In Need of a Good Wife (21 page)

“We try to get Ully to wear dresses but she won’t,” Sigrid said. “It was she who cut her own hair too. We honestly don’t know what to do about her.”

Ully scowled to be discussed as if she weren’t standing right there before them. “You came from Manhattan City?” she said to Rowena.

Rowena blinked. What in the world was she going to do? She had prepared herself to accept almost any sort of shortcoming in Daniel because she couldn’t imagine anything she wouldn’t be able to endure. So what if he was fat or homely or cruel? Rowena could be cruel right back. Nothing mattered but the money he would send to the asylum. It was a business arrangement in which they both would gain. But this—this was too much to bear.

Ully stood expectantly. “Didn’t you hear my question?”

“Ully,”
Daniel reprimanded.

The little girl twisted up her mouth, then raised her leg at the knee and brought the heel of her heavy boot down
hard
on Rowena’s foot. “Rude!” Ully shouted. “I
don’t
like her!”

They all seemed paralyzed, waiting to see what Rowena would do. They didn’t have to wait long. She turned on her heel and tromped through the grass up to the road, swinging her arms like a Viking. She walked in a straight line back toward the town where she knew she’d find the woman who was to blame for all of this.

Clara went back to the depot to claim her trunk and paid the porter, Stuart Moran—soon to marry Deborah—to bring it over to her new room and leave it in the hallway. It was after two when she got back to the tavern, and it was empty. She found Mrs. Healy in the kitchen, a plump, friendly woman who thanked Clara for shipping some sense out to the prairie. Clara paid her for the first week’s room and board with the last of her money, then climbed the steps to her new home with the key pressed in her hand. She barely looked around the dark room before lying down and closing her eyes in fitful sleep.

She bolted upright and slapped her palm to her chest, gasping for a breath, at the sound of frantic knocking on her door. She understood that the dream had come on again, but her sleep had been shallow enough that she had been able to steer the walking Clara away from the staircase. The knock sounded again. Why wouldn’t the porter leave the trunk and go away?

“Miss Bixby, I know you’re in there.”

It was a woman’s voice, a pinched and angry woman’s voice, and Clara knew instantly the grating harpy to whom it belonged. She rose from the mattress and smoothed her hair before opening the door.

Rowena Moore stood in the hallway with her arms crossed, breathing through her nose in short bursts.

“Mrs. Moore,” Clara said. “Good afternoon.”

“It’s no longer Mrs.
Moore
,” Rowena said, pushing past Clara and into the room. “Thanks to you, it’s Mrs. Gibson. Or as those children seem to have been taught to call me—
Mother!
” Clara closed the door. Rowena spun around on her heel. “How could you do this to me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Clara heard herself say. She had noticed upon their arrival that Daniel Gibson met the train with a minister in tow. Smart man, to get that marriage certificate signed before taking Rowena home.

“That is a bald lie, and it will be a judgment on your soul. You
knew
that man had five children. Why didn’t you tell me?”

A defensive haughtiness broke over Clara’s face. “Why didn’t you
ask
him? It seems an awfully important matter to settle before agreeing to marriage.”

Rowena held out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Clara shook her head, feeling a hint of remorse about her deception but fighting to keep it at bay. “How old are you? Can it
be
that you have not yet learned?”

“Twenty-five. Learned what?”

“That men will always disappoint. Will always fall short.”

Rowena opened her mouth to retort, then stopped and pursed her lips. “Not all men,” she said quietly. “Not my Richard.”

“But,” Clara said, softening her tone, “he is
dead
. Had he lived long enough, he would have failed you eventually.” Clara had once felt George would be forever steadfast, forever in love with her. But she was wiser now. Perhaps Rowena could be wiser too.

Rowena’s nose grew pink and she sniffed, her eyes welling with tears. “You know nothing,” she said, her arms rigid at her side, refusing to fish in her pocket for a handkerchief. “If he had lived I would be spending the rest of my life cherishing his every flaw. And, happily, I never would have had to meet you.”

So she will be impervious to my advice
, Clara thought. “Well, we are all perfect in death, I suppose.”

