Courting Miss Hattie (50 page)

"Reed? Reed, are you all right?" she asked, her voice hoarse.

"Am I all right?" He was too tired even to smile. "That's supposed to be
my
question."

They lay silently in each other's arms, weariness overcoming them as the darkness of the night settled around them. Reed pulled her more securely against him, suddenly afraid of not holding her close enough. Their eyes closed in exhausted slumber.

* * *

The night was pitch-black when Hattie awoke, wet and shivering in the rain. Startled at the strangeness of her surroundings, she moved too quickly. The searing pain in her thigh stopped her instantly.

"Hattie," Reed whispered groggily beside her. "You're fine, my love. You're safe."

She remembered the fall in the river and the odd dream that
had puzzled and frightened her. Carefully turning toward her husband, she ran her hands over his chest, making sure he was alive and well beside her.

As reality slowly seeped back into her consciousness, she realized what had happened and sat up. She had fallen in the river, and Reed had saved her. Reed had risked his life to save her. Or had she saved him?

He sat up beside her and wrapped his arms around her, laying his head in the hollow of her shoulder. "I love you, Hattie," he said quietly.

"I know, Reed," she answered, caressing his cheek. "Because I love you too."

They sat together calmly, content, secure in their happiness and thankful just for the chance to touch.

Finally the reverence resolved to tenderness, and Reed sprinkled pecks on the mass of sodden muddy hair at the nape of Hattie's neck.

"I must look a sight," she said lightly.

"Why worry? It's pitch-dark."

Laughing, she turned in his arms and shared a sweet summer peach kissed with raindrops.

"I'll never worry about being younger than you again," he said, teasing. "I swear I aged twenty years when that levee gave way."

"The rice!" she exclaimed with sudden dismay.

"What?"

"The rice! The levee broke. Reed, we've got to get back. You'll lose all of your rice."

Reed pulled his wife into his arms, ignoring her consternation. "Hattie, darlin'. I don't give a damn about the rice!"

"Of course you do," she said. "You've wanted to grow rice on this farm for years. If you don't hurry back to that field, you're going to lose everything."

He tenderly cupped her cheek. "Hattie, today I almost did lose everything." He kissed her brow,
then
sighed. "You are everything to me, Hattie Tyler. All I have ever wanted, all the ambition I've ever had, has always centered on you. I love you, Hattie. That is the only thing that matters to me."

Rising to his feet, Reed Tyler lifted his wife into his arms and carried her home.

* * *

It was nearly a week before the sun finally shone and Hattie and Reed walked out to the rice field. The river had ebbed quickly but left sodden reminders in its wake.

Reed waded into the rice field. The standing water was little more than a few inches, but he sank in the mud up to his knees.

Hattie tied her skirts around her waist and silently followed him into the muck. In the days since their brush with death, she and Reed had opened up to each other. For the first time both were willing to look at the love between them and talk about it. Both marveled that the love they had searched for elsewhere had always been so close at hand.

"I think I'll always feel grateful to
Ancil
Drayton," Reed told her. "When he decided to court you, I was nothing less than jealous. It was the first time I'd allowed myself to think of you as a woman."

Hattie pulled him to her and kissed him. "I'll always be grateful to
Ancil
myself."

Raising an eyebrow, Reed waited for her to continue.

"If he'd never asked to court me, I'd never have learned about peaches."

"Humph!" Reed scoffed. "It's a good thing you came to me for lessons. Drayton probably knows less than you."

Hattie nodded in pretended seriousness. "I don't think he understands peaches at all. But he is quite fond of '
smoochy
-smooches.'"

"What?"

"Never mind."

Opening their hearts added so much to what they already had, it was almost impossible to contain. They held each other in comfortable tenderness and confessed their truths both large and small. Thankful, grateful, they sat together and listened unconcerned to the rain running off the roof.

Their days of joy had been a time out of time, special moments of love and closeness that many married couples live a lifetime and never see.

But today, as they stood in the ruin of their former rice field, the things of earth again took precedence over higher concerns.

Reed reached down and pulled up a handful of full-grown, beautiful, but rotten and ruined rice. "Damnation," he cursed, then glanced back to see if Hattie was going to take exception to his language. She seemed to be of similar mind as she gazed upon the ungodly mess.

Slapping the sopping grain against the leg of his trousers, Reed was furious. "They all told me it wouldn't work," he said angrily. "But I didn't believe anyone
. '
It's perfect for rice,' I said. Rice is the crop of the future. Isn't that what I said, Hattie? Just a few years from now, and the whole county will be seeded in rice, and they'll have me to thank."

