In Need of a Good Wife (32 page)

“You put them back in the barn, Leo—remember?” Nit said. “You said it was too hot for them to be out.”

“That ewe is going to drop her lamb any day.” Mr. Schreier turned his head to the side and spat on the ground.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is the worst month of June I have ever seen.”

They helped him through the kitchen door and into his bed, and Nit went to get Dr. Owen. Mr. Schreier seemed lucid, but Elsa couldn’t get him to drink anything, even plain tepid water. One sip of it had him trying to bring up the contents of his empty stomach all over again. She helped him unbutton his shirt and pull it down his shoulders. He didn’t bother pulling it all the way off and it ringed his waist like a cummerbund.

Mr. Schreier tried to get Elsa to leave him alone in his room. “I’m fine now,” he barked, even as he vomited again into the bowl she had brought him and slumped against the wall.

Elsa shook her head. She pulled a kitchen chair into the room at the left side of his bed and settled in to wait for the doctor. Mr. Schreier slept for a half hour. Elsa watched him carefully. His forehead was shiny with sweat, his eyes roving beneath their lids. With a sudden jerk of his body he tossed to one side and whispered to her, his eyes still closed, “Would you read something to me? If I’m going to die, I’d rather not spend my last moments in boredom.”

Elsa hesitated. There was only one book she could read, would read. “Yes, sir,” she said, then moved quickly across the sitting room to the stairs to retrieve the Bible from her room.

When she returned to his bedside his breathing had steadied. His bare chest rose and fell, revealing, on the exhalation, the hard lines of his ribs. She sat quietly a moment, clutching the book. She had decided he had fallen back to sleep when he sighed. “Well, then?”

He didn’t want her to know that he was afraid, but fear emanated from his pores. Elsa plunged her index finger into an arbitrary place in the center of the book. She began to read the psalm she had marked with a penciled star.
As the hart
panteth
after the water brooks, so panteth
my soul after thee, O God.

Mr. Schreier soon slept. It was two hours before Dr. Owen came, and Elsa left the bedroom then, fixing a plate of food for Nit in the kitchen. Nit ate while Elsa stood at the sink. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about anything at all. Leo Schreier had been, in his own way, kinder to her than any man ever had been. Than any person. In all of her life.

Finally, Dr. Owen came out. He gave Elsa a glass bottle containing an amber tonic. “Give this to him three times a day for three days. And be certain he eats. Meat.”

She slipped the bottle into the pocket of her apron and nodded. “Yes, Doctor.”

Nit stood up and walked the doctor to the door. “Will Leo be all right, sir?”

Dr. Owen gave them a confused look. “Why, yes, of course.” He laughed. “You didn’t think he was dying, did you? That man’s only ailment is foolishness.”

“Oh,” Elsa sighed softly, though neither man heard it. Her heart dipped back down into place, like that thirsty deer in the psalm, lowering its mouth to the stream.

I never pegged you to be an ungrateful sort of woman,” Mr. Schreier said to her when she came back into the room. He had put on a clean shirt and was sitting up in bed.

Elsa blinked at him and sat down. Perhaps he was not all right after all. She wondered if that red dust that had caked in the fibers of the laundry was caked in his brain too. Or was it Ully he was asking about—had he discovered her visits? “Mr. Schreier,” she said, shocking herself by touching his forearm with her fingertips. “Please rest, sir. I beg you.”

He glanced at her hand and she quickly pulled it away. “But you haven’t told me whether you like it. I’ve given you plenty of time to say something. You haven’t said thank you.”

“Like it? Why, of course, you must know that I like it here very much.” Her chest tightened. If he told her now that she was fired, would the order stand? Was he delirious? “You don’t know what my life was like before I came here. Each day I was in a sea of people but I was utterly alone. Your letter to me asking me to come west—that letter changed my life.”

The stern lines in his brow that pointed like arrows to his nose shifted into an arc of surprise and he said nothing but watched her for a moment. Elsa’s hands remained in her lap, her fingernails caked with red dust.

“I meant the hairbrush, the mirror,” he said. “You didn’t find them outside your door this morning?”

Elsa pressed her lips together. “Those were from you?”

