Mackinnons #02 For All the Right Reasons (3 page)

Karin walked for quite a spell, until she saw the light go off in Katherine’s bedroom. She made her way back to the house, glad Katherine had gone to sleep. She didn’t like to talk about the past like Katherine did. And why should she? The past was dead and buried, just like their folks. Pointless, it was. Just plain-as-pig-tracks pointless. The past held nothing for her, just as this dirt farm held nothing for her. It was a stopping-off place, nothing more—a place to bide her time until she could pinch and scrape and save enough to buy herself a one-way ticket out of here. A ticket to as far away as her money would take her. Maybe as far away as New York City, or San Francisco—or at least St. Louie. She’d go anyplace, as long as it was a big city and away from here. Away from this farm. Away from Limestone County.

Away.
That’s
where her future lay, and for that reason she was only interested in the future. Her future.

Katherine wasn’t asleep, but she didn’t feel any more like talking than Karin did. She was lying in bed asking herself why she had mentioned anything about Alex Mackinnon to Karin.

Karin thought she was crazy as a loon as it was. What would she think if she knew just how often Katherine thought of Alex? Or worse, the kinds of things she envisioned whenever his memory paid her a visit. She closed her eyes, calling up another memory.

Katherine remembered when she and Karin were growing up. Back then life in the rolling hills of Limestone County had been easier on them. Papa’s eyes were sharp as an owl’s and their mama was as pretty and healthy as a body could hope to be. Back then the corn was as tall as the eaves on the house and life had held so much promise. “Count your blessings,” their mother always said. “If you don’t thank the Good Lord, He might just see fit to take it all away.”

And Katherine had counted her blessings, and she had said her prayers every night, thanking the Lord above for giving her all that He had seen fit to give her, praying life would always be this way. But it hadn’t been, and just as mama had feared, the Lord had seen fit to take it all away, and Katherine couldn’t understand why. She only knew that He had seen fit.

“Our job isn’t to question the workings of the Lord, for His reasons aren’t ours,” Katherine could remember her mama saying after they suffered through a hard winter and the spring rains washed all the newly planted crops away. When the rains had finally stopped, their mother had said, “There’s better times a coming.”

But better times must have decided to go someplace else, because that summer their five-year-old brother Billy had died suddenly from a snakebite, and that fall, when she’d just learned to walk, baby Audrey had toddled into the bull pen and had been gored to death. Mama had never been the same after that. One day she would be as normal as sunshine, and then all of a sudden she would turn strange. Several times, when Katherine came into the house, she would see her mother standing over Audrey’s tiny, little bed singing a lullaby, and when she saw Katherine she would smile and place her fingers over her lips and say, “Shhhh, baby Audrey is sleeping.”

The minister, Rev. Archibald Haynes, had said the same thing the day they buried Audrey. “She isn’t dead, but sleeping. Sleeping in the bosom of Abraham.”

Two years ago her mother had gone on to sleep in the bosom of Abraham along with Audrey. After her mother’s death, Katherine had wondered just how long it would be before her father went that way as well. Jonathan Simon had been as thin as a split rail and couldn’t see the hand in front of his face. Most of the time he just sat on the front porch and stared straight ahead, as if his cloudy eyes could see the world crumbling in decay all around him. He had been doing just that the day he died, and the only thing that looked different when Katherine came in from chopping the Johnsongrass out of the corn, was the way his head slumped down between his shoulders. It had been a little over three weeks ago that they had buried him beside their mother, just a few feet from Billy and little Audrey. Sometimes Katherine wondered if she would be buried there as well. What would her marker say?
More than likely, it will say: Katherine Simon, spinster,
a voice inside her head replied.

Of all the things in her past that haunted her, it was thoughts of Alex Mackinnon that filled her mind at night the most. Thoughts of how she had always loved him. Thoughts of how he loved her sister. Katherine Simon, spinster. It did have a familiar ring to it.

