Rainsinger (25 page)

“Oh, Daniel,” she whispered. “You have your hair down.”

He clasped her tightly to him, overwhelmed with a sudden shakiness, feeling her big, warm body next to his, smelling her deep scent. He couldn’t speak for the fear in him—he would have let her go, would have let her walk away without a single word. It terrified him now, and he lifted his head and kissed her again, deeply. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you. I love you.”

She was shaking and he tasted her tears. He rubbed the tears with his thumb. “I was wrong,” he said. “I think it was a marriage vow when we made love, whether we knew it then or not.”

Very seriously, she touched his mouth. “Yes, I think it was.”

“The way of my nation,” he said, “is that the land belongs to the woman.”

“I’ll share it,” she said, and laughed.

A wild happiness filled him, deep and wide. The cactus prickles of his exploded heart no longer ached, and as the sun rose higher in the sky, he took her hand, and faced them toward the east, from whence all life came.

Quietly, he began to sing the doxology, stumbling on the words until she joined in. Together, they sang in praise of morning, of life, of blessings, and Daniel finally knew the truth of her words to him that morning of the sunrise. It didn’t matter who loved the land more, or what songs one sang.

It was the praise that was important. He sang with all his heart, holding her hand high to the sky.

T
hey were married in the orchard, on a fine late-July day. The mess of the storm had passed. Joleen wore her new, blue glasses, and her fine, blond hair had been neatly trimmed into a cap that framed her elfin face perfectly. Her dress was blue rayon and it made her look like a princess. Giselle, too, had on blue rayon.

Winona wore white, but it was not like any wedding dress the others had ever seen. It was an Ethiopian cotton shift, with bright-colored beadwork around the collar, and she’d bought it when she was twenty-two and new to the Peace Corps. For the day when she married.

Next to her, Daniel wore jeans and a fine tunic woven in soft cotton for him by Mary Yazzie, the head of the weavers project. A sash belted his waist, and he’d left his hair loose and brushed to a gleaming shine. “For you,” he told Winona with a wink.

The ceremony was simple, performed by a Congregationalist minister in the meadow at the center of the orchard. Winona felt near to bursting as they were pronounced man and wife, and barely heard the cheers of the others.

As they all turned to go back to the house, Winona glanced at the stump of the mother tree, offering silent thanks. Daniel paused with her, holding her hand, and the others gave them a respectful moment alone.

Sunlight dappled the meadow through the trees overhead, and birds twittered in the branches. Small, furry green fruit hung from many branches, and the hardy trees had grown new leaves. “Everything, everything has come to me through this orchard,” she said, and smiled at her new husband.

“But I’m the best thing.”

She laughed. “Yes.”

A small flash of new green caught her eye. Her fingers tightened convulsively on his. “Daniel,” she said urgently, pulling him forward. “Look!”

There, at the base of the mother tree’s enormous stump, was a new green shoot, hardy and strong.

Daniel touched it reverently, and began to laugh. “A wedding present from the grandmothers,” he said, and kissed her.

And just for a moment, Winona thought she heard celebration singing through the leaves and branches of the precious trees, the voice of a thousand generations of women, who knew what really mattered.

Love.

As Daniel led her back to the house, she sent a passionate thank-you to those women, and moved forward to begin the joys of her new life.

~~###~~

For the readers who wrote and asked for Daniel’s story.
Many thanks.
Also for Connie Brockway, for last-minute help, and Susan Kay Law, who held my hand and cheered a lot.
Thanks, guys.

BARBARA SAMUEL O'NEAL

Barbara Samuel (also known as Barbara O’Neal) is the bestselling author of more than 40 books, and has won Romance Writers of America’s RITA award an astounding six times, and she has been a finalist 13 times. Her books have been published around the world, including France, Germany, Italy, and Australia/New Zealand, among others. One of her recent women’s fiction titles,
The Lost Recipe for Happiness
(written as Barbara O’Neal) went back to print eight times, and her book
How to Bake a Perfect Life
was a Target Club pick in 2011.

Whether set in the turbulent past or the even more challenging present, Barbara’s books feature strong women, families, dogs, food, and adventure—whether on the road or toward the heart.

Now living in her hometown of Colorado Springs, Barbara lives with her partner, Christopher Robin, an endurance athlete, along with her dog and cats. She is an avid gardner, hiker, photographer and traveler who loves to take off at dawn to hike a 14er or head to a faraway land. She loves to connect with readers and is very involved with them on the Internet.

You may read more about Barbara’s books at her main website, find her at her A Writer Afoot blog and on Facebook. She also blogs regularly at The Lipstick Chronicles.

