The Springsweet (7 page)

After all, hadn't I known a girl who could see the future? Had I not myself looked into the dark to see the veins of water flowing through the land? Why not a babe with the gift of wingless flight-—would that be entirely impossible?

Stumbling into a clearing, I realized that my silly head
had
been dreaming the impossible. Louella had not floated, she'd jumped up—onto a rail of graying wood.

"That was a good chase," I said, swiping my brow with my sleeve. I approached, slowly so she wouldn't be tempted to run again.

"I won."

With a laugh, I murmured my agreement. And as I came closer I realized she balanced not on a rail but on a foundation of sorts. Wood had been joined together, stretching across the dry ground in a long rectangle. It didn't quite meet in the middle, and I realized as I walked through that space that someone had left room for a door.

Turning inside the border, I asked, "What is this?"

Louella held her arms out wide, walking the rail fearlessly. "Our house. Papa started it."

Inside my chest, my heart tightened. Birdie and her husband Petty had settled first in Kansas—that's where Louella was born. But when news of the land rush in the Territories came this year past, they moved to claim their 160 acres. It was free land to anyone willing to race for it. To care for it.

Walking the borders of the foundation, I tried to imagine what this would have been, if scarlet fever hadn't taken Petty.

I had only Emerson's cabin as a measure, but it was a good measure, I thought. This house would have been twice as wide. Room enough for a bedroom, for an iron stove; space enough for a family to spread out a bit come winter.

Nothing like the earthen cellar of the soddy, where Birdie had to take up the pallets each morning so there would be room to cook and eat and sew during the heat of day.

Standing in the middle of an unfinished promise, I rubbed the place where my locket had been. My fond remembrance at the well peeled away. In my own grief, the world had stopped. Having it start again so abruptly, on such a sharp reminder that my pain was hardly singular, I dammed my tears.

When Louella strayed near, I caught her hand. "It's getting dark, duck. Your mama will be wondering about us."

"I'm tired, Zora," she chirped.

Weary, I groaned. But when she put her finger in her mouth and implored me with big green eyes, I relented. Giving her my back, I said, "Hop on, then. No pulling my hair for reins."

And hop she did, nearly knocking me to my knees. Worse yet, she was hot. It felt as though I carried a burning coal on my back, one with wriggly little fingers that pulled my hair in spite of my admonition. Which turned out to be quite a bit better than when she felt her balance shift and threw both arms around my neck.

Half-strangled, I wheezed. The sounds I made sent Louella into peals of laughter, which—once I had extricated myself enough to breathe—made me laugh as well. We were a disheveled, giggling mess as we came around the soddy.

And so it was, with delight on my lips and a babe in my arms, entirely careless and hair pulled loose, that I met Mr. Theo de la Croix again.

Six

"Let go now," I told Louella.

I dipped low so she could slide off, then straightened. My hands flew immediately to my hair. There was no salvaging the chignon, so I did my best to smooth everything around it.

It wasn't that I wanted to pretty myself for him, though it was generally embarrassing to get caught out so discomposed. But what it did, however, was let me stall polite conversation so I could try to regain my composure.

Unfortunately, I failed and blurted out, "What are you doing here?"

"Where are your manners, Zora?"

Birdie's voice sounded tight, and when I caught a glimpse of her face, I noted the tension between her brows. Reaching out to take her hand, I forced the best smile I could and looked up at Theo again. "I mean, imagine my surprise. This is the last place I expected to meet you."

"Forgive me for that. It seems I'm always turning up unexpectedly on you," he said. His voice was creamy as I remembered it, warm like his skin and dark eyes. Perhaps in deference to travel, he'd pulled his glossy hair back and fixed it with blue velvet ribbon, the same sort that edged his lapels and cuffs. "As I was telling your aunt, I have a great deal to atone for when it comes to you, Miss Stewart."

Insistent, I said, "No, of course you don't..."

"I think I do," he replied, and tried to catch my gaze.

Panic clutched at my heart and stilled it. In my mind, I all but bargained with possibility. He couldn't have come all this way to court me—that was madness, wasn't it?

