Mary Connealy (51 page)

“Can you get over here, Grace, and pay attention?” Daniel didn’t seem aware that his son was talking to him.

And Ike didn’t quit carping or insulting his new mother, even when his pa talked over top of him.

“You may not know a lick about cooking, but maybe we can learn you something. You just take five or six fistfuls of flour. Boys have appetites….” Daniel threw flour around until the air in the cave turned as white as the world outside. “That jar there,”—Daniel jerked his head at the floor in a direction so vague Grace wasn’t sure if it was a lame effort at pointing or if he had a crick in his neck—“you put a glug or two of that…” Daniel quit throwing flour, grabbed up the milk pail, and glugged away, slopping some milk straight onto the pile of flour on the table.

“If she’s not going to cook, what’s’a use of her, Pa? She’s just hogging up the blankets near as I can see.”

The door slammed open, and John charged in. He hurled a snowball at Ike, then whirled and ran out, whooping and hollering every step of the way. Ike roared like a rebel charging down the slopes at Gettysburg and ran outside.

“Get back here!” Daniel kept mixing while he yelled.

Grace covered her ears against the pain of Daniel’s thunderous bellow, afraid for her hearing. The flour was now a lump of dough.

Daniel went back to talking in his normally deafening tone. He didn’t seem to notice Ike was gone. Well, he noticed. He’d yelled loudly enough, but he didn’t do anything when Ike ignored him.

Grace pulled the door shut again. She’d found her place in the family. Door-shutter. She’d be busy from morning till night.

Daniel set the bucket of milk aside. Had he said something about some unknown number of glugs again? Daniel went to the stove and flipped the steaks through the roaring flames. Then he quickly stacked an enormous mountain of meat and reached for the lump of dough. He tore off knots of the white goo and dropped them directly on the stovetop, beside the steaks. He flattened each with his hands, adding dough until the stovetop was covered.

Daniel flipped open the small stove, and with a long-handled ladle he’d snagged from behind the stove—Grace was fairly certain it had been on the floor—he fished around inside the roaring fire until he began pulling out blackened lumps that looked like coal. He tossed them on the table and they rolled, but none went onto the floor.

Grace decided whatever he was doing, he was an expert at it.

He clanked the stove door shut, used the fork to prod the biscuits around until he could turn them, shoved them to one side, pulled a bucket from under the table, and began cracking eggs onto the stovetop. When he had a dozen or so broken, he went to the door, pulled it open, and bellowed, “Breakfast!”

By the time the ringing in Grace’s ears subsided, the boys came charging in, skidding through the wide-open door on the packed snow. Abe got there first and slammed into the table. The coal started rolling, and before Grace could react, Abe and Daniel caught the lumps and held them down, corralling them with their forearms. Ike came swooping in next. He careened into Abe, who shoved him. Ike nearly crashed into the stove.

“Watch the food, Ike. You’re eating ’em whether you knock ’em on the floor or not.” Daniel set the milk bucket in the center of the table.

John came next, with Luke right on his heels. The two of them knocked into the bench that sat alongside the table. With deep-throated laughter, they dived out of sight then popped up on the other side of the table, clambering onto a bench and reaching for the coal.

Daniel whacked at their hands with his fork.

They ducked the slapping utensil, snagged the coal, and began chewing on it.

Mark came in last. “You better not’ve eaten my share.”

Grace backed as far as she could from the earsplitting child. She pressed up against the wall and stayed there.

Daniel threw the fork at Abe.

Abe caught it in midair. He stabbed a steak from the top of the tower of meat and handed it to Mark. Mark took it off the fork with his bare hand and started gnawing on it as he rounded the table, making sure to stomp on Ike’s toe. Mark got shoved toward the bench. He sat down next to his brothers.

Ike took the next steak for himself and started eating as he stomped to the bench seat directly across from his triplet brothers. Abe handed a steak to Luke and John. He was getting near the bottom of the pile. Abe forked the next one and threw it to his father, who caught it. Abe took one for himself then stopped short.

“You made too many, Pa.” Abe looked at the steak with pure greed shining in his eyes.

“Nope, had to make Ma one.” Daniel pulled the single tin cup forward and poured it full of milk directly from the bucket that sat in the center of the table. He downed the milk then poured again. He handed the cup to Ike, who was sitting next to him.

