Beyond All Measure (3 page)

Wyatt cleared his throat. “I’d best fill you in on Aunt Lillian before we get there.”

“
Aunt
Lillian?”

“By marriage. I took over her affairs a few years ago.”

Her anger flared again. “Then
you’re
my employer?”

“Technically. I put money into her account and she takes it out. It makes her feel that she still has some control over things.”

She stuck out her bottom lip and blew her sticky curls upward. “For the love of Pete! You might have said so, Mr. Caldwell.”

“Please call me Wyatt. And don’t go getting your feathers all ruffled. I was coming to it.”

“My feathers aren’t ruffled. I simply prefer to be apprised of all the facts.”

“Fair enough. Aunt Lillian married my daddy’s brother when she was just a slip of a girl. They came here from North Carolina and bought a farm. A few years after Uncle Pete died, she sold the farm and married Doc Willis. After he died, she took care of that big house and the gardens all by herself, even through the war, but then she broke her hip. Since then—well, she has good days and bad days. But I reckon Hannah told you all about that.”

Ada looked at him with grudging respect. There weren’t many men who would defer their own dreams and take on the responsibility for an aged woman who wasn’t even his blood kin. “I’m sure she appreciates your looking after her.”

He nodded. “She took care of me off and on, when my mama was sick and my daddy was away tending his cattle. I spent quite a bit of time with her. The year I lived with her, right after my mother passed on, she sent me to school, taught me some manners.” He sent her a rueful smile. “I was pretty hard to handle, but she never gave up on me. I can’t turn my back on her now.”

“Of course not.”

“Hannah . . . Miss Fields . . . was the latest in a series of companions,” he continued. “It’s only fair to warn you that Aunt Lillian can be a handful sometimes. She resents needing help and takes her frustration out on whoever is around. It’s more than some people can take.”

She felt him studying her, gauging her reaction. What did it matter? It was too late to change her mind.

“We knew that Hannah planned to leave sometime soon,” he went on. “We weren’t expecting it quite
this
soon.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what gets into folks that makes ’em turn tail and run at the most inopportune time. But that’s beside the point now.”

“Miss Fields wrote that your aunt is seventy-nine.”

“Thereabouts. She’s been known to fudge the numbers in both directions, according to her purposes. A couple of years back, the newspaper offered a prize in exchange for a story about the oldest citizen in the county. Aunt Lillian admitted to her true age then and won a year’s subscription to the
Gazette
. Otherwise, she usually shaves off a couple of years. She’s a corker, all right.”

The last of the clouds had dissipated. The sun beat down with merciless intensity. Ada unfurled the parasol and rested the thin wooden shaft against her shoulder.

“Aunt Lillian enjoys having someone read to her in the mornings and again before bed. She says it helps her sleep, but she’s not above taking a bit of brandy to speed things along.” He glanced at Ada. “She’s at the age where she has so few pleasures left I can’t deny her the comfort of an occasional sip. I hope you don’t object.”

“It isn’t my place to object.”

“When the weather’s nice she likes to sit outside in the garden. She takes tea at four in the afternoon. Supper at six, bed by eight. You’ll have the evenings for your own pursuits.”

Ada stared out at the passing landscape. What pursuits awaited her in a small town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains? Back home, before everything collapsed, her life had been filled with dinners and concerts, skating parties, and lectures at the public library. Now all that seemed like a dream, like something that had happened to someone else.

She shook her head, a gentle warning to herself to stop dwelling on the past.
Think about your plans. You’ ll have time in the evenings to get things started.

They approached a white clapboard church, its steeple piercing the sky. A few wild rosebushes struggled to bloom in the patchy graveyard connected to the church property by a winding brick walkway; a handful of pale pink blossoms littered the ground. A few mottled tombstones dotted the plot, but most graves were marked with simple wooden crosses, several of which listed to the side as if blown about by a strong wind.

“The church is Aunt Lillian’s second home,” Wyatt told Ada. “Preaching at eleven every Sunday morning, and the ladies’ quilting circle on Wednesdays.” He grinned. “Although from what I hear, the quilting circle is as much about gossip as sewing.”

The wagon continued along the road. Wyatt pointed out the homes of his neighbors dotting the valley and showed her the stands of timber that belonged to his company. At a sharp bend in the road, he pulled into the yard of a sawmill bustling with activity.