Rowena stared at her. “I don’t understand it—why do you hate me so? I’ve never done a thing to you.”

“Hate you? I don’t hate you. I have no feeling for you, good or ill.” Even as the words formed on her lips, Clara knew they weren’t true. She
did
hate this Rowena Moore Gibson, hated everything about her: her foolish youth, the petite frame suited for fine garments and parlor dances. So the girl’s beloved husband had died. What of it? Did she suppose her own tragedy was somehow remarkable? It was as common as dirt. Clara refused to feel badly for Rowena just because it had taken her so long to discover how cruel life could be.

Rowena sank down in the chair and put her head in her hands. “What am I going to do?”

“I suppose you could go back to New York,” Clara said.

Rowena looked up at her. “Go back to what? I have a tenant in my house now—it’s the only way I can pay the taxes. And Daniel is paying for my father’s care. He has been paying, if you can believe it, since we first exchanged letters. He is as trusting as I was.”

“So you’ll stay then,” Clara said. “And make the best of it.”

Rowena stood and walked over to her. “Yes. But there is no question,” she said, pointing her finger very close to Clara’s face, “that what you did is
wrong
. And trust me when I say that I will make you very sorry.”

A s soon as she rose on her first morning in Leo Schreier’s house, Elsa set to work. The man was fortunate that vermin had not fully claimed the place, the way he let food sit out to rot, left soiled clothes heaped on the floor and stagnant bathwater in the small, round tub. By the end of the day Mr. Schreier’s laundry hung on the line, including a pair of overalls that had been so crusted with filth, Elsa had had to boil them for hours. The dishes, too, had been washed, all the surfaces in the kitchen rubbed down with vinegar. Elsa opened the window to air the place, then dragged the one rag rug outside and beat it with all her might. She thought about how pleased Mr. Schreier would be when he saw what a difference she could make with just one day’s work.

He stayed out in the fields until the sun was low and orange. It was marvelous to watch the vibrant disk slip over the line of the horizon. In New York there were so many buildings in the way, Elsa hardly ever noticed time passing. But out here there was nothing to keep you from the fact of the heavens doing their work, nothing to shield you from the wonder and terror of the sky’s size. A man standing on a prairie in Nebraska could not escape an awareness of his insignificance. For a woman, Elsa supposed, it was slightly less jarring. Most women knew how insignificant they were without an enormous sky to remind them. And, anyway, Elsa liked feeling small for a change.

She heard the sound of Mr. Schreier using the boot scraper, and then the door creaked open. He sniffed as he walked into the kitchen, then froze, gazing around. He hung his hat on the hook by the door and walked into the sitting room, where Elsa had lit a small fire and the lamp next to his armchair. He had yet to bring home groceries or offer to take her to purchase supplies, so she had made do with what she found in the small cellar beside the house: potatoes and sausage. The pot sat on the stove, waiting for him to come in.

Mr. Schreier stared at Elsa. “Where are my newspapers?”

She bit her lip. He didn’t seem to notice that his house was spotless. “I thought I would straighten up a little bit, sir. Are you hungry? I’ve got supper here.”

He ignored her and limped back into the sitting room, his eyebrows contracting, his lips pursed. He seemed to be chewing on the inside of his cheek when he came back into the kitchen and stood before her.

“
Where are
my newspapers?”

The ink on some of them had been smudged and smeared beyond recognition. The out-of-date papers came from all over: Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis. In Elsa’s opinion, not that she would ever express it, Mr. Schreier was too much interested in the things of this world, in war and politics and commerce, when his own soul should be his object of study.

“Be warned, woman—I’ll put you out if anything happened to them. You can walk back to New York, for all I care.”

Elsa stepped over to the shelves on the back wall of the kitchen, behind the table. She pulled the basket down from the top shelf and tipped it toward Mr. Schreier so that he could see what was inside: each of the papers, neatly folded.

She heard him swallow, then let out a breath.

Elsa gave him a hopeful smile and he grunted, leaning his cane up against the wall and sitting down at the table.

