Longing for Home (30 page)

“I would, actually.”

“‘Actually,’ she says, as though it’s a great shock that anyone might enjoy chatting with me.”

“Aye. It is something of a shock. Seeing as I haven’t chatted with you in nearly a week now, I can’t quite recall if it was an enjoyable thing or not.”

“Oh.” His eyebrow arched and his mouth opened in a wide circle, even as laughter twinkled in his blue eyes. “Could it be you’ve missed me, Sweet Katie?”

“Not at all.”

“Not at all?”

She shook her head. He matched the movement precisely. After a moment, Katie was fighting a smile.

“Perhaps a wee little bit.” ’Twas more of a confession than she’d meant to make. “But only a wee bit. And only because there hasn’t been anyone else to talk to.”

“Your very last choice, was I?” The cow lowed in the stall behind them, pulling Tavish’s attention away. “Hush, you troublesome beast. I’ll get to you in a moment.” His was a look of sorely tried patience. “The cow’s rather fond of me.”

“Someone ought to be.”

His laughter rang out again. “I’m right pleased you dropped in, Katie. You’ve brightened my day already.”

Was he sending her away? She’d begun to enjoy talking with him.

“Put away the puppy dog eyes, dear. That wasn’t a good-bye.”

“I wouldn’t want you to neglect your cow.” Katie thought she managed not to sound overly anxious to stay. “She’d grow terribly lonely.”

“I’m about to go talk sweet to her, I am. She’ll be fine enough.” Tavish took a three-legged milking stool off its hook near the stall door. He leaned a touch closer to Katie, lowering his voice. “If you stick around long enough, I’ll come back out and talk sweet to
you.
”

Katie just smiled. Though she’d never tell him as much, she would enjoy hearing a few sweet words from him. She felt happier in his presence than nearly any person she knew.

He raised an eyebrow in surprise. “No objections this time?”

She shrugged. “Best see to your chores, Tavish.”

“I haven’t a fine seat to offer you,” he said. “But a woolen blanket set on the pile of straw just there would make a comfortable spot.”

Katie glanced over at the straw. “Would I offend your friend by sitting on her next meal?”

Tavish picked up his metal bucket once more and opened the stall door. “Hay is for feeding the animals, Sweet Katie. Straw is for them to lie down on.”

Too much time had passed it seemed since her days on a farm. Katie hadn’t remembered there was a difference between the two.

“You’ll find a pile of blankets in the corner not far from the straw.”

Katie nodded and searched it out. She took the thick, gray blanket on top and spread it out on the straw. Behind her she could hear Tavish speaking in low tones to his cow, though she couldn’t make out his words. She looked around as she sat herself down. This barn was not the monument to crippling poverty she’d seen time and again in Ireland, the working men bent under the weight of want and struggle. Here was a measure of prosperity in the hands of a man who obviously took pride in what he’d built for himself.

She thought of Biddy’s words a few days earlier. Tavish worked hard, tirelessly even. The barn was nothing fancy but was sturdy and cared for. Katie liked knowing that about Tavish.

A moment passed before she realized someone was speaking her name. A moment more and her mind wrapped around the obvious.

“I’m sorry, Tavish. My thoughts were wandering.”

“Wandering far, it would seem.” Katie could hear him, though she could barely make out his silhouette through the slatted stall wall that separated them.

“I was only thinking that my father would very much have liked a barn such as this.”

“He was a farmer, was he?”

Tavish sat on the stool beside the cow. Katie could see enough to tell that much. And she could hear the still-familiar sound of milk splashing into a metal bucket. She found an added measure of comfort talking to someone she didn’t have to look in the eye. It was almost like talking to her own self.

“He
was
a farmer,” she answered. “Until The Famine.”

“Aye.” ’Twas a sound of complete understanding. Tavish’s family had themselves fled Ireland during the height of The Hunger. “The Bad Times drove many people from farming. I suspect your history has a landlord in it somewhere.”

“It seems every poor Irishman’s history involves a landlord,” Katie said, then thought on Joseph and his role in this valley. She liked knowing he at least tried to be fair-minded and merciful. “We hadn’t money enough to pay our rent. The landlord sent his agent along with the local lawman to our home late at night after we’d gone to bed.”