The cat landed in the middle of the table and made a dash for the milk.

“Scat, you.” Abe swatted at the cat.

The cat, obviously a master at self-preservation, leaped off the table with a yowl.

“Don’t you hit my cat,” Ike raged as he punched Abe in the shoulder.

Grace prepared for an all-out fight, no goofing around this time.

Abe shoved him back. “If I’d’a wanted to hit that cat, he’d’ve been hit.”

That seemed to satisfy Ike, or he was starving. For whatever reason, this once the twins didn’t end up tussling on the floor.

Abe gave Grace a glowering look, as though he was considering fighting her for the meat. Grace would have backed up more, but the wall held her in place. With a shrug of disgust, Abe forked up a steak and took it for himself, then poked the last one and raised it, stuck on the utensil, in her direction.

“I…I don’t eat…” Her voice started to fade. She hadn’t seen the smallest sign of plates or silverware, besides the fork and ladle of course. The fork that had been sticking straight down into the dirt floor just moments ago.

“She don’t eat?” Abe looked from her to Daniel, his eyes shining with hunger. “If she don’t want that steak, I claim it.”

“She’s eating it.” Daniel jabbed at Abe with a half-gnawed steak bone. “Put hers on the table. It was on the bottom of the stack, direct on the stove. It’ll need to cool.”

Abe turned from Grace and plopped the sizzling meat directly onto the tabletop. Then Abe began breaking biscuits in half, shoveling a hard-cooked egg into the middle of each, and handing the biscuits to Ike. Ike passed them on around. Each of them got two biscuits with eggs inside and one plain biscuit, besides the enormous steak.

Grace could see now that the coal was really baked potatoes.

Abe was almost finished when he looked at her. His surprised expression told her he’d forgotten his brand-new ma again. He tossed two egg biscuits beside her rapidly cooling steak. Blood ran off the steak and onto the floor, and fat began to congeal on the table.

The milk kept getting passed. After everyone had a drink, the tin cup would start another circuit. Grace gulped when she saw Mark fish around in the milk with his unwashed index finger, snag something, swish it out and flick it onto the floor, then guzzle down the rest of the milk.

“We coulda stood some’a them apples, Pa. Didn’t he have none left?” The din of conversation, all at full volume and all with mouths stuffed full of food, went on only briefly. The food—meat to the equivalent of half a cow, a small mountain of potatoes, a whole…stovetop full of biscuits and eggs, and an entire bucket of milk—vanished.

The boys shoved and pummeled each other as they ran back outside.

And Grace still stood, stunned, against the back wall of the tiny cave, with the door wide open to the bitter winter wind.

“S’pose it’s beneath your dignity to help clean the kitchen up.” Daniel scowled at her and began clearing.

Except Grace noticed that there was nothing to clear. The boys hadn’t made a mess. They’d barely let the food cool and certainly never let it sit on the table. They’d even taken their steak bones out with them.

Daniel scooped the empty milk bucket full of snow and set it on the stove. He picked up another bucket half full of water that was tucked behind the stove, poured a little water into the milk cup, swirled it around, and then tossed the water out the door. Daniel shut the frigid day outside and set the milk cup back on the table—the table that was now perfectly clean except for Grace’s cold, bleeding meat, with its pair of biscuits standing by its side.

“Eat when you want. Warm it up if you’ve a mind.” Daniel grabbed the bucket of water and went outside without a backward glance.

A
in’t she
never
gonna do
nothin’
but stare or hide under a blanket, Pa?” Mark tugged at Daniel’s sleeve while he fed some grain to the four milk cows. Mark seemed the most determined to return Grace.

“As long as she keeps outta the way, we’d better count our blessings, son.” Daniel watered the cows with the bucket he’d carried from the house; then he went to the chicken coop to scatter cracked corn.

Mark carried his own, smaller bucket of corn and slogged along behind, setting his small feet in the tracks as Daniel broke a trail in the deep snow, trudging through the snow back to the barn. Mark nagged him every step of the way.

Abe and Ike had taken off on horseback to ride herd. Luke and John were in the woods that climbed the hill behind the cave—the one the boys liked to slide down on their bellies and go flying past the front door. It was Mark’s turn to stay close to the place and help with the barnyard chores.

