Marrying Stone (10 page)

He undid the buttons on his trousers, wiggled out of his worsteds, and climbed into the bed, decently covering himself.

Meggie stood with her back to him, thinking. She didn't know why he'd stepped away from her so quickly. She had kept her expression as stiff as a rock and was sure that she hadn't given away any of the fluttery feeling that she'd felt when she had been forced to touch him.

She hated the unease of having him in the house. Obviously, neither of them was going to be able to forget the kiss that they had shared. But, they couldn't go on living together in such cramped quarters without ever exchanging a word.

"Here they are." She heard his voice behind her.

She turned to find him safely covered in the bed, the red and blue patchwork covering him. He held his britches in his left hand and she hurried over to take them without comment.

The soft, dark wool was warm in her hands as she lay the trousers out upon the table. She smoothed down the trousers, marvelling. The machine-woven fabric was flawless, its colors fast dyed in the cloth, its stitching precise. She'd never seen such material before. She hoped her own homespun butternut would not show up poorly by comparison.

Her mouth tightened. She was doing it again, worrying about what he might think. She shouldn't care. He was a stranger come to the mountain and soon he'd be gone. It shouldn't matter what he thought about them, what he thought about her. But it did.

It took her only a minute to measure the trouser's inside seam. It was nearly the same as Jesse's. Roe Farley might not be as tall as her brother, but his legs were just as long. She glanced over at the one-poster where he watched her in silence. Right now those long legs were naked beneath the bedcovers. She felt the roses blooming in her cheeks once more.

"Let me go ahead and patch up the knee in these," she said.

Roe nodded.

"There is enough cloth in the hem for me to cut you out a good underpiece," she said.

"Thank you," he replied.

Meggie started to sit next to the table. But after only a moment of hesitation, she dragged her chair over near the bed.

Roe watched her carefully, as if she might spring like a tiger.

"You don't have to look so fearful," she told him. "I'm not coming over here to crawl in that bed with you."

"I never thought—"

"I think," she said as she sat down and pulled the sewing into her lap, "that it's time that the two of us had a talk."

Roe cleared his throat rather noisily. "I'm not sure this is the best time."

"I'm not likely to get a better one. You are here in my cabin, I can say whatever I please, and you're not likely to get up and leave or chase me around the room if you don't like what I have to say."

He could hardly argue with that. He watched her as she removed part of the hem and carefully set it into place against the ripped knee. "What is it that you want to say, Miss Best?"

"You can call me Meggie," she said, as she carefully began to surround the patch with tiny stitches that were quick and deft. "You've already done it a time or two, and it's hard to keep up this miss and mister thing when we are here in the same house."

"All right, Meggie. What is it that you want to say?"

Meggie's blue-gray eyes met his brown ones and for a long moment she was speechless. She looked down to the woolen worsted trousers in her lap and continued her stitching. Somehow the activity helped her to get the words out the way that she wanted to say them.

"We need to talk about what happened the other day," she said quietly.

"There is no need," Roe answered as he watched her bright metal sewing needle dart in and out of the fabric that she held.

"There
is
need," she said determinedly. "I can't continue to pretend that you're not here, and you can't keep acting like nothing has happened."

Roe took a deep breath, distinctly uncomfortable. "Miss Best… Meggie, I can only say how much I regret any embarrassment that I might have caused you," he began.

Meggie laughed humorlessly. "And I can only regret any embarrassment that I might have caused myself," she said.

There was silence between them for a long moment. Meggie continued sewing.

"I've always been kind of dreamy," she confessed quietly. "All the folks on the mountain will tell you so. And I have to admit that it's true. I just read those fairy tales so many times, I guess I started to making up fairy tales of my own."

'There is nothing wrong with having imagination," Roe assured her.

She shrugged. "Maybe not. I never thought so anyhow. But when I let my fancies steal into my real life," she shook her head with self-derision, "it sure makes me look awfully foolish and it makes you kindy jittery."