Visit Barbara on the Web!

www.BarbaraSamuel.com
www.AWriterAfoot.com
www.BarbaraONeal.com
Barbara on Facebook

~~~

BONUS MATERIAL

Please enjoy excerpts of three of Barbara's other books:
How to Bake a Perfect Life
,
Walk in Beauty
and
Dancing Moon
. Additional books are listed at the end of the excerpts or click
HERE
to jump there.

Barbara is very active writing new books and converting her backlist into eBooks. To find the most up to date information, please visit her website.

HOW TO
BAKE A
PERFECT
LIFE

(Excerpt)

by

Barbara O'Neal

Published by Bantam Books (Jan 2011)

Excerpted from
How to Bake a Perfect Life
 by Barbara O'Neal. Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Samuel. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Step One

STARTER

Sourdough starter, or mother dough as it is known, is made from wild yeast living invisibly in the air. Each sponge is different, according to the location it is born, the weather, the time of its inception, and the ingredients used to create it. A mother dough can live for generations if properly tended, and will shift and grow and transform with time, ingredients, the habits of the tender.

The Boudin mother dough, used to create the famously sour San Francisco bread was already fifty years old when it was saved from the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 by Louise Boudin, who carried the mother dough to Golden Gate Park in a wooden bucket. There it was packed in ice and used to make bread daily until a new bakery could be built at its current location. The mother dough, now more than 150 years old, is stored in a vault, "like a wild beast," and bread is made from it every day.

CHAPTER ONE

W
hen the phone call that we have been dreading comes, my daughter and I are gathered around the center island of the Bread of Life kitchen. Sofia is leafing though a magazine, the slippery pages floating down languidly, one after the next.

I am experimenting with a new sourdough starter in an attempt to reproduce a black bread I tasted at a bakery in Denver a couple of weeks ago. This is not my own, treasured starter, handed down from my grandmother Adelaide's line, rumored to be over a hundred years old. That "mother dough", as it is called, has won my breads some fame and I guard it jealously.

This new starter has been brewing for nearly ten days. I began with boiled potatoes mashed in their water, then set aside in a warm spot. Once it began to brew and grow, I fed it daily with rye flour, a little whole wheat and malt sugar, and let it ferment.

On this languid May afternoon, I hold the jar up to examine it. The sponge is alive and sturdy, bubbling with cultures. A thick layer of dark brown hooch, the liquid alcohol generated by the dough, stands on top. When I pull loose wrap off the top of the bottle and stick my nose in, it is agreeably, deeply sour. I shake the starter, stick my little finger in, taste it. "Mmm. Perfect."

Sofia doesn't get as worked up over bread as I do, though she is a passable baker. She smiles, and her hand moves over her belly in a slow, warm way. Welcoming. It's her left hand, the one with the wedding set—diamond engagement ring, gold band. The baby is due in less than eight weeks. Her husband is in Afghanistan.

We have not heard from him in four days.

I remember when her small body was curled up beneath my ribs, when I thought I was going to give her away, when the feeling of her moving inside of me was both a terror and a wonder. If only I could keep her that safe now.

The bakery is closed for the day. Late afternoon sunshine slants in through the windows and boomerangs off the stainless steel so intensely that I have to keep moving around the big center island to keep it out of my eyes. The kneading machines are still as I stir together starter and molasses, water and oil and flour, until it's a thick mass I can turn out on to the table with a heavy splat. Plunging my hands into the dark sticky blob, I scatter the barest possible amounts of rye flour over it, kneading it in a little at a time. The rhythm is steady, smooth. It has given me enviable muscles in my arms.

"What do you want for your birthday?" Sofia asks, flipping a page.

"It's ages away!"

"Only a couple of months."

"Well, I guess as long as there are no black balloons, I'm good." Last year, my enormous family—at least those members who are still speaking to me — felt bound to present me with graveyard cakes and make jokes about crow's feet, which thanks to my grandmother Adelaide's cheekbones, I do not have.

"A person only has to suffer through one 40th birthday in a lifetime." Sofia turns a page. "How about this?" She holds up an ad for a lavish emerald necklace. "Good for your eyes."

"Tiffany. Perfect." At the moment, I'm so broke a bubble gum ring would be expensive, though of course Sofia doesn't know that the bakery is in trouble. "You can buy it for me when you're rich and famous."

"When I am that superstar kindergarten teacher?

"Right."

"Deal."

I push the heel of my palm into the dough and it squeezes upward, cool and clammy. An earthy bouquet rises from it, and I'm anticipating how the caramelizing molasses will smell as it bakes.

A miller darts between us, flapping dusty wings in sudden terror. Sofia waves it away, frowning. "I hope we're not going to have a crazy miller season this year."

"'The first moths of summer suicidal came,'" I sing, a line from a Jethro Tull song, and for a minute, I'm lost in another part of my life, another summer. Shaking it off, I fold the dough. "It's been a wet year." "Ugh. I hate them." She shudders to give emphasis. Then she closes her magazine and squares her shoulders. "Mom, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about."

Finally. "I'm listening."

She spills it, fast. "I told you Oscar's ex-wife has been arrested in El Paso and Katie has been living with her best friend's family, but Oscar really wants her to come and live with me. Us. She's got some problems, I won't lie, but she just needs somebody to really be there for her." Sofia has eyes like a plastic Kewpie doll, all blink and blueness with a fringe of blackest lashes. "She can sleep upstairs, in the back room. Close to me. She lived with us before Oscar went to Afghanistan. It was fine."

"Hmmm. I seem to remember she more or less hated you."