”
“Are you hurting?”
“No.”
He sat up, then remembered he’d forsaken his nightshirt on this warm evening. And he’d went hard since the sound of her voice. She came closer.
“Would you kiss me, Matthew?”
“Sure.”
He did, tenderly, his fingers hovering under her chin. Then he waited. The way Lottie waited for him when he was coming alive again. He pulled the covers aside. She slipped into the bed. Shivered.
“Cold?” he asked.
“My hands and feet. Why is that, Matthew?”
“Takes longer for the blood to get there, now that you’re sharing.”
“There’s nothing wrong?”
“No.” He breathed into her hands. “You tell Annie and Vita your worries, ’Lana?”
“Not all of them.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want them to think I’m as ignorant as I am.”
“But —”
“You already know.” She laughed. Embarrassed, high, her eyes skittering across the room’s braided rug. “I thought,” she whispered as her cold toes contacted his leg shyly, “that I would never feel like … like I did when you came in with the noon bells’ tolling. Not again. Matthew, do you —”
“Oh, yes.” Stop that. Jumping on her words, he chided himself.
She took a deep breath. “Could we, I mean would it hurt the baby if we —”
“No, darlin’.” Shit, again. But she didn’t seem to mind.
“Could we, then?”
“When you’re ready.”
“I am.”
He resisted the urge to tell her she wasn’t, that he could feel her fear in her voice. But trust had brought her to him, hadn’t it? Trust and that courage of hers, leading. So he lost his face in her short curls, his hands in the new curves beneath her gown. He tasted her tears. Why was she crying? It unnerved him. He stood, pulled on his nightshirt, and went to the open windows. He leaned into the ocean’s sound, felt her hand on his arm.
“I’m too ugly now?”
“No.” He drew her close. “Honest to God, ’Lana, I have never wanted you more.”
He felt the heat of her blush and took pleasure in it. She turned her attention to the night sky. “So clear,” she said. “Like when the twins were born.”
“Yes.”
He lifted her onto the deep windowsill, beside the vase his mother had filled with yellow roses. She dangled her legs, making a soft breeze.
“Olana, I love you.”
The dangling stopped. “You only love broken things.”
He inhaled deeply. “I don’t believe you’re broken, ’Lana,” he whispered. He took a rose from the vase and touched her bared shoulder with it. Olana shivered, but not with the cold. He kissed
between her breasts, then led the rose up to her throat. She plucked it from the stem. Matthew felt the pedals shower his hair. Their scent intoxicated him. His tongue stroked her nipples as her little gasps and raking fingers urged him on.
She peaked, melting her body in that delicious way Matthew loved. He lifted her from her perch and carried her to bed. Once down, the catches in her throat.
“’Lana — I can wait.”
“No, please, Matthew. Don’t turn away from me tonight.”
He placed more pillows behind her back, then slid his hand between her thighs. She was moist. Smiling bravely as if she was at the gates of Hell.
His mouth took hers, delving deeper. He slid inside her. She gasped.
“You well, ’Lana?” he asked.
She nodded, blushing, but her hands urged him on. Again, again he entered, burying himself between her thighs as she laughed musically at his ear. The tears only started when they were done, when he was falling asleep in her arms.
He took her hand. “What is it, love?”
“It didn’t hurt,” she breathed.
The dread circled his heart. “’Lana, did I hurt you, that first time, at your house? I did everything so badly, when I wanted —”
She pressed her fingers against his lips. “That night has been the thread to my sanity, Matthew!”
“It has?”
“I thought I’d somehow dreamed it, after —” She closed her eyes. “It was like being under a waterfall, that night — feeling so full, rushing, powerful, beautiful. What came after … oh Matthew, my cruelty toward you, who was —”
“Rude, and demanding, and confusing —”
“I deserved it. I deserved everything.”
“’Lana, don’t.”
She drew herself and her childspace away from him. He coaxed her back into his arms and held her there, gently, as the
pre-dawn light began to filter into the room. She stirred against his chest.
“Innocent,” she murmured. “That’s what you said my baby is, didn’t you, Matthew?”
“Yes.”
“I want a name that means that.”
“The women, they know those things.” He kissed her temple. “Ask the women.”
When he woke she was gone, but her scent remained, and the sheets were strewn with rose pedals. His grandmother knocked the last one out of his hair at breakfast. Olana giggled behind the cream pitcher.