Roe was certainly
jittery
at that moment. He was not the kind of man to allow his physical desires to control him, but he was not unaware of them either.

Meggie looked up at him then. She didn't understand the expression on his face, but it wasn't pity and she was grateful for that.

"I'm not sorry that I kissed you," she said, her chin defiantly high. "I liked it and we both know that already."

"I liked it, too," Roe said quietly.

Meggie blushed as a kind of pride stole in her heart. He'd liked it too. Somehow that made it not quite so bad.

"But I know that you aren't my prince come up the mountain," she said. "You're just a man that's come to listen to our music and document it on that Listening Box."

"Yes."

"So, I won't be throwing myself at you anymore, and I'm not going to be walking on pins around you neither."

"I'd like us to be friends, Meggie," he said.

"I don't know that we can be that," she said. "It seems that friendship and kissing don't mix too well together."

"Perhaps not."

"But, I'm glad that you are Jesse's friend. It seems like you really like him some, and I hope that that's true. Because he likes you and I wouldn't want him to get his feelings hurt."

"Neither would I," Roe answered.

"Good," Meggie said with finality.

There was silence between them then as Meggie continued her sewing. But it was a comfortable silence. The first they had ever shared.

"So," Meggie said. "You and I will just go along the best that we can. Not pretending that it didn't happen, but just making the best of the way things are."

Roe nodded understanding. "Do you do that a lot?"

She made a small sound of shock. "Kiss fellows? Of course I don't!"

"Not that," Roe assured her quickly. "Do you just make the best of the way things are?"

Meggie shrugged and gave a positive tilt to her head as she leaned forward slightly to bite off the thread just above the knot. "That's Ozark ways."

The next morning, clad in his brandnew, homespun butternuts, Roe followed Jesse to the barn where Jesse cut him strips of leather for crossed galluses, a kind of suspenders, for Roe's new trousers. The pants were bulky and unfashionable. But, strangely, Roe felt rather comfortable in the cloth made by Meggie Best's hand. It was smooth and soft. Perhaps much like herself. Dressed this way it was hard to distinguish Roe from any other Ozark farmer.

The morning was already warm and heavy as they started out. The thick green canopy of woods overhead was dripping heavy dew onto the forest duff. As the two men made their way across the clearing Roe could smell the fresh scent of mint and dogwood. Everything looked green and slightly hazy. After nearly losing his spectacles in the wood pile, Roe had carefully stowed them in their tooled nickel case and left them in his shirt pocket most of the time. This caused him to squint more than a little. He could certainly see Jesse perfectly well and of course he could hear him, too.

Today, he was talking rapidly about his favorite subject. Hunting dogs. It was the young man's modest ambition to own his own hound. And although Jesse had never managed to memorize his numbers from one to ten, he seemed very much an authority on redbones, blue ticks, walkers, and Plotts. As Roe knew exactly nothing about the animals, he half listened to Jesse as if the man were speaking a foreign language.

"We could get a dog together," Jesse said. "A tree dog is what we need, no derby or bird hunter for us no ways. I could train her myself. But you could hunt with me."

Roe chuckled. "I don't know anything about hunting."

Jesse gave him a wide-eyed look of disbelief. "You know
everything
," he insisted naively. "You probably just forgot about hunting. But you'll pick it up again when the weather gets cool in the autumn."

"I won't be here in the fall, Jesse. I have to go back to where I come from."

"Why would you want to do that?"

"Because that's where I belong."

The young man considered his words. "You could learn to belong here. Pa was not from here once, but now he is."

Roe smiled at the young man's encouraging welcome, but he shook his head. "No, Jesse, I'll be going back east. It's what I want to do."

Jesse shook his head, clearly puzzled. "What's there that ain't here?"

Culture and music and civilization
, Roe thought, glancing at the young man at his side, wishing he knew a better way to explain. He searched his mind for a concept that Jesse could grasp. "Back east, Jesse," he said, "they have privies at every house."

Jesse's eyes widened with appreciation. "At ever' house?"

Roe nodded. "Rich and poor, there are privies in the Bay State enough for all."

