Courting Miss Hattie (18 page)

"I hope your reputation and respect will make you happy, Bess," he said in a cold voice, "because you are sending love away."

With that, he slipped off her windowsill and vaulted down the tree, dropping to the ground. As he walked casually toward the woods, this time he didn't look back.

 
CHAPTER
 
10

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T
he sound traveled strangely in the fog, not muffled or hushed but in little pockets of sound, as if on water. To Reed, as he walked to Miss Hattie's barn to check on the swollen knee of one of the mules, the sound was as distinct as if it came from his own head.

Immediately realizing that the woman weeping so mournfully was Hattie, he quickened his step, ultimately breaking into a run to get to her house.

Illuminated in the light from the doorway, Hattie sat on the front porch step, her arms crossed on her knees, her head on her arms, crying as if her heart were breaking. Standing beside her, like a friend offering solace, was the goat,
Myrene
, whose big-eyed expression was almost as dismal as Hattie's sobs.

Without hesitation, Reed walked up to the step and seated himself at Hattie's side.

She jumped, startled at the intrusion. "Reed!" she exclaimed, her voice raw from crying. Hastily she choked back the sobs and tried to wipe the telltale wetness from her face. "I didn't hear you come up."

"What's wrong, Miss Hattie?" He handed her a worn blue kerchief from his back pocket. "Has something happened?"

"Oh, no, nothing," she said. "I'm just being foolish." She attempted to laugh, but it failed when she couldn't stop the flow of tears from her eyes. "It's nothing really."

Reed was not an expert on crying women, but he'd seen his share, and without hesitation offered the only surefire cure he knew. Slipping his arm around her back, he pulled her to him, nudging her head down onto his shoulder. "Come on, Miss Hattie," he coaxed. "Tell me what's wrong."

His sympathy met with a new torrent of tears mixed with words as sorrowful as they were unintelligible. Reed rocked her back and forth, holding her close as she cried her misery into his shirtfront. He remembered another time when he had held her like this, the day her father was buried, but he didn't remember being aware of the softness of her body or the sweet smell of herbs in her hair.

As she quieted, he continued to hold her, rocking gently and humming a child's lullaby. It was a warm, comfortable moment encased in the privacy of the night fog. Innocent yet pleasurable.

It was Hattie who moved away first, as embarrassed by her contentment in his arms as she was by her loss of control. "I'm sorry, Reed, I—"

"
Shhh
," he interrupted, smiling at her with tenderness. "What are friends for but to hold you when you cry."

His sincerity was real, and Hattie looked away, timid in the face of it. He reached over and lightly grasped her chin, turning her back to him. "None of this hiding, now, Miss Hattie Colfax," he said. "You tell me what awful calamity brought you to such a sad state that it took me and
Myrene
both to dry your tears."

Hattie glanced from him to the goat,
who
now that the excitement had passed, was calmly nosing around in the tall grass near the porch. Trying to ignore his request, she shrugged and leaned forward to stroke
Myrene's
long silky neck. "It's so
silly,
it's not even worth telling."

"If it made you cry," Reed said, raising an eyebrow slightly, "it's worth telling."

Hattie hesitated, crumpling his blue handkerchief in her hands. Swallowing back the residual sorrow that still clogged her throat, she gave a halfhearted sigh. "Well, Mr. Drayton was here this evening," she began. With her attention focused on the handkerchief, she missed the hard expression that streaked across Reed's face.

"Was that son of a bitch fast with you?" he asked.

She jerked her head up, startled. "Reed! Your language."

"Damn my language! If that no-account laid a hand on you, Hattie, there won't be enough of him left to scrape up and bury!"

"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "It was nothing like that. I
mean,
nothing like that, exactly."

Reed gazed at her speculatively, not quite willing to let it go. "What do you mean, 'nothing
like
that exactly'?"

Hattie looked at everything around her, except Reed before finally replying with a slight cough to muffle her words. "He tried to kiss me."

Involuntarily, Reed's gaze dropped to the bodice of Hattie's thin summer gown. "Where?" he asked impulsively.

Following the imprudent direction of his eyes, Hattie gasped in shock. Not too casually, she crossed her arms over her chest. "On the mouth, of course," she whispered, mortified.

"Of course," Reed said immediately, silently cursing himself as twenty kinds of fool. Drayton had upset her, and he was making it worse.

They sat silently side by side, neither quite ready to look at the other. Taking a deep breath, Reed finally broke the spell. "So Drayton tried to kiss you, and you didn't like it," he said.

Hesitating over her answer, Hattie found herself not totally comfortable talking with Reed about her feelings.

"It wasn't that I didn't like it," she began.

"You liked it." It was a statement rather than a question, and its brusqueness surprised her.

"Well, no. I mean, well—" She broke off, disgusted by her
missishness
. "I don't know if I liked it or not. I didn't let him kiss me."