Even if his coach trip from Skeleton Ranch to West Glory had been entirely uneventful, it was still a journey of significant hardship and distance, to come from Maryland to Oklahoma Territory. Surely he'd meant to come this way on his own. Certainly it was a coincidence that he stopped at my aunt's homestead...

Then, to destroy my anxious hope, Theo said, "I have only the most honorable intentions."

I looked at the ground, and my vision blurred. The last thing I wanted were his
intentions.
My love lay in the cold ground, forever sleeping beneath the flowering pear trees, and that's where it would stay.

Words were dust in my mouth when I said, "You're too kind."

"Where will you be staying?" Birdie asked.

"I've got a room in town for now. The school board said they'd help me find a modest place of my own as soon as they could."

At that, I lifted my head. "Will they? Is that common?"

Theo smiled, offering me his card. "Common enough, I suppose. I'm taking the schoolmaster post in West Glory."

Once again, my manners failed. "Why would you do that?"

Tipping his hat, Theo smiled once more—as if he hadn't noticed my discomfit at all. In fact, his black eyes sparkled, dancing as if he'd met a particularly toothsome challenge. "As I said, I have only the most honorable intentions."

With that, he mounted his very fine horse and made his pretty adieus to Birdie and Louella. They watched him go, for he was quite something to consider, but I studied his calling card instead.

It was one of the most fashionable kinds. The front bore his name, and on the reverse, each corner had a word printed in it. Instead of scribbling a note, he simply had to fold the corner that best expressed his sentiment, so it would appear on the face. Today, he'd presented
Visite,
as if I might not have noticed that he'd delivered it in person.

The paper was so thick, it weighed in my palm, and I knew those extra engravings came at quite a fee. This wasn't the card of a poet at all; it belonged, instead, to a very rich man. In a moment, all my assumptions about him shifted.

And they made him seem rather more dangerous to me, a wastrel for entertainment's sake, a rich boy used to getting what he wanted. I couldn't bear to think what that meant; I refused to consider that I might be the thing he wanted.

"I see?" Louella asked, pulling my hand down so she could grasp for the card.

"You may keep it," I told her, and went to collect my wash.

***

To my dismay, Theo's visit lit a fire in my Aunt Birdie. While I tried to master the temperamental woodstove, she finished the last of her lacework with a giddy sort of amusement.

"Can't feature running away from that," she said as I handed Louella a pan of peas to pick.

Clasping the back of my neck, I avoided Birdie's gaze and turned back to the stove. "It's not what you think at all."

I started chopping my field onions, rough, hard strokes to work out the tension between my shoulder blades. My plan was to mix them with the cornmeal, to make a flavored cornbread, just a touch of variety to go with boiled, mashed peas.

"That boy is a sugar cake," Birdie said. Amused, she raised her lace to inspect it and spoke to me through it. "Melt right on your tongue."

My gaze flew to Louella, who had not the slightest idea what kind of conversation was flying around her little curly head. She'd centered the pan of peas between her legs. Her face had transformed, a mask of concentration, as she picked the pods open one by one.

Satisfied that Louella was unaware, I nevertheless lowered my voice before replying. "Do you know where I met him? At the cemetery. Drinking in the daylight, sharing a toast with a dead poet."

This revelation further delighted Birdie at my expense. "So he cuts a dramatic figure."

"A foolish one," I replied.

"Obviously, it intrigued you enough to meet him at the dance." Birdie folded her lace carefully, then leaned back in the chair to appraise me. "And into the gardens..."

Rather harder than I meant to, I dropped a pan on the stovetop. "In both cases, he followed me. In both cases, I fled."

"That's not what Pauline said in her letter."

I swept around, dropping to the floor. I clapped my hands over Louella's ears, which didn't seem to bother her at all. Apparently, she had found her bliss in a handful of peas.

"It's not that way at all. I left him with my friend, and that would have been the last of it if I hadn't fallen in the fountain! He didn't ravish
me,
I ravished
him
so Mama would ... what's so funny?"

Birdie covered her mouth, rolling her eyes heavenward. And she shook, loose curls dancing around her face, reminding me how young—how pretty—she was.

