Dorothy Garlock (13 page)

“I’d a kilt him first.”

“Why, Zan! What a thing to say!”

“I warn’t lettin’ them no-goods have ya, gal.”

“Oh! You’re going to make me bawl again, and I don’t want to.” She wiped her eyes with one hand and held his with the other. There was surprising strength in the hand that gripped hers.

“Air we ’bout thar?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to ask Jeff? He’s driving the wagon.”

“I know hit, gal. No. Just keep a lookout and tell me what ya see.” He closed his eyes and let his head roll to the side. “Hit’s a purty day, ain’t it?”

“Yes. It’s a pretty day. It’s pretty country, too.”

“Ain’t nothin’ smells good as the woods. Ya like being in the woods, gal?”

“Yes, I do. I got awfully tired of the river. We’re well back from it now and on higher ground. The soil is black and rich. I wish you could have seen Mr. Cornick’s farm. The garden patch was spaded and planted. Mrs. Cornick had brought some buttercups and wild ferns out of the woods and planted them in a rotted-out stump. She seemed so birdlike, the way she moved and talked, but her men jumped when she hollered just like they thought she was grand.” She stopped talking. His eyelids flickered and she continued. “The land around the house was cleared and fenced with split rails. It looked like Mr. Cornick and his boys had been busy burning off brush.”

“I could tell he warn’t no slouch . . . Keep talkin’, gal.”

“I . . . saw a few cowslips trying to get through the grass along the trail.” Annie Lash hastily wiped her nose on the hem of her dress. “We’re near the river again and the bank is a solid mass of scarlet. The redbud is in bloom, Zan. And all along the trail I can see berry bushes and wild plum. Ma loved berry bushes and plum and cherry trees. She used to make plum jelly.”

“She made plum butter,” Zan said without opening his eyes. “Said she didn’t like throwin’ out the pulp.”

Annie Lash felt a tightness in her throat. “I didn’t know you knew my mother.”

“Hit was a mighty long time ago. She were jist a slip of a lass, all eyes ’n chestnut hair. Talk, gal. What’re ya seein’ now?”

“I can see Jeff’s house. The name Berrywood is fitting.”

Annie Lash sat there with a cloud of hair tumbling about her face in the warm morning breeze and stared at Zan’s whiskered face for an endless, empty moment, knowing these were the last minutes she would spend with the man who was the link with her past. When he was gone she would be cut loose from everything she had ever known and loved. Suddenly, she could not go on and had to wait until she could master her voice again. She saw Zan’s eyelids flutter. Her head came up then, her eyes enormous in her drawn face.

“The house is backed up to a wooded slope. Someone’s been busy splitting rails. There’s a big pile at the edge of the timber.” She drew a ragged breath and forced herself to go on. “Everything is laid out in patches and fenced, Zan. There’s a garden, an orchard, and a fenced pastureland with a creek running through it. It looks like Osage plum planted along the fence. Pa always said they grew fast and were so wiry and thick they were better than a fence once they got going. Inside one of the patches the black soil is plowed open. There’s a barn and a railed barnlot, a smokehouse, and a chicken house. The lower part of the buildings are stone and the upper part split logs. The house is made like that, too, and it sits in the center of its own grassy yard.” She blinked her eyes rapidly so she could see through the tears. “It’s really a double cabin, Zan. One roof covers two separate buildings, with a dogtrot connecting them. The roof slopes down and covers a run across the front of the house that’s paved with flat slabs of stone. There’s a big rock chimney at the outer end of each of the cabins.” Annie Lash’s heart trembled. It was a lovely homestead.

“Air we thar yet?” The voice didn’t sound like Zan’s voice.

“Almost, Zan.” She spoke with trembling lips, but with gladness in her voice despite the constriction in her throat.

“Do ya like what ya see, Lettie?”

Lettie? Her mother’s name. Oh, Zan!

“Yes. It’s—” Her voice broke. “It’s beautiful and peaceful here, Zan.”

The old man let out a long shuddering sigh. Tears rolled from Annie Lash’s eyes and fell on the wrinkled, brown hand she held to her cheek.

Light had gone ahead and now stood holding open the rail gate so they could pass through. Weariness enveloped Annie Lash like a dark cloud. She put nervous hands to her hair and pushed it back from her face, not knowing or caring that it was coming loose from the pins or that her dress was dirty and she had grime on her face and hands. Her insides quivered when she looked at Zan’s face. To her he looked a hundred years older than he had yesterday at this time, and he was a million times dearer.