"Because you don't want to kiss him," Reed prompted,
turn
ing to face her.

"No." She sat up straight and tall with an air of independence. "I do want to kiss him, but I don't know how."

"What!"

"You heard exactly what I said," she replied, stiffening her resolve. "I wanted to kiss him, but I didn't know how."

Reed shook his head in disbelief. Carefully pulling one leg up and draping his arm over his knee in a relaxed pose, he studied Hattie. "What are you talking about? There's no
how
in kissing. There's just kissing."

"That's easy for you to say," she said, obviously miffed. "You probably kiss Bessie Jane every week, and maybe even other girls before you were engaged to her."

Reed declined comment and adjusted his position until he was leaning against the porch pillar facing Hattie. He continued to study her, wondering why a kiss had caused her such distress. Unless… "Surely kissing today is not much different from when you were a schoolgirl."

Staring down at her hands as they continued to twist his handkerchief in knots, Hattie confirmed his suspicion with a shrug. "I never kissed anybody in school," she said quietly. "I've never kissed anyone, ever, except Mama and Daddy, and I know that's not the same."

He nodded. She chanced a look at him and felt herself blushing under his unrelenting regard.

Throughout the years of their friendship, Hattie had never cause to feel naive. She was older, after all, and Reed had always looked up to her. He respected her judgment and valued her ideas. Now she felt the sudden powerful need to explain herself, clarify her past,
vindicate
her lack of experience.

"You don't know how it was for me in school," she said. "You've always seen me as the older sister who knew what she was about. But I haven't always been that way."

His silence encouraged her to continue. "Living out here as an only child, I just didn't play much, didn't know much about other children and the kinds of games they enjoyed. When I went to school, I was frightened of the other children at first. They were so noisy and messy. Mama would have never put up with that, and I was afraid the teacher would be as angry as my mother would have been. So I stayed away from them. Since I was by myself most of the time, the other children began to tease me."

She looked quickly to see Reed's expression. It revealed nothing, and she gazed off into the obscurity of the fog, as if seeing the past. Reed
steepled
his hands together, touching his fingertips to his lips as he gazed intently at her. This frightened, lonely child was a Hattie he'd never known. She intrigued him.

"The other children made me the joke of the school," she went on. "For years, all a child had to do to get the admiration of the other children was to tie my pigtails to the back of my chair or paste the pages of my reader together."

She smiled slightly as if the nightmares of childhood were not wistful memories. "I grew out of it finally," she said with a hint of triumph. "By about ten or twelve, I was making friends and learning to get along. I was still a bit of a joke, but I made a place for myself." Her tone was more confident now. "I was very good in school, which pleased my teacher, and I tried to be the first one to make fun of myself so that no one else could. Most of the children liked me if it were just me and them. But when the group got together, I was still 'odd man out.'"

She shook her head as if tossing away the worst of the memories,
then
looked at the man beside her, "So you can see," she said, "I probably wouldn't have been the boys first choice as a sweetheart. And then, of course," she added vaguely, "there was the other."

"What 'other'?" he asked immediately.

She looked down, unable to hold his gaze. "My looks," she said quietly. Then she lifted her head, refusing to cower. "The young men didn't favor my looks."

Reed opened his mouth to say something, but no words came. He stared at her, his brain searching for the right words, the honest and allaying words, but they couldn't be found.

Painfully aware of his silence, Hattie focused once again on the handkerchief. She could feel Reed's eyes upon her and fought the desire to jump up and run.

"There is nothing wrong with your looks," he said finally. His tone was matter-of-fact, as if to emphasize the truthfulness of his conclusion.

"You're sweet," she said, easily disregarding his statement. "But you see me through the eyes of a friend, or a brother." Not wishing to prompt him to further undeserved compliments, she hurried on, struggling to explain. "You may not believe this, but when I was a young girl, the boys had a name for me." She swallowed
hard,
screwing up her courage to reveal a truth she'd spent a good deal of time ignoring. "The boys called me
…
they called me
Horseface
Hattie."

Years of pride and success couldn't completely override the remembered pain of childhood. As Hattie heard her own words, her bottom lip trembled, and the tears she had so carefully controlled filled her eyes once more.

Reed watched her emotional struggle as the echo of her words rang in his ears. He could hear the cruel name on Bessie Jane's lips, and instinctively he reached out to take Hattie in his arms and comfort her. "
Shh
…
Hattie, no," he whispered into her hair.

"It's true," she said, her voice muffled against his chest as her tears dampened his shirtfront again. "No man in the county would ever look twice at
Horseface
Hattie."

"Don't say that, Hattie," he admonished her tenderly. "Boys are cruel and stupid, but that was a long time ago."

"Not so long as I thought," she said. "The other day,
Ancil
was talking about when we were children, about the rotten jokes they used to play on me. He was one of the ones who always called me that. I remember his face as he said it to me. I remember it so clearly, it hurts me still."