"What?" I demanded again.

She shook with one more giggle. Then she made note of my furious scowl and put a hand out to pet me. "Shhh, shhh, Zora..."

Still furious, I shrugged from beneath her hand. "There's no romance there."

"It seems like there could be," Birdie said. She leveled me with a look. "If you say you keep running, but this boy keeps turning up, maybe the Lord is trying to tell you something."

It seemed to me that the Lord surely had more things to worry about than one new spinster in Oklahoma Territory. But I didn't say that. I got up and went back to the stove, turning all my attention to my onion cornbread.

Her voice more serious, Birdie said, "I know what it's like to lose your heart, Zora."

"I haven't lost it." A knot bound my throat, and I had to blink fast to keep from salting the cakes with my tears. "It's Thomas' still, and I'd like to stop talking about this."

Birdie stood and smoothed a hand across my shoulders. She patted me gently and leaned in to murmur, "All right. For now."

As determined as she was to delay this conversation, inwardly I killed it entirely. If she spoke on it again, I'd ignore her. She was barely my elder, twenty-two to my seventeen, so I couldn't outright defy her. But I could hold my tongue and had done so for months in my mother's house.

Perhaps I would become another Wild West notion, a legend sent back east in the newspapers. Zora Stewart, the mute keeper of Thomas Rea's memory, first mourning lady of the plains, raiser of other women's children.

It did not occur to me at that moment that I might in fact become part of the mythic West for something else entirely. But soon it would, and I would wonder if the Lord or the universe had, in fact, led me to this place apurpose.

I felt no sense of destiny in myself, but my feelings would hardly deter fate.

***

Come the morning, Birdie woke me before the sun had entirely risen. Pressing a finger to her lips, she motioned for me to follow her. Tugging a blanket around my shoulders, I slipped outside, leaving Louella sleeping peacefully on her pallet.

"I'm heading into town," Birdie said.

She wore a green calico dress, the perfect shade to bring out the color in her eyes. Tying on her good bonnet—the ironed one that spent most of its time on a peg—she nodded in the vague direction of West Glory. "I should be back by lunch, but if it's not 'til supper, don't worry."

Worry tightened my skin. "You don't want me to hurry and dress Louella? We could come along."

"I'll get more done more quickly if you stay behind."

I wanted to be agreeable, so I nodded. But I struggled for words, my mind whirring. I had my tasks for the day, and they were no different than they would have been if Birdie were going to be here. But somehow, minding the baby and the stove seemed less daunting with her nearby.

Taking my silence for agreement, Birdie said, "Put on a happy face. I'll be paid today, and that means a bit of meat for our beans and, if we're very lucky, some flour and sugar. I'll bring you a penny candy if you're good."

Sheepishly, I laughed. "I favor cinnamons."

"You'll get whatever Mrs. Herrington has at the general." Birdie put her hands on my shoulders, her freckled face turning more serious. "If there's any trouble, bar the door and keep the shotgun at hand."

"I can't," I said bluntly.

Birdie mistook my meaning. "It's already loaded. Just raise it to your shoulder and pull the trigger if you have to. It's unlikely, Zora. Before Mr. de la Croix, we hadn't had a visitor since ... well, since the funeral, and that's a year past."

"I'm sorry," I said; my condolences came without thought, as if grief were written into my bones now.

"Don't be." Birdie picked up her basket of sewing. Then she fixed me with a quelling stare. "Just tell me you understand and you'll take care of my Lou."

There was no need to argue with her. Truly, if no one came here, then handling arms would be no issue. And if someone did come, I'd devise another way to protect Louella—if she needed protecting at all. So I covered my lie of omission with a truth.

"As if she were my own."

"Good girl," Birdie said, turning to start the long walk to town. She laughed lightly, casting a look back over her shoulder. "You might get that penny candy yet."

***

After breakfast, I drew our morning water and went out back to tend the garden.

I recognized most of the vegetables there—the peas were the most obvious, because they had already shed their blossoms to produce their fruit. Long, leafy blades marked the row of corn, and beside that, two sad tomato plants withered on their stakes.