Earlier that day, Mr. Schreier’s farmhand Nit LeBlanc had come up to the house because his arm was bleeding from a cut on a nail. The cut was about four inches long, on the pale, hairless inside of his forearm, but not deep enough to worry about. He sat at the kitchen table pressing a reddening towel against it while Elsa ripped a remnant of linen she found in a sewing basket upstairs into strips to make a bandage.

While she worked on the cut, Nit told her about the farm. Despite the poor condition of his leg, Mr. Schreier kept a hundred acres of wheat and barley and a year-round kitchen garden that by the middle of June should bloom with lettuce if they had enough rain. East of the house were several acres of tall prairie grass, and when the weather was fair the milk cow and sheep and two horses grazed in it. When the cow—Leo called her Honey—lay down on her side, her jaw always working, working in a circle, they knew it was time to get all the animals in the barn. When the rain came, it gushed from the sky, the way feed streamed out of a burlap sack when you ripped your knife through the bottom seam. Too much in one night could wrench the sprouting barley right out of the soil. But Destination and environs hadn’t seen rain in weeks. It had been a strange year so far, Nit explained. They expected drought in August, but no one could remember two weeks in May without rain.

The previous season, Mr. Schreier had allowed Nit, whose family had come from Quebec a generation back, to build a soddy on the western edge of his parcel and employed him as a farmhand. Nit intended to put in a claim for the land adjacent to Schreier’s, but he had to save up some money first. It cost only ten dollars to file for as much as 160 acres, an unthinkable generosity on the part of the government for anyone who had come from the Old World, but while the land was free, breaking it, making it yield something you could live on, was not. A claimant had only five years to make the land produce. Nit would need tools, a team of horses, and seed, at the very least. In the meantime, he did the work Mr. Schreier could no longer perform.

“Does it hurt an awful lot?” Elsa asked as she tightened the bandage and tucked the ends under the linen.

Nit shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m busy enough to keep my mind off it. Leo probably told you that he has a ewe we aren’t sure about. She got loose twice over the winter, you see, once after Christmas and once at the start of February, and we don’t know which visit with Mr. Gade’s ram was the, well,
fateful
time. It takes about five months, but we aren’t sure when to start the count from. She’s always been a shy one—won’t let us get near her to see.”

Elsa nodded. But Mr. Schreier hadn’t told her anything about the sheep, or the existence of Nit. They had hardly spoken at all, in fact. Elsa woke to the sounds of Mr. Schreier working in the barn a good two hours before the sun came up.

At midday he set two pails of milk outside the kitchen door next to a bowl and cloth. The bowl he took over to the pump and filled with water, then plunged the cloth into it and wiped it across his face and hair. He rubbed it vigorously over the back of his neck, up the meaty ridges of his oversized ears. Elsa knew how cold this water was from the first time it splashed over her hands as she tried to learn how to work the pump. It turned her skin white, made her two front teeth ache. But the cold didn’t seem to bother Mr. Schreier. He would finish washing up, then splash the water across the lettuce and come silently through the kitchen door, wiping his boots on the mat.

“Do you have any family here, Mr. LeBlanc?” she asked as she wiped the dried blood off his hand with a rag.

He shook his head. “I had my hopes up that a bride might arrive on that train for me.” He pressed his lips into a line. “But it was not to be.”

Elsa nodded. “I got to know Miss Zalinski a little bit on our journey. She was a kind girl. It’s very sad, what happened. For your sake and hers.”

“Zalinski,” Nit repeated to himself. “Do you happen to know her Christian name?”

“It was Molly,” Elsa said. “Margaret, I suppose.”

Nit smiled. “She never would tell me herself.”

“What will you do about your money? A few of the other men whose brides didn’t arrive seem to be fighting awfully hard for theirs.”

“It is a loss, surely, but I can’t see holding Miss Bixby responsible for the girl’s death. It was just God’s will. I should have listened to my father and found myself a Québécoise.

Every single one of them is beautiful and devout. But why in the world would any of them leave Montreal to come
here
?”

Elsa thought this over for a moment. “Well, why did
you
come here, Mr. LeBlanc? Sometimes people looking for a fresh start don’t care so much about where they go.”

“I suppose.” He had wiggled his fingers and stood up. “Thank you for the bandage. I should get back to work.”