She was only six the first time she could really remember being drawn to Alex Mackinnon. It was the day the Mackinnon boys all returned home with their father to find their home burned and their mother and brother killed. The Simons had dropped by, offering the boys and their father John a place to stay while they rebuilt their house. Katherine could remember as vividly as if it were yesterday, the way Alex had looked that day when his pa had talked to hers. She remembered too, how John Mackinnon had backhanded Alex and knocked him to the ground when he saw the tears on his face. “Your ma is dead and it’s time you acted like a man. Don’t ever let me see you sniveling like a baby again.” That was the last time she saw John Mackinnon, for he was scalped a few months later, leaving his boys orphaned.

After that, Alex seemed to have grown up overnight. It had always been a little bit strange to her, as she watches Alex and Adrian grow over the years, that it had been Adrian, not Alex who had turned so cynical. Alex was anything but cynical. He had grown up with a grin on his face and a twinkle in his eye, and Katherine would go to her grave remembering the way Alex laughed; how he threw back his dark head and laughed, the sound of it rumbling up from somewhere deep within, rolling across the pastures like a clap of thunder. It was like no other laugh she had ever heard. She guessed if Alex had any faults at all, it was that infuriating habit he had of teasing girls until they screamed. “I don’t know how you can stand him! He torments the daylights out of me,” Karin had once told her, but the way she had said it sounded like having the daylights tormented out of her was something Karin rather looked forward to.

Since they were neighbors, the four of them, Katherine and Karin, Alex and Adrian had walked to and from school together. Since the day they had all come down with chicken pox at the same time, they had always looked upon that occasion as something quite special about their friendship, something that set them apart and made them unique. It was after they recovered that they had taken oaths to marry one another when they were grown. Only problem with that oath was, they hadn’t been too specific as to just which Mackinnon married which Simon.

And for a while it didn’t seem to matter.

Katherine and Alex had always held a special fondness for one another, feeling themselves linked by a bond that did not exist between Adrian or Karin. However, as time passed, Katherine began to feel Alex’s pranks and capers were too irritating for words. “Stop pestering me!” she would shout to Alex as the four of them walked home. Her harsh words only caused him to pester her all the more, and soon he began teasing her about her freckles, telling everyone at school that she had swallowed a ten dollar gold piece and it broke out in pennies. One day she had had enough and clobbered him with her spelling book, and sat for a spell on the naughty stool in the corner. On more than one occasion she had refused to speak to him. Gradually he had stopped his teasing.

About the time Karin and Katherine had felt the first tingling of budding breasts, Katherine began to realize she wasn’t feeling as much resentment toward Alex as she had been, and was ready to forgive and forget past injustices. She had given it much thought and decided to welcome his teasing again when she realized that Alex hadn’t really stopped his teasing. He had simply stopped teasing her. The tricks, the pranks, the jokes he used to play on her, he was still playing—only now they were being played on Karin, and it appeared to Katharine that Karin didn’t find it half as irritating as she had.

The first sting of rejection came when Katherine realized she had lost Alex to her sister. A thousand times she cursed herself for bringing that book down over Alex Mackinnon’s head, and for driving him away. Yet it really wasn’t a book slammed on top of his head that had made Alex take a sudden interest in Karin Simon.

Katherine rolled over in the bed and punched her pillow with a frustrated sigh.
What am I doing thinking about all of this? Like Karin said, you can’t go back, so why torture yourself?
Katherine looked at the long shadows on her wall and knew the moon had climbed higher in the sky. It was growing late. She needed to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be another long hard day, when there would be too many chores for her to do and too little time to do them in. But the thoughts wouldn’t go away.
What is wrong with me?
Why was she tormenting herself this way? She flopped over in her bed again and squeezed her eyes together tightly. It was no use. She could still see the white flash of Alex Mackinnon’s smile as he rode by, his black horse thundering across the pasture toward the pecan grove that stood along the creek, the faraway melody of his laughter coming back to haunt her, carried by the wind.

It must have been a night not for sleeping, but for memories, for about the same time Katherine was tossing in her bed, Alexander Mackinnon sighed in his and rolled over, his hand coming out to grope for the lantern. Finding it, he raised the wick, filling the room with a dull golden glow. He looked at the bottle of whiskey, the empty glass, and wondered why he hadn’t been able drown his thoughts. He looked at the dark liquid in the bottle, the way the lamplight shimmered on the top. He recalled the way the sunlight danced like a thousand scattered spangles on the surface of Tehuacana Creek in the summertime. The glossy green leaves arched out over the water like a woman’s parasol, filtering the sunlight that sparkled on the water’s surface, sending shadows across Karin’s milk-white skin.