Mr. Schreier laughed. “Why, yes. Did you think they came from Nit?”

“No, sir,” Elsa said. She covered her face. Embarrassment whisked over her entire body. Mr. Schreier’s hoarse laugh continued, then became a hacking cough. He leaned over to the other side of the bed and spit into his handkerchief, then laughed some more. When Elsa’s eyes filled with tears, he stopped.

“Elsa, I’m not laughing at you. It’s only that I am surprised. I didn’t know you had other suitors.”

She spread her fingertips so that she could peek out at him. What a word for him to use!
Suitors.
He had with one sentence, she felt, made her the most ridiculous woman in the world. She wanted nothing more than to get up and leave the room, but she felt bolted to the chair.

“I think you are very cruel,” she said.

Mr. Schreier grinned at her. “Cruel is withholding an answer from me while I’m lying here, near death!”

“I don’t think you are so near death as I did a few minutes ago.”

“Nonsense, woman. I am as old as the dirt—I could go at any minute.”

“You want to make a fool out of me. Well, I won’t let you do it,” She stood up and pointed an accusing finger at him. “This earthly life is only a season. Soon I’ll cast off all the shame of it, all the degradation, and meet my Lord in heaven.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Schreier said. “Some day you will, I have no doubt of that. I wonder, though, if, in the meantime, we could walk together in the evenings?”

Elsa grew silent. She turned to the window and smoothed her hair, then untied and retied her apron strings with a firm tug. “It’s the heat. You’ve lost your senses, Mr. Schreier.”

“It’s not the heat, Elsa. I’d like you to call me Leo now.”

She stood next to the bed with her hands on her hips. “I can’t imagine why I would do that,” she whispered.

“Just consider me, is all I ask,” he said. “I know I am hunched and irritable. I know I have a face like an old shoe.”

Despite herself, Elsa laughed.

“Well, I’m sorry to say it wasn’t any better when I was a young man. Always have been ugly.”

“That’s not true,” she whispered.

“So your eyesight is bad too? I have always looked for that quality in a woman.”

She shook her head.

“Will you consider me, Elsa?”

Her right hand was still on her hip. She covered her mouth with her left, so the smile starting there wouldn’t betray her.

Someone vandalized my chicken house,” Rowena told Daniel the night she learned of her father’s death. She was splitting a chicken carcass into pieces to stew overnight for broth.

Daniel nodded behind his newspaper. “I saw that one of the walls came down.”

“You will have to ask that carpenter to come back, I suppose,” Rowena said, careful not to look up from her work too quickly and give herself away.

“How do we know it was vandalism? Perhaps the chicken house was poorly constructed. Perhaps Mr. Skala is not a very good carpenter.”

She felt Daniel’s eyes on her, probing. “There was a crowbar on the ground,” Rowena said. “The nails were pulled out one by one.”

“Really.” Daniel grunted, then set down his paper, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” Rowena said, working her way around to the explanation she had dreamed up. “And I would never point a finger at anyone without proof. But it is a fact that Sigrid and Gustav do not care for me. And they see that project as
my
chicken house. Perhaps …”

Daniel stood up abruptly and his chair scraped the floor. He crossed the tiny kitchen and stuck his finger in Rowena’s face. “The Lord knows I have put up with an awful lot from you, but I
won’t
put up with that. My sons would not steal from me, which is what has been done in destroying that carpenter’s work. They are good boys. Their
mother
saw to that.”

“I’m sure she did,” Rowena said quietly. “I’m sure she was a wonderful woman. I wish she were still here to take care of you all. I wish that I had never left Manhattan.”

Daniel sighed. “Well, she
was
wonderful. Until her mind got sick. She wasn’t perfect, Rowena, though she tried to be.” He folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them, worked his jaw as if he were working up his nerve. “But I haven’t been completely honest with you, or with the children, about her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She didn’t die. She ran away.”

Rowena’s eyes widened. “Oh, my. Where did she go?”

“Memphis. Maybe New Orleans. She got it in her head that she was meant to work on one of those riverboats. As a singer. I don’t really know where she may have ended up. She may not know herself. There were times when she didn’t recognize me or the children—she lived a lot inside her own head.”