The hoarse barking of a dog and a hallooing came from the distance. The team picked up speed, sensing the end of the journey. The wagon made a half turn and Annie Lash saw a woman with a small child astraddle her hip come out of the dogtrot. The wind was blowing her skirts against the backs of her legs and lifting the blond hair on top of her head. A small boy with cotton-white hair ran across the barnlot, crawled through the fence, and raced for the house on short, stubby legs. A man in buckskins stepped from behind the house and scooped him up with one arm. The child let out a squeal of laughter and hung limply from the middle like a sack of grain.

Annie Lash watched the scene with tired, dull eyes, painfully aware that nothing would ever be the same again. The wagon slowed and rolled to a stop. She sat there holding tightly to Zan’s hand, her stomach knotted with tension and her heart heavy with pain, but reconciled to the inevitable.

Zan’s eyes opened. They were as vacant as a blind man’s eyes. He blinked at her and she felt a surge of guilt and . . . love.

“Yore a good lass. Ya got Lettie’s eyes an’ her hair, an’ ya got ’er ways. Get Jeff, gal. I got a thin’ to say to him.” He was lucid and spoke clearly, but his face had turned a bluish gray.

He was going to die! There was nothing she could do for him. A cold, gray dread was pressing down on her, crushing the last of the energy that had held her upright and gotten her through the night. Horrified awareness that she was losing her dearest friend was reflected in her eyes. Zan saw the expression on her face and snorted in the old familiar way.

“Don’t lollygag, Annie Lash. Hit ain’t fit an’ proper fer ya to be bawlin’ an’ carryin’ on. Ain’t nothin’ ya can do fer me, nothin’ a’tall. Get Jeff.”

“I’m here, Zan.” Jeff leaned over the end of the wagon, his eyes on a level with Annie Lash’s tear-blurred ones.

“We’ve got to do something! Help me get him in the house. We can get herbs and bind the wound—” In an agony of despair she groped for words.

“No, lass,” Zan was gasping for breath, now. “I ain’t a leavin’ this here wagon. If’n I warn’t so goldurned stubborn I’d a been dead back yonder a ways.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Zan.” She tried to hide her pain behind a scolding voice.

“Hit’s a good place ya got here, Jeff. Hit’s a good place fer me to leave my little gal. I ain’t ne’er ask no man fer nothin’ till now. I’m a askin’ ya to be seein’ after Annie Lash. See she don’t end up with a no-good, the likes of what’s back in Saint Louis. I thought she’d take to ya ’n want ya fer her man, but my gal’s got ’er own mind ’bout such as that. I’d . . .” His weak voice trailed away.

“I’ll do it, Zan. I’ll take care of her. She’ll not go back to the Bank. You have my solemn word on that.” Jeff bent over and spoke low and firm.

“I knowed I could count on ya. Hit’s purty here—the woods ’n . . . all.” His eyes closed and his chest heaved with a deep sigh. A trickle of blood came from his nose and Annie Lash wiped it away.

The morning sun beat down on her bowed head. She was weeping silently. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the still gray face of the man who had been like a father to her during the trying years her own pa had been sick. Afterward, he had stood between her and the toughs of Saint Louis. His breathing was so faint, the hand she held in hers so limp, that she never knew when the breath finally left him. Jeff stood at the end of the wagon, his broad shoulders and her own body making a private place for Zan to die. After a while Jeff reached over to take Zan’s hand from hers and place it on his chest.

“It’s over, Annie Lash.”

She sat still for a long moment, her head bowed. When she stirred and tried to stand, her numbed legs wouldn’t hold her and she grasped the side of the wagon for support. Jeff placed his hands beneath her armpits and swung her to the ground, holding her against him until her lifeless legs found the strength to hold her.

“Are you all right?” It seemed to her that he was always asking that. She nodded and stood away from him. “Callie,” he called over his shoulder. A woman came from the shadows beside the house. She was young, her oval face a pale apricot and her thick, honey-blond hair braided and twisted around on the top of her head, making her appear taller than she was. “This is Annie Lash Jester. She needs a cup of tea.”

Annie Lash glanced at the woman and then back to Zan’s still face. Her eyes found the sun-bonnet she had discarded the day before crammed down in the crack between her trunk and the side of the wagon. She reached for it, spread the brim, and covered Zan’s face.