 
 
“Cal limps for the bullet still in his side, and can’t eat no fried foods either. All for nothing? Damn. That ranger sure as hell looked dead.”
“Shut up, Ezra,” his brother growled.
“Mr. Hopkins recognizes your effort. That’s why he’s willing to engage our services again.” McPeal rubbed the stubble of his chin.
“Where is he? We’ll get him this time.”
“Unknown, at present. This job is simple robbery. To show our Mr. Hopkins that we’re serious about getting back in his good graces. He’s looking for traces of his kinswoman, the very elusive Olana Whittaker Moore.”
“Find one, you’ll find the other, if you ask me,” Ezra claimed. “All set up in housekeeping again.”
McPeal had learned to listen to the dull brother. “If this escapade leads to them both, we’ll have a chance at those thousands again.”
“Who do we rob?” Cal asked impatiently.
“Seems there was a shadow woman, the night Mrs. Moore slipped off her matrimonial rigging, who led the distraught husband on a merry chase to a big house, along the shore. She delivered something besides a false scent.”
“We can get her to tell us what, don’t fret yourself, Mr. —”
“No violence, this time! You’ll get me in, take whatever you’d like. Now. Mr. Hopkins has arranged easy access. But I’m told the house is confusing.”
Sometimes Olana went to his room, sometimes Matthew went to hers. Sometimes they met in the hallway, laughing. It was one of those nights that Annie Smithers caught them. She sighed.
“Will you two settle yourselves in one bed so we can all get a good night’s rest?”
Matthew colored to the roots of his hair as he “Yes, ma’amed” her. His grandmother was the only person alive who could embarrass him, and Olana realized that doing so was the old woman’s chief vice.
Her grandson never ceased delighting Olana with lover’s variations, were they playful, passionate, or tender. He encouraged her attempts to give him pleasure. He made her feel beautiful again, though her hair was shorn and her middle soon would not allow even Vita’s largest apron to keep her shifts protected.
She helped the Smithers’ household bring in the apricot crop, and often went with Matthew and Possum for their daily swim in the bay. The summer grew so warm Olana walked out into the water herself and floated on her back while they swam around her. Once, while Possum napped in the shade, Matthew brought her over the hill and made love to her gently, sweetly in a place he
dug out of the sand to accommodate her growth.
He and his women never grew impatient with her questions. If she were shy about asking the women, he would ask for her. How big was the baby now? How would she know it was ready to come out? What would it feel like? She thought that in the women’s care, and with him beside her, she could face even the agony she had seen on Mrs. Amadeo’s face.
It was after the birth she had difficulty imagining. She didn’t think of it much, only when a stranger rode down the road and she’d seen fear in Vita Hart’s eyes. Or the night she woke up screaming.
“He’s coming,” she finally whispered through clenched teeth.
Matthew caressed the seven-month bulge her waist had become. “I won’t let any harm come to you, I swear it.”
She touched his face, which seemed to glow in his conviction as well as the full moon’s light. “It was a dream, Matthew.”
“Listen to your dreams,” he said, settling her against his chest. “Especially now.”
The next day she found his Colt Peacemaker in the drawer beside their bed. His rifle was ready over the mantle. Even Annie’s old Dragoon pistols came down from the back room’s cupboard and rested in the drawer under the pastry cloth. And Olana heard the two women arguing.
“Mama, he’s a powerful man, her husband. He could make it look —”
“Ain’t time to worry about that yet. Let’s get the child through her confinement.”
Vita’s troubled face brightened when she saw Olana. She held up the tiny baby gown. Olana took it from her hands. “Will he be this small?” she asked.
“She’ll be, yes,” Annie proclaimed.
“She? How do you know —”
“She doesn’t know, just fancies she does,” Vita spoke, irritated.
“Tell me my business when you’ve brought in over a thousand babies,” Annie scolded her daughter.
“A thousand?” Olana marveled, happy even in the midst of these two women’s quarrel.
“One thousand, one hundred, three.”
“You remember exactly?”
“Don’t have to. Got a record.”
“May I see it?”
The old woman’s face betrayed pleasure before she fetched the thick book from an undistinguished place beside the Bible and Sears Roebuck catalogue. She placed it on Olana’s dwindling lap.
The opening pages of the text revealed a handwriting related to the one in Matthew’s book of remedies, but more childish, full of too hard pressing and ink blots. Olana ran her fingertips over them and felt the buckling efforts of a young woman pioneering to be her family’s first literate.