“In the middle of the night? I’d imagine your father argued against that.”

“He wasn’t given the chance.” Katie breathed deep, telling herself she’d not be overcome by yet more memories. “They came with torches and set fire to the roof. They didn’t even wake us first.”

The milking stopped. Tavish muttered a Gaelic curse, the very one Katie had heard from her father that night.

“Something woke Mother. The fire must have been burning for some time. The whole roof was glowing, and the smoke so thick I could hardly see the rungs on the ladder when I climbed down from the loft. She and Father grabbed blankets as we rushed out. I—” She’d been given charge of Eimear. She nearly said as much to Tavish, but the words would not come. Katie hadn’t admitted to a living soul since leaving Cornagillagh that she’d ever had a little sister. She’d run with Eimear to a tree at a safe distance from the burning house and told her strictly to stay put. Then she’d turned back. “I went back inside.”

“Begorra, Katie! What were you thinking?”

“I went back for my father’s fiddle.” She’d been foolish to do so, but she’d also been panicked, frightened clear out of her mind. “He played it every night. Every night. Leaving it behind would have . . . would have felt like leaving a bit of him behind to burn up in that house.” Her throat thickened and her heart ached at the thought of those terrifying moments. “’Twas foolish, I know, looking back, but I had to. He played that fiddle every day. He taught me to play on that fiddle. I simply couldn’t leave it there.”

“You’re fortunate you got out with your life.”

Every time she allowed her thoughts to dwell on that night, Katie swore she could smell burning thatch again. It filled her even as she sat there in the calm of Tavish’s barn. Once more she felt the heat of the fire. She ran with bare feet across the dirt floor, glowing embers dropping like shooting stars from the roof above. Her eyes stung. Her heart punched a fearful rhythm against her ribs. Katie grabbed the fiddle from its usual place beneath her parents’ bed. For just a moment she’d thought to climb under there as well to escape the fire raining down.

She ran, fiddle case clasped to her. Thatch dropped in burning heaps on all sides of her. Mounds of it covered the only path out. So she ran through the fire itself. The flames seared her feet and set the back of her nightgown smoldering. Huge clumps of the roof came down as she rushed out of the house. The heavy thatch blew cinders and smoldering bits of itself out the open door in an enormous explosion of sparks, knocking her to the ground.

She’d lain there, crying as she listened to the merciless crackle of fire consuming her home, gasping for air as pain radiated from her feet and legs and back. She’d saved her father’s fiddle, but the deed had left deep scars.

“Is that the same fiddle you had when we rode into town with you?” Tavish asked.

“Aye. The same.”

He’d begun milking again. The rhythmic thwank of each stream of milk set a soothing tempo her heart tried to slow enough to meet. ’Twasn’t rushed nor forceful but quiet and constant. Katie focused on the sound.

“Do you carry it as a reminder of your father or as something to play?”

Katie hadn’t given it a lot of thought. She hadn’t allowed herself to. “Both, I suppose.” She did, in fact, think of her father every time she played.

She wove her fingers together, setting her clasped hands on her lap. Though she’d shared more of her history lately than she ever had before, the telling hadn’t grown easier. “My father was a fine fiddler. One of the best in all of Donegal, many swore.”

Tavish stepped out of the cow stall and poured his bucket of milk into a tall, metal can sitting not far distant. He crossed close to where she sat and leaned against the nearest stall, facing her. “Did your father give you the fiddle because it meant so much to you?”

Katie tried to take in a breath, but it stuck. Father hadn’t given her the fiddle as a token of her bravery or her love of the music he played on it. He hadn’t given it to her in memory of the hours he’d spent teaching her to play.

Truth be told, he hadn’t given it to her at all.

“I’m sorry, Katie.” Tavish sat down beside her. “I should have realized speaking of his fiddle would make you miss him.”

If only that was what weighed on her heart. It seemed every memory of home and family came tinged with regrets and guilt.

“I have my grandfather’s pocket watch,” Tavish said. “He gave it to my oldest brother when we left Ireland, and my brother gave it to me.”

Katie grasped at the change in topic, hoping her mind would make the shift as well. “That was kind of Ian to give it to you.”