Wagonloads of timber lined up before long wooden sheds, waiting their turn at the circular saws. A small army of workers moved about the vast lumberyard, unloading the logs and placing them on a conveyor belt powered by a small steam engine. Two men in sweat-stained shirts shoveled coal into the engine’s firebox, sending a plume of steam into the air.

“We just received a big order from Chicago.” Wyatt raised his voice above the whine of the saws and the crack of newly sawn boards being loaded onto waiting wagons. “Ten thousand board feet for a new mercantile they’re putting up.” He pointed to a house situated on a rise behind the sheds. “That’s mine. I built it a couple of years ago.”

Constructed of overlapping rows of whitewashed planks, the house boasted a wide porch that wrapped around three sides, and a steeply-pitched tin roof. Tall, lace-curtained windows on either side of the door afforded views of the mill and the forest. Beside the door, flowers bloomed in a riot of colors. A pair of rocking chairs occupied one end of the porch.

It was a fine house, beautifully constructed and well tended—a house meant for a family. Ada imagined smiling faces around a candlelit supper table, winter evenings before a merry fire, the murmurs of sleepy children at evening prayers. That had been her dream once, and it had almost come true. Now that dream had been supplanted by one less emotionally satisfying but infinitely more practical.

She sighed. Mrs. Wyatt Caldwell, if there was one, was a lucky woman indeed.

A man in a beat-up felt hat and brown pants wiped the sawdust from his face and trotted over to the buckboard. Ada took his measure: rough hewn and compact, with a sun-browned face and kind hazel eyes that regarded her calmly from beneath his hat brim.

Wyatt said, “Miss Wentworth, this is my foreman, Sage Whiting. Sage and I served together in the war.”

The foreman tipped his hat. “Ma’am.”

He turned to his boss. “The oak and hickory are looking real good, but that pine . . . well, there’s too many knots in it. Might not be good for nothin’ ’cept kindling.”

“Mill it out anyway, Sage. Scooter Johnson said something about wanting to build his missus some new furniture. Maybe he’ll buy it.”

“All right.” The foreman nodded. “You oughta talk to Nate Chastain at the bookshop too. He may need more shelves for that trainload of books he got in last week. We could let him have the pine pretty cheap, since we wouldn’t have to ship it.”

“Good idea,” Wyatt said. “I’ll mention it to him.”

Ada shifted on the hard wagon seat and tried to stem her rising impatience. Her backside had gone numb. Her blistered toe pulsed painfully in her tight shoe. The shade from the parasol couldn’t mitigate the infernal heat that sat on her head like an anvil. Perspiration trickled down the back of her neck and into the limp collar of her dress. And all this man could think about was timber.

At last, he picked up the reins. “I need to get Miss Wentworth settled at Aunt Lillian’s, but I’ll be back to pay the men by the end of the day.”

Mr. Whiting waved his arm toward the wagonloads of timber. “We’ve got plenty to do. Nobody’s going anywhere till quitting time.”

Catching Ada’s eye, he again touched his index finger to the brim of his hat. “Pleasure meeting you, ma’am. I hope you’ll like Hickory Ridge.”

THREE

Wyatt glanced at his passenger. Despite the heat, she sat up straight, one hand grasping the handle of the parasol, the other resting in her lap. He could tell that the long journey, coupled with the heat and her ill-advised hike along the road, had worn her out. He felt a stab of sympathy for her and regret that his words had caused her to take offense.

“It won’t be too much longer, Miss Wentworth. We’ll get you settled and cooled off. Aunt Lillian usually has lemonade waiting on days like this.”

He hoped the prospect of lemonade would coax a smile out of her, but she merely nodded and blotted her face with a frilly handkerchief that in his opinion had seen better days. He spoke to the horse, and the buckboard rolled down the road. A bit farther on, he indicated the turnoff to a twisting dirt road that was nearly obscured beneath a tangle of vines and undergrowth. “That’s the road to Two Creeks. You’d best avoid it.”

“It does look rather rugged.”

“That isn’t the problem. Two Creeks is a colored settlement. Things have gotten a little wild down there since emancipation.”

“How so?” She tucked her handkerchief back into her cuff.