Daniel climbed up into the haymow and grabbed up the pitchfork.

“Couldn’t you’ve done a better job of pickin’ a ma?” Mark shouted from down below where he wrestled all three baby calves into the pens with their mamas.

After the Reeves family got their milk, the babies got to suckle the rest out for their own breakfast. The calves bawled and rushed for their mothers, who crooned deep in their throats to their babies. Then there was silence as the calves started feeding, their little tails jerking in time to their feasting.

“’Tweren’t no big rush about it.” Mark trailed Daniel up the ladder and grabbed armloads of hay to throw down to the fat cows below.

“When we told you we wanted a ma, none of us never said you had to go off half-cocked and bring home the first ma you run across.”

The kid hadn’t stopped yapping since he’d come outside. Daniel pitched hay down, trying to work fast enough that—Daniel shook his head. Fast work wouldn’t make him go deaf, and that was his only escape from Mark’s harping about Grace.

The cows started crunching away at the hay, but the noise didn’t drown out the boy. “Maybe if we took her back and told the preacher real nice that she weren’t good for
nothin’
.”

Mark’s prattle was wearing on his ears to the point Daniel was tempted to leave the rest of the chores to Mark and go inside. Except “inside” was plumb full of that useless, prissy woman. She was most likely still standing there, holding up the consarned wall.

“Just tell him that she hasn’t done nothing, ’cept’n sleeping with you….”

Daniel cringed and forked faster.

“Maybe he’d take back your I do’s. Just kinda erase the whole stupid thing. I’d be glad to tell Parson Roscoe that so far going to bed with you is the only thing she’s good for. If the parson knew that—”

“Don’t try and help me out with this, son. It ain’t a job for young’uns.” He worked beside his carping son in the dry, sweet-smelling hay. After he had the milk cows’ feed bunk full, he moved to the opening above the hogs and gave the sows their share. They rustled their snouts into the growing pile in their low manger, their babies squealing and nudging the sows’ fat udders for milk. Then he moved on to the pen with one older calf. The little heifer was weaned but too young to go out with the herd. He finished with the pen of older pigs from last summer’s farrowing. The greedy little beasts squealed and bit at each other as if they were starving to death. Last he pitched some hay down to the cow with the new calf he’d found yesterday. They seemed to be doing well, but Daniel knew he’d have to keep them inside until the cold weather broke.

The barn was bitter cold, but the doors were tight and the frigid wind stayed outside. It was about a thousand times nicer place to be than that dark, musty cave. Daniel wondered again why he’d never got around to building a house. He craved the thought of having a bedroom for his new wife. She could hide in there forever if it suited her.

Daniel would just shove a steak under the door three times a day and be done with it. And he would build himself a room, too—as far from Mark’s nagging and Grace’s finicky manners as he could get. In fact, for a moment, Daniel toyed with the idea of just moving himself out to the barn. Sure, he’d freeze to death, but that was the only flaw he could see in the plan.

Mark kept pestering. He wasn’t driving the boy hard enough. He’d never get too tired to talk at this rate. The work his other boys were doing would half kill them, Daniel thought with satisfaction. They wouldn’t get all the way killed. He’d trained them up right. Another ten or fifteen hours of hard labor mixed with wild, reckless play, and his boys would sleep like the dead. Now he only had to wear out this chatterbox.

“Mark, brush the horses when you’re done here; then start fetching pails of snow into the house. Leave ’em long enough to melt; then water the animals. I gave the cows some, but I shorted ’em, so you’re gonna need to—”

“That’s right. With this much snow, we won’t have to chop a hole in the crick er nothin’.” Mark beamed at him. “It’ll be fun feeding the stock snow.”

“Don’t forget the chickens. I’m gonna saddle up and see to dragging windfalls in closer for the night. John and Luke can’t gather enough wood to last for long.”

“I’ll be ready to chop it for you by the time you’re back.”

Daniel jammed his fists on his hips and turned to face his son. “What’d I tell you about the ax?”

Mark’s eyes narrowed.

Daniel held his gaze. It was a showdown. He had one about twice a day with Mark.

Finally, his son caved. “All right, Pa. You think I’m too young for chopping.”