“My first seven years ain’t in there,” Annie explained as she stood over Olana’s shoulder. “Those I did apprenticed to my mama. Before Michael Barnes taught me my letters. I wasn’t much of a student, as you can see.”
“Michael —”
“Barnes. The husband with the vest and watchchain,” Vita explained which of Annie’s men she was talking about. Olana nodded, remembering the old photograph of the graying man with sad eyes. The first baby written in the book was born in 1843. Olana’s fascination grew as she read on. The women worked silently around her. She found Vita, written in more detail than the rest. Empire, California, 1850. Gold Country. Annie Smithers was a forty-niner. Olana drifted through time, distance, and children until Vita nodded down at a new page.
“There’s Matthew,” she proclaimed softly at a drawing of her and a wrinkled, peaceful baby in her arms. “My second stepfather drew us.”
“Joe Fish. Who was taught by Sequoyah himself.”
“That’s right.”
“Matthew told me he made wonderful likenesses.”
“You are getting to know us all, both living and passed on!”
Olana stared at the drawn, shining face of the young mother. “Was it a difficult birth?” she found the courage to ask.
Vita smiled. “I was very frightened. Mama and I were estranged at the time, because of my marriage. I was the only woman at the garrison. There had been some Indian trouble. I sent for Mama, but couldn’t be sure she even got my message, or would come if she did. She had little ones of her own then.”
Annie snorted. “Joe Fish knew there’d be no stopping me once I set my mind to going. He got me through.”
“And once I saw Mama and Joe, the burden of my loneliness and fear had lightened along with my pains. I never saw a more beautiful sunrise than the first one I saw in my son’s eyes.”
“Oh, I must read —”
Olana discovered the next page had been brutally ripped from the book. Though carefully replaced, it was smeared with an ugly red ink stamp-marked “Property of U.S. Army.”
“What is this?” she asked the women.
“This stood between Matthew and a rope some years ago.”
“His court martial.”
Vita raised her eyebrows. “He’s told you?”
“Not him. It was the reason he lost his commission at the park.”
“Lost?”
Annie Smithers’ mouth narrowed into a hard line. “Didn’t I tell you, Vita? Didn’t I tell you he got pushed back on the farm?”
There were tears in his mother’s eyes. “The documents were supposed to be sealed. His father promised me. I stayed with him the rest of his life because he promised me those records were sealed!”
Olana took her hand. “They were. Mr. Parker didn’t know why he was ordered to dismiss Matthew. And he wouldn’t follow the order. So Matthew resigned.”
“He loved those trees,” Vita whispered, “they were healing —”
“He was shutting parts of himself down,” Annie contended. “Permanent hibernation would have come next. He needed to
come home. It was for the best, Vita. Quit coddling the boy.”
“Tell me about the court martial,” Olana asked.
“He was tried and found guilty of desertion in 1890, during the Conner’s Ridge Campaign,” Vita began.
“Massacre,” Annie corrected her sharply.
“1890? Why, Matthew was —”
“Born June twenty-fifth, eighteen and seventy-six. During the Battle of Little Big Horn, that changed everything. Or maybe just speeded things up. Leastways, his birthday made Matthew fourteen in ninety. Fourteen. Exactly how we got him freed, though they should have not wasted the rope and put it around —”
“Mama,” Vita scolded. “His father had lied years before, in order to get him enlisted. Matthew was always a little tall for his age.”
“He never had no business in uniform, and I told them such at the trial.”
“I don’t know why the Apache didn’t kill him,” Vita fretted.
“I do. Even in their beaten state, them Indians had the sense to recognize a child as good and pure as his superiors were filthy in corruption! He refused to kill women and children at Conner’s Ridge. He defended them against the murdering savages who gave the command for slaughter. A few even managed to slip away because of it, with their babies on their backs. That was both disobeying orders and aiding the enemy, as the army saw it. The soldiers beat him so badly it was two weeks before he could stand trial.”
Olana’s head hurt. “Mama,” Vita cautioned, placing her hand on Annie Smithers’ arm.
“So,” the old woman finished, “now you know for what crime Matthew lost his place among the trees.”
The book had gotten too heavy for Olana’s lap. It slipped to the floor, notes and recipes flying out of the pages. It had something to do with her, his losing his place in the trees. It wasn’t Sidney that found him out, she finally realized. It was Darius.

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