The silent woman was waiting, and Annie Lash walked with her toward the house. Under the shelter of the sloping roof, on the flagstone run, were several benches. She made for one of the them, her legs suddenly so weak she was staggering.

“Do you mind if I sit down here?”

“No, ma’am. If that’s what you want.”

Annie Lash leaned her head back against the stone wall of the house and closed her eyes. She felt as if there were a wide chasm between her and everyone else in the world. Her thoughts finally became orderly. Was this the woman she had come to take care of, the one that was so sick she couldn’t care for her babies? She didn’t look sick, but if she were, she shouldn’t be waiting on her. Pushing herself away from the wall, she got to her feet as the woman came from the dogtrot with a steaming mug in her hand.

“You don’t need to wait on me.”

The woman looked at her with dark-circled green eyes. They were large and clear and unsmiling. She was shorter than Annie Lash, slightly built and small-boned. Her breasts were full and gently rounded under her brown linsey dress.

She held the mug out and Annie Lash took it. “I’m sorry about your pa.” She spoke slowly with a soft slur to her words.

“He wasn’t my pa. He was a very dear friend who was like a father to me.”
Was.
She closed her mind to the agony the word brought her. Her lips pressed together to trap a sob that longed to escape.

“Are you homesteadin’ ’round here?”

Annie Lash sat back down. The calm question had just barely penetrated her mind when Jeff rounded the corner and stood looking down at her.

“I’ve picked out a burying spot in the woods. Would you like to see it before we start digging?”

She shook her head. “Any place in the woods would be all right with Zan.”

“The burying won’t be until the middle of the afternoon. Will’s making a box. He knew Zan the same as I did.”

“It’s good of him.”

Light brought her rocking chair from the wagon and set it in the shade of the porch. Callie’s eyes shifted from the chair to Annie Lash with an unmistakable question in their depths that Annie Lash sensed immediately to be one of displeasure.

“I’ll not be staying long,” she said numbly and took a deep, dry, hurting breath. Everything was a blur of fatigue.

“It’s not
my
house,” Callie said wearily, and walked away.

Jeff stood looking down at the top of Annie Lash’s bent brown head. She kept it bowed over the cup in her two hands, and after a while she saw his moccasined feet moving in the direction Callie had taken.

Oh, Lordy! She wasn’t wanted or needed here, that was plain enough. Her eyes flooded with new tears of despair. She’d have to study on what she was going to do, but . . . not now. She was so tired. It felt like a hundred years since they left Saint Louis. Zan . . . was so happy . . . Her brain seemed to be aimlessly whirling, spinning fragments of thought into space as fast as they formed. In this terrifying state of tiredness and confusion, Annie Lash knew only that she could not face the woman again without breaking down. She set her empty mug on the floor under the bench and lay down. She covered herself with her shawl and fell into a sound sleep.

*  *  *

Feeling strange, almost like an intruder, Callie went back into the house. The kitchen door was standing open and the sunny breeze played across her, moving the hair at her brow, fluttering it against her cheeks, stirring up the clean smells of soap, wood, and mush bubbling in the iron pot at the fireplace. Absently, she moved to the crane, swung the pot away from the heat, and filled two small wooden porringers with mush to cool for Amos and the baby. She looked around the big, cozy room, at the clean, stone floor and the massive fireplace with its baking chamber on the side. She took stock of the work shelves, the washstand that was attached to the wall near the back door, the water bucket and the wooden washbasin waiting there. The long trestle table and benches that would be replaced with chairs when Will got around to making them occupied one end of the room. This had been hers for almost two years. She had come to believe it would be hers forever. How foolish of her to dream . . .

Will.
How she had enjoyed being here with him during Jeff’s absence. It wasn’t decent for a married woman to be yearning for another man, she scolded herself as she had done more than once before. But she didn’t feel married to Jason, she argued silently with her conscience. It seemed as if she’d lived a lifetime since he ran off and left her and Amos with Henry and Jute.

Will had been with Jeff when he brought them to this place. It had always been Jeff and Will. Almost inseparable since childhood, she had known Will for as long as she’d known Jeff, but he had always been politely reserved until lately. The last few weeks had been the happiest of her life. Now that time was over. Jefferson had not only come back, he’d brought a woman with him. What would she do now?