“Ian?” His brows pulled in before understanding dawned in his eyes. “I’d forgotten you never knew Grady. He and Patrick, the brother just younger than me, were soldiers with an Irish regiment from New York. They both died at Gettysburg.”

“I’ve heard tell of that battle. ’Twas said to be fierce beyond imagining.”

“Aye. Both sides suffered heavy losses,” Tavish said. “Our family alone lost two. Mr. Johnson lost a brother. I suspect that’s part of the reason he hates us so. Johnson hails from the South; his brother fought against the Irish regiment in that very battle.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder as they sat side by side. “Losing a family member brings a person such pain.”

He took her hand in his. What Katie wouldn’t have given to have received from her parents even a fraction of the sympathy she felt from Tavish in that moment.

“Now I have Grady’s watch,” he continued, “which was my grandfather’s. I miss them both, but having something that belonged to them, something real I can hold in my hand, makes them feel closer, somehow. Probably the way your father does, having something he gave to you that means so much.”

He compared her father’s fiddle with his brother’s watch. Little did he know how painfully different the situations were. Tavish came by his treasure rightly.

“My father didn’t give me his fiddle.” She pushed out the confession. “I stole it.”

“You what?” Clearly he thought she was joking.

“He took me to Derry for my first job, and while he was talking with the housekeeper, I nipped off with his fiddle and hid it behind some flour sacks there in the kitchen where he’d not see it.” She rushed the words so she’d not lose her courage. Confession, she’d heard said, was cleansing for the soul. She’d not thought she would ever be willing to confess this. “Father had a great many bundles that day, and I thought he might not realize right off that he was missing something.”

She glanced up at Tavish, a little nervous at what she’d see there. The smile had entirely disappeared from his face. “Did he notice?”

“I imagine he did eventually.” She lifted her head from his shoulder once more. He likely didn’t appreciate the contact any longer. She’d just admitted to being a thief, after all. “I think he knew where it was, but it wasn’t worth coming back for.”

“You said he played it every day. I can’t imagine he’d not come back looking for it.”

She felt tears building behind her eyes. She never cried. Not ever.

“Katie?”

“He loved that fiddle. Not a day went by he didn’t open the case and take it out. I know he knew I had it. I know he knew. He could have come for it. He could have come back for—” Emotion choked off the word that would have come next.
Me.

She hadn’t taken the fiddle because she wanted to play it nor because she wanted it for herself. In her desperation she’d taken it out of fear she’d never see him again. Stealing his fiddle meant he would come back.

But he never did. His utter silence after Eimear’s death, his willingness to give her away to a stern-faced housekeeper, had hurt. But knowing not even his beloved fiddle could make him come back and see her again had broken her utterly.

“How old were you?”

“Eight.”

“You were only a child.”

“No one was a child after The Famine.” Her lungs squeezed tighter with every breath. “We were nothing but cobbled-together pieces of the children we once were.”

Rather than pull away, he’d begun rubbing her hand between his. “I suspect, Katie, there’s a great deal you hold inside from that time.”

“Too much,” she whispered.

One of his arms slid around her shoulders and pulled her close once more. Katie melted against him, welcoming his warmth and his embrace. She’d expected him to toss her out upon hearing she was no better than a thief. Instead, she was offered comfort. She’d received no embrace, no comforting touch after the fire, nor on any of the long and miserable nights they passed in cold and hunger afterward. Neither of her parents spoke a word to her in the days after Eimear’s death.

“I mean to give my father back his fiddle someday.”

“I’ve a feeling,” Tavish said, “he’d be far more grateful at having his daughter nearby than his fiddle.”

“I want him to be.” She made the confession quietly, almost afraid to speak her misgivings out loud. “I want him to see I’m not the selfish person I was then.”

Tavish kept his arm around her, rubbing her arm with his hand. “There’s not a soul on earth who would think you selfish.”

Selfishness was her besetting flaw, the part of herself she’d worked hardest to overcome. ’Twas that shortcoming that had led to the worst mistakes in her life.

“I can see you think I’ve no idea what I’m saying.” He turned the tiniest bit, enough to look more directly at her. “Let me give you my list, then. You talked Joseph into paying a bit of your salary to Ian and Biddy for watching his girls, knowing they could use an extra dollar or two. I suspect you’re the one who works magic with Emma Archer’s hair every Sunday.”