“Some of them are a mite too fond of their whisky. Gambling and cockfights and spirits are a volatile mix.” Mercy, it was hot! He pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. “Still, there are some fine families down there. The Dawsons work for me. Josiah’s my wheelwright. His daughter Libby does Aunt Lillian’s laundry. You’ll meet her when she comes to pick it up.”

“Then how will I avoid them?”

“Isn’t exactly what I meant. You know about the Klan, of course.”

“Only from a few conversations with my father. He abhorred their secrecy and their hatred.”

“Most folks around here feel the same. The Klan organized here in Tennessee a few years back and, I am sorry to say, we’ve had some trouble with them.”

He paused. How much should he tell her? Too much information and she was apt to hightail it all the way back to Boston. On the other hand, her safety might depend on knowing just what she was up against. At last he said, “They don’t like it when whites and blacks get too friendly—and it’s hard to tell what they’re going to decide is too friendly. Last year they hanged a black man for looking too long at a white woman.”

Her lovely gray eyes went wide. “But that’s criminal! Surely the authorities saw to it that they were punished.”

“They tried. The legislature passed a law against their shenanigans some time back, but the Klansmen hide behind masks and robes when they go out. They meet behind closed doors. They protect each other. It’s hard to bring them to justice.”

He watched her expression change from distaste to fear and back again. Now he wished he’d saved this bit of information until she’d settled in. “I’ve frightened you, and I didn’t mean to. You’ll be fine so long as you stay away from Two Creeks and don’t fraternize with the coloreds.”

She waved away a cloud of gnats hovering about her head. “The whole thing seems so—”

“Uncivilized,” he finished. “In some ways, the violence has gotten worse since the war ended. We don’t have wild gangs terrorizing citizens on the roads anymore, but there were a lot of hard feelings around here between secessionists and the unionists, and those feelings didn’t go away after Appomattox. The two camps still blame each other, and both groups blamed the Freedmen’s Bureau, even after it closed down.”

They passed an ox-drawn wagon loaded with lumber heading toward town. Wyatt nodded to the driver and went on. “I don’t want you to have a poor opinion of Hickory Ridge. There are such problems everywhere these days.”

“Apparently so. On the train this morning, I was reading about that terrible blood feud in Texas.”

“Lee and Peacock. Everybody’s talking about that one. They say Peacock was unarmed and on his way to the outhouse wearing nothing but his long drawers when Lee’s men gunned him—” Heat rushed to his face.
Tarnation!
The woman was already frightened. Now he’d embarrassed her. “Pardon my language. I didn’t mean to be indelicate.”

She frowned. “How much longer, Mr. Caldwell?”

“Wyatt.” He smiled, hoping to lighten her mood. “Not much farther.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “That’s what you said when we left your mill.”

He snapped the reins, and the horse sped up.

The wagon gathered speed as they descended a hill. Presently, his aunt’s house came into view. Bordered on either side by tall stands of trees, flowering hedges, and meandering rose gardens, it was an older, larger version of his own. He’d driven up this road a thousand times, and his first glimpse of the house and the river beyond always gave him a sense of belonging. He hoped Ada Wentworth would come to feel the same way.

He halted the buckboard. A young boy ran barefoot into the road and grabbed the reins. “Hey, Mr. Wyatt. Guess what? Me and Toby McCall caught six trout this morning. They was bitin’ faster than we could get our lines in the water.”

“Good for you!” He jumped lightly to the ground and turned to help Ada down. He lifted her, his hands around her waist. Mercy, but the woman felt good in his arms. Smelled good too, like warm skin and some kind of exotic flower.

He set her down and turned back to the boy. “Robbie, this is Miss Wentworth. She’s going to be staying here now, looking after Miss Lillian. Miss Ada, this is Robbie Whiting, Sage’s boy. He helps out with the chores around here, so feel free to ask if there’s anything you need.”

“Hello, Robbie.” Ada straightened her hat and smiled at the boy. “Six trout! You’re quite a fisherman for one so young.”

“I’m not young. I’m going on eleven!” Robbie flushed and added shyly, “Ma’am.”

Wyatt hoisted Ada’s trunk onto his shoulder. He couldn’t help noticing that the clasp was loose and that it felt half empty. The poor girl must be worse off than he thought. He handed her the travel satchel. “Let’s get these into the house.”