Grabbing up another bunch of ruined grain, he threw it down in disgust. He slogged through the muddy field, searching for something—some answer, some small reason to continue to believe in his dream. Stopping at the cut bank, he surveyed the ruined field before seating himself on the wet grass that clung tenaciously to the slope.

"Facts are facts," he said, mostly for his own benefit but as if he were addressing Hattie. "Cotton is the crop that we know how to grow on this prairie, and cotton is what we're going to grow."

She walked closer to him, watching the play of emotions on his face.

"Hattie, I'm putting this back into prairie grass to see how much of this topsoil we can save," he said. "I hate to admit it, but when I'm whipped, I'm whipped."

Hattie silently surveyed the disaster around her,
then
she studied her husband as he stared out over the ruined field. She tried to recapture the future as Reed had always seen it. Suddenly making a decision, she raised her chin defiantly. "Wait just a minute, Plowboy!"

Startled, Reed turned to look at his wife.

She folded her arms across her chest and spoke sharply. "If you remember correctly, this is
my
rice field. I'll make the decision what we're going to do with it."

His smile was tentative. "Hattie, a joke is a joke, but this mess…
Well, what else can I say?"

"You can say that you're going to repair that levee and as soon as it dries out a bit, you're going to get this field in shape so we can get a jump on the rice planting next spring."

He leaned back against the bank and folded his arms obstinately. "Hattie, I've failed. It's time we faced the facts. I've already wasted a lot of time and money on this witless idea of mine. Obviously we can't grow rice here. I was wrong all along, and it's finally been proven to me and everybody in the county."

"It hasn't been proven to me," she said tartly. "The old-timers say that this was the worst flood ever seen in these parts. Floods happen to everyone. If the cotton hadn't already been picked, we would have lost a lot of it on the lowlands too."

Reed shook his head. "No, Hattie, I've given up on rice. I'm out of the rice business forever. I'm a cotton farmer from now on."

"Plowboy, I want a rice field. If you aren't going to grow it for me, I'll find some other farmer who will!"

Reed leapt to his feet, ready to argue. The two faced off for at least a minute, holding
themselves
rigid. Then a hint of a smile tickled at Reed's mouth. Reaching out, he grabbed his wife and hauled her to him. They both tumbled into the thick murky black mud.

"Another farmer!" he exclaimed. "Miss Hattie, you've got more farmer than you can handle right now."

To prove his point, Reed pulled Hattie onto the gentle grass-covered slope of the cut bank, and there in the bright sunshine of midmorning, their
bodies
slick with the mud of the ruined rice field, Mr. and Mrs. Reed Tyler planted a crop of an entirely different kind.

 
EPILOGUE

«
^

R
eed
cranked up the tin
lizzie
and listened with a pleased
expression to the well-tuned engine.

"Come on, Hattie, boys, Sally!" he called. "If you all don't hurry, we'll be late for church."

Three young boys raced out of the house. The eldest, a tall black-haired boy of ten, beat the others to the car. His handsome
Tyler
face was accented by a strong Colfax jaw.

"Daddy," the boy said, "
Hershall
asked me to have Sunday dinner at his house. Then we're going to take the raft out for a while."

"Do
Hershall's
folks know about this?"

"Yes, sir," the boy answered, nodding. "
Hershall
done asked. Mr.
Leege
said he'd be down at the dock anyway, and Mrs.
Leege
said one more child at their table would hardly be noticed."

Reed smiled at the truth in those words. In Bessie Jane and Harmon's brood of nine youngsters, another one more or less wouldn't make much difference. Harmon's business sense had paid off well for him. Machinery was all the
rage,
and Harm had been the first to bring modern farm equipment and light manufacture to the county. That and everything else,
Leege
Mill was the biggest this side of
New Orleans
, and after Arthur Turpin died, Harmon had expanded the dry-goods store to a whole
streetful
of shops. New people and businesses had started moving in right away. It was only natural that the town's new business district be called
Leege
Avenue
.

"I guess it'll be okay," Reed said, "but mind your manners and do what you're told."

"Sure, Daddy," the boy replied,
then
clambered into the backseat.

The two other boys were chasing each other around the house, destined to get their clothes dirty before they made it to the door of the church. The long veranda they roughhoused upon was a far cry from the little porch of the old Colfax farmhouse. John and Sarah Colfax had never needed space the way the
Tylers
did. Reed had added a room here, a room there, until the porch began to
looked
dwarfed. Finally last year, he'd built around the old house, creating a big three-story Victorian-style home with a wide veranda on three sides.

"John!" Reed shouted. "You and Cole quit horsing around and get in this car." He stepped out of the car to help the two
dust
off their dirty knees. "What's keeping your mother?"

"Mama's sick," a small girl answered, jumping from the porch, to the ground.