Karin.

Her name whispered across his mind like a spring breeze heavy with the scent of woodbine, the memory of her coming with the force of a kick in the belly. How well he could see the Simon place, just as he’d seen it so many times before—just across Tehuacana Creek from the grove where his mother and brother Andrew were buried. How old were they when he and Adrian had begun wandering down to the grove, under the pretext of seeing after the graves, when all they wanted was to spy on the Simon place, hoping and praying they’d catch a glimpse of Katherine or Karin?

And one day that prayer had been answered. Lord preserve him. How well he could remember that particular afternoon when he’d caught more than a glimpse. Oh, he remembered all right—as if it were yesterday.

It was one of those hot, dry days that come, one after the other, during the long, scorching Texas summers. Katherine and Karin had been helping with the chores, Katherine doing laundry in a wooden tub on the back porch, while Karin was working the garden. When Karin finished chopping weeds, she gathered black-eyed peas, okra, summer squash, beets, and a few green onions, none of which were a particular bother, except the okra, which left her skin red and itching.

The back door banged behind her since her arms were too full to stop it. Her mother was stirring something in a pot that simmered on the stove and didn’t bother to turn around. “Just put them on the table, angelkin.”

“I washed them in Katherine’s tub outside. You want me to cut anything up?”

“No. I’ll see to them in a minute. Why don’t you go look for your pa? Supper will be ready before too long.”

Karin started out across the pasture intending to look for her pa, but her arms were itching and burning like fire from that okra, and the thought of washing them in the cool waters of the creek was just too tempting. She could always say she had looked for pa and simply couldn’t find him.

She changed direction and headed for the dark fringe of trees that lined the creek. A minute later, she broke into a run, feeling as happy and carefree as any girl her age could feel. She had planned to run until she reached the cool strip of shade that followed the creek, but she had to stop when she got a stitch in her side. By that time she had decided she didn’t want to run anyway. It was too hot, and she was breathing harder than a plow horse. Stopping to walk, she caught her breath, walking on, counting the number of steps to the creek. She had reached four hundred and thirty when she stepped into the shade. A blue jay scolded her noisily and she laughed, mocking his scolding chatter. Overhead a gust of wind rattled through the dark glossy leaves and the branches drooped gently, swaying the woodbine that trailed like long May-day streamers to the ground. As she walked, she pushed the trailing vines back to let herself pass, feeling like she had entered her own private hideaway as they closed behind her, looking as thick and matted as they had before she entered. In the shade, the ground was cool and covered with vines and rotting logs grown over with lichen, and near the tree trunks last year’s leaves still lay moldering on the ground.

She reached the water and paused, thinking how quiet and still everything was. Overhead the sun was still shining through the arch of trees and all about her the sky was a clear, cloudless blue. Everywhere the world was still and cool and perfect as a picture. Even the surface of the water seemed subdued as it reflected the blue of the sky and the white brilliance of the sun in shimmering sparkles of light. The stillness was broken when a fish flipped out of the water, his silver sides flashing for a moment before he fell back and disappeared out of sight.

She stood for a moment looking at the water, then moved to its edge and began scrubbing her stinging arms with wet sand. As she rinsed them she spied a log that had fallen across the creek. The water in the middle of the creek was deeper and cooler and she decided to walk out there and bathe her feet that were blistering hot. She took off her shoes, then her stockings, leaving them on the bank. As she made her way across the log, she decided to dramatize the moment, closing her eyes and imagining herself to be the greatest ballerina in all of Russia. Balancing herself on one leg, she raised the other in a perfect point. She stayed in flawless balance for several seconds, enjoying the moment to the fullest. Then something happened that should never happen to any ballerina, and certainly not the greatest in all of Russia. She lost her balance. In a twinkling of a moment she felt herself falling through the air, having no time to prepare herself for the landing that was to follow.