Vows (55 page)

 
"You? Oh, Emily…" Supine, Tarsy laughed at the ceiling till the mattress bounced. Then she braced up on an elbow, catching a jaw on one shoulder. Her blond hair cascaded over one arm and her bewitching eyes took on a gleam of confidence. "Emily, if you want a man like Tom Jeffcoat to notice you you'll have to trade your smelly boots for button-top shoes and learn to curl your hair and wear dresses instead of those wretched pants." Tarsy fell back onto both elbows, once again throwing her breasts into relief. She set her legs swinging and decided to be generous with her advice. "And it wouldn't hurt you to wear a corset that … well, you know … sort of helps you out a little up here. And as for admitting that you don't like housework and you don't want b—"

 
"I'm going to marry him, Tarsy."

 
Tarsy's legs stopped swinging. Her lips clamped shut and her face blanched. The room held a knotty silence before Emily continued as kindly as possible.

 
"I wanted to be the one to tell you before you found out from someone else, and chances are you would have the minute you left the house."

 
"You … marry Tom!" Tarsy snapped erect, her face pale. "Don't be absurd! Why the two of you couldn't recite the Pledge of Allegiance without fighting over it!"

 
"He asked me and I said yes. We told Charles together last night and the two of them had a terrible fistfight, which you're also bound to find out. I'm really sorry, Tarsy. We didn't mean to—"

 
"Why you two-faced, conniving bitch!" Tarsy shrieked, leaping off the bed. "How dare you!" She swung full-force, slapping Emily's face so hard it knocked her sideways, teetering the vanity stool.

 
Emily's heart contracted with shock and fright. Stunned, she righted herself on the seat and stared while Tarsy's face turned unattractively rubicund. "I wanted him and you knew it! You knew I planned to marry him and you plotted to get him from me all the while, didn't you!
You milked me for personal privileged information!
"
Enraged, Tarsy threw herself around the bedroom while Emily, who never witnessed female anger of such magnitude, sat too stupefied to move. Gripping her temples, Tarsy raved,
"
Urrrr!
You low … cunning…" She swung about abruptly, nosing Emily backward on the bench. "You let me tell you things I never would have told anyone else.
Never!
" Suddenly she backed off with a malevolent sneer, dropping her hands onto her hips. "Well, how's this for privileged information, Miss Judas Walcott! What I convinced you of a few months ago was nothing but a convenient lie.
You
may be a virgin, but I'm not!
I did it!
With your precious Tom Jeffcoat, who wouldn't take no for an answer! Take
that
to your wedding bed and sleep with it!" Reveling in her malevolence, Tarsy tossed her head and gave a spiteful laugh. "Go on, marry him and see if I care! If Tom Jeffcoat wants a freak who dresses like a man and smells like horse apples, he can have you! You're exactly what he deserves! Huh! You probably haven't got the right equipment to make him babies anyway!" Tarsy's expression turned hateful. "Now get out! …
Get out!
"
She grabbed Emily's jacket and jerked her roughly to her feet, then thrust her through the doorway.

 
"Girls, girls, girls!" Mrs. Fields arrived, puffing, at the top of the stairs. "What's all this shouting about?"

 
"Out!" Tarsy screeched, shoving Emily past her mother, bumping her against the handrail and down two steps.

 
Emily grasped the rail to keep from tumbling to the bottom. "Tarsy, you're not being fair. I wanted us to talk about it and—"

 
"Don't you ever speak to me again! And you can tell that toad-sucking swine Tom Jeffcoat that I wouldn't cast him so much as a moldy crumb if he was starving to death at your kitchen table, which he'll be soon enough, since you don't know the first pathetic thing about cooking! But he'll learn that, too, won't he, along with the fact that all you care about is stupid animals! Well, go! What are you waiting for, standing there like a moron with your mouth hanging open. Get out of my house!"

 
Demoralized, Emily fled. Racing from Tarsy's yard, she gulped back tears and bit back tardy rejoinders, holding her hurt inside until she could find privacy to do her crying alone. But where? Fannie was at home. Papa was at their own livery.

 
She went to Tom's livery barn, inside the building with the sign on the door saying, "Closed for the day," into the familiar scent of hay and horses and liniment and leather, where she mounted the stairs to his loft and sank down into the hay. At first she sat as stoically as an Indian before a council fire, doubling her knees up tightly against her chest and hugging them hard in an effort to relieve the tight band of misery that seemed as if it would crack her ribs. She rocked in slight short thrusts, staring dry-eyed while the hurt pinched her vocal cords and stung her nose and throat. Deep within, minute trembles shook her belly and tensed her thighs. She pulled them tighter to her chest and, as the avalanche of misery descended, dropped her forehead to her knees.

 
She wept bitterly—hurt, degraded, demoralized.

 
I thought you were my friend, Tarsy. But friends don't hurt each other this way, not on purpose.

 
While racking sobs filled the hayloft and shook Emily's shoulders, she heard again and again Tarsy's abasing evaluation. A flat-chested freak who dresses like a man and smells like horse apples and probably hasn't got the right equipment to make babies anyway. A moron.