“Will you ever tell them the truth?”

Daniel shrugged. “I know I should, but what difference would it make? I’d rather let them go on believing it wasn’t her choice.”

“But what if she comes back?”

Daniel shook his head. “She won’t. I’m certain of that. She believes we’re all part of a dream she has woken up from.”

Rowena put the last of the chicken in the pot and came over to the table, wiping her hands on a towel. “That’s terrible. No man’s wife should do that to him, no mother to her children.”

Daniel shrugged. No woman should, he seemed to be saying, but this woman had. “May I ask you something?”

Rowena nodded.

“Why are you so determined not to like any of us, not to like me? I know we aren’t what you expected,” Daniel said. “But I do believe I have some things to offer you. We could be happy here together, if you would just give us a chance.”

Tell him
, Rowena thought.
Tell him what you did to Clara,
to the chicken house. Tell him about Father.
She didn’t want to be irredeemable, but everything seemed so far gone.

Rowena thought for a long moment about what to say. She knew she didn’t deserve his kindness. If he knew who she really was, he wouldn’t want anything to do with her. Besides, though it made no earthly sense, she could think only of Tomas, of seeing him once more before he went away forever. “You have been very good to me, Mr. Gibson, and I’m sorry if I have seemed ungrateful. I will try to do better. And I’m sorry for what I said about your sons.”

Daniel cocked his mouth to the side. “Oh, hell—who knows? Perhaps they did do it. I can’t think of anyone else who would. I will have Mr. Skala come out to make the repairs.”

Rowena waited inside the house when she saw Tomas coming up the path two days later, but instead of coming to the door he went around back without knocking and started in on the work. The walls of the chicken house consisted of two sections separated by eight inches of space filled with hay for insulation. She watched from the kitchen window as he hoisted the heavy wall and propped it onto his knees, then pushed it back into place. His jacket was draped over the fence and his shirt collar was unbuttoned, wilted from the heat. He drove a few nails in from the outside to hold it in place, then went around to the small open doorway and stooped to step inside and secure the interior boards.

In the kitchen, Rowena touched her hair, running her finger along the bumps in her braid. She sighed. She clasped her hands behind her back, then put them on her hips, tied and retied her apron strings. She tapped her boot on the floor of the soddy, as if to mark the passing seconds, each one a victory of restraint.

But there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She went out the kitchen door and crossed through the dust of the yard to the chicken house. With her hand on the top of the door frame, she lowered her head and passed inside the eight-by-ten-foot space, the dim light striped with rays that pierced the spaces between the boards. Dust swirled in the light. Tomas had his back to the door and held a fistful of small nails. He hammered each nail into place with one careful blast of the hammer. There was nothing clumsy or inexact about him. Everything in his domain—his tools, his clothing, his conversations—was completely under his control. He didn’t seem at all, even, to be working; only the damp hair around the back of his ears, over his collar, betrayed him. He hesitated for a moment when he heard Rowena’s footsteps, but he didn’t turn around or greet her.

“Good morning, Tomas,” she said.

He nodded once in acknowledgment but still did not turn around. “How this happen, I wonder?”

“We aren’t sure. Perhaps one of the Gibson boys …”

He nodded again with a curt jolt of his head that told her he didn’t believe that theory. She was manipulating him and he knew it and it made him furious.

The rest of the nails went into the wood like gunshots.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Tomas pushed on the wall with his open palms. It gave a small creak but stayed firmly in place. The structure was sound, warm.

Rowena took a small step toward him in the space. She could see Tomas’s face in profile. His eyes looked tired, the corners turned down, and this surprised her. His joviality was gone, his playfulness worn away. He seemed to be holding his jaw carefully; Rowena saw it move under his cheek. She took a breath, then touched his elbow.

The space between them disappeared. His right hand went to the back of her head, pulling almost painfully on her hair as he yanked her mouth to his. His left hand was on her neck, then her shoulder, then her waist, then her hip. He pressed her so hard against him she felt everything—his collarbone digging into her shoulder, the hard buckle of his belt, his knee at the bottom of her thigh.