Jesse whistled and shook his head in disbelief. "Frien', that is downright amazing."

Roe chuckled and then gazed around at the primitive wilderness that existed on the same continent as his Bay State home.

"Yes, Jesse, it is downright amazing."

The morning's work consisted of rounding up the hogs that lived and lounged at their leisure around the homestead and driving them to the small patch that Onery and Jesse planned to put into corn. There were two big sows, one already heavy with piglets, one big huffing, noisy boar, and three yearling hogs as pesky as puppies, but not nearly as appealing. The pigs were a lazy and uninterested group. But Roe found himself surprisingly deft at the task. Still Jesse was much better. With one small stick and some loud encouragement, he shortly had the squealing swine headed in the proper direction.

The cantankerous creatures attempted to escape more than once, especially during the noisy, splashing moments when they forced the uncooperative hogs across the cold, rushing stream.

"This is our cornfield," Jesse told him proudly as they reached the small plot of cleared land on the far side of the creek.

Roe looked up and down the stubby undergrown hillside. It was far from level land, but appeared to be the flattest piece of ground Roe had seen on the Best farm.

"If it's your cornfield, why are you letting the pigs in it?"

"To hog it down," Jesse answered, as if that explained everything.

Shortly, Roe got the idea as he watched the snorty swine rooting up the leftover com and early weeds that plagued the field.

"It feeds them and it makes it easier to plow," Roe commented.

The pigs, however, didn't know a good thing when they had it. Off and on throughout the morning a hog would attempt to wander off. Jesse had no trouble handling that problem. With a loud call and a flick of his stick, the errant animal would be back where he belonged in no time.

At midday the two men took to the shade of a big chestnut tree up on the rise. The blaze of sun streamed down through the hugh branches in dappled patterns across the ground on which they rested. They couldn't see the hogs from this resting place, but they could still hear the noisy rooting and grunting from over the hill.

For Roe it was with a curious sense of well-being that he rested from the morning's hard work. Peace and good humor had settled upon him like a cloak. He didn't understand if it was this place or Jesse and his family that made Roe feel so comfortable. He had always struggled to fit in wherever he was doing his work. Strangely, here in these desolate mountains it didn't seem much of a struggle.

The men joked together as they searched their respective lunch buckets to see if there was anything that Meggie had packed that might be remotely edible. Jesse found a greasy, half-burnt pork chop. Roe's meat was a jaw of jerked venison.

Jesse laughed. "Don't be thinking she was trying to short you," he told Roe. "That venison will taste a dang sight better than this old cold pork chop."

"At least we've both got gravy," Roe said.

Jesse nodded. "Yep, but it's just poor-do."

Roe and Jesse shared. In Roe's bucket there was an ample supply of Meggie's special corn pone, hard and crispy on the outside, still half-raw in the middle. Jesse had a whole jar of last year's pickled okra, but it was overcooked and rather slimy. Hunger, however, could overcome a finicky palate and the two ate heartily.

"If a feller had a good dog and a steady hand," Jesse said, "he can make a fair living in these hills."

"It would be a pretty hard living," Roe commented.

"How so?"

"Well, it must get very cold here in winter. And the crops surely don't grow well on these hillsides."

The young man shrugged. "Pa says life ain't meant to be easy," he answered. "If it just ain't miserable you've got a lot."

Roe grinned at Onery's homespun philosophy. "I suppose there is truth to that," he admitted.

The two ate quietly together for several minutes, then, his mouth half full and a gob of jelly hanging off the side of his lip, Jesse spoke up again. "Meggie likes you, you know."

Roe raised an eyebrow in surprise at the abrupt change of subject. The ease of tension between them had been abrupt and obvious. Of course Jesse would be expected to notice.

"Your sister is just being polite."

"Oh, I don't think when it comes to fellers, Meggie cares much about being polite. You two just got started off wrong."

The memory of Meggie's passionate kiss gave Roe momentary pause.
Wrong
wasn't exactly the word he was thinking of.