 
Hurt piled upon hurt as Emily realized Tarsy's friendship had been false all along. Today she had revealed her true feelings, but how many times had Tarsy secretly laughed behind her back, ridiculed, derided, probably even among their crowd of mutual friends?

 
But as if the vindictive assessment were not enough, Tarsy had exacted her revenge by imparting one last pernicious arrow, and this one aimed straight at Emily's heart.

 
She and Tom had been lovers after all.

 
Emily wept till her entire body hurt, until she fell to one side, clutched her belly, and curled into a tight, wretched ball.
Tarsy and Tom, together
. Why should it hurt so much to know? But it did. It did! Knowing was different from speculating. Oh, Tarsy, why did you tell me?

 
She wept until her entire frame ached from recoiling, until her face was swollen, her cheek raw from rubbing against the scratchy hay, and her stomach muscles hurt to be touched. When the worst was over she lay listless, shaken by leftover sobs, staring at her own limp hand lying knuckles-down in the hay. She closed her eyes, opened them again because, closed, they stung. How long had she been here? Long enough to be missed. But she remained, weighted by an apathy more immense than any she had experienced before, studying her hand, dully opening and closing her fingers for no reason that came to mind.

 
In time her thoughts clarified.

 
Perhaps the men's way was more civilized after all. A swift, clean fistfight would have been preferable to this insidious, long-term venom inflicted by Tarsy's words. Emily understood now why the men had fought. If it were possible she would do it herself, go back to Tarsy's and take ten smacks on the chin and crack a couple ribs, then go home and lick her wounds as the men were doing today. Instead, she would live for years festering with the knowledge of her own shortcomings as a woman, and of Tom's sexual predilection for another. Emily sighed, closed her eyes, and rolled to her back, hands lax near her ears.

 
Tarsy, and Tom had been lovers.

 
Forget it.

 
How?

 
I don't know, but you must, or Tarsy will have won.

 
She has won and both us will know it on my wedding night
.

* * *

She took her heartache to Fannie, whom she found in the kitchen, making chicken noodle soup.

 
"F—Fannie, can I talk to you?"

 
Fannie turned from the stove where she was dropping noodles into a pot of boiling broth.

 
Try though she might, Emily could not hold her tears back. They began falling as her face crumpled.

 
"Dearling, what is it?" Dusting off her hands, Fannie hurried toward Emily.

 
"Oh, Fannie…" Emily went gratefully into the older woman's arms. "It's Tarsy." Some moments passed before Emily could continue. "I just came from her house. I told her I'm going to marry Tom and she … she turned so hateful. Oh, Fannie, she sl—slapped me and c—called me the most awful names. I thought she was my f—friend."

 
"She was. She is."

 
Emily shook her head. "Not anymore. She said t—terrible things to me, things to deliberately hurt me."

 
Fannie's own heart ached for Emily. Holding her, she loved her with a maternal intensity, simply because she was Edwin's flesh and blood. She felt privileged to be able to share Edwin's children, even through such a painful ordeal as this.

 
"What did she say?"

 
Emily poured out her hurt, eliminating nothing. By the time she ended, her face and eyes were freshly swollen from weeping. "I just don't understand how she could have t—turned on me so. I know she loves Tom. I know that, and I was sorry to have to … to hurt her, but the things she said to me were malicious, meant to inflict as much pain as they could."

 
"Ah, dearling, growing up is hard, isn't it?" Fannie cradled and rocked the young woman who, given other circumstances, might have been her own daughter. "So you've paid a price already for your love and you're asking yourself if he's worth it." She gently pushed Emily back to look into her streaming eyes. "Is he?" she inquired softly.

 
"I thought so … before today."

 
"What you must do, dearling, is weigh the gain of him against the loss of Tarsy. You knew she would be hurt, didn't you, even before you told her?"

 
"Yes, but she had changed so much. I thought she'd grown up and become, become…" Emily found it hard to delineate the recent changes in Tarsy. "The way she helped at the funeral, the way she'd stopped dramatizing everything. I liked the new Tarsy. I thought I had a friend for life."

 
Fannie found a handkerchief and dried Emily's cheeks. "She's a woman spurned. Spurned women are dangerous creatures. And oddly enough, though you thought she had changed, I find her reaction quite in character. So she has unleashed her wrath on you, and called you names and hurt you with insinuations about herself and the man you love. The question is, what are you going to do about it?"

 
"Do?"

 
"You can believe her and let it eat inside you like a bad worm in a good apple. Or you can reason it through and come to grips with the fact that though Tom may have liked, even loved, Tarsy at one time, if he truly loves you now, it takes nothing away from that love. Nothing."

 
As the eyes of the two women locked, Fannie's words resounded in Emily's heart. Who should know better than Fannie about a man who had genuinely loved two women?

 
"I want you to do something for me," Fannie said, taking Emily's hand. "I want you to promise that the next time you're with Tom you won't confront him with this, that you'll give yourself at least a full day, maybe two, to decide if you even should. Will you do that for me?"

 
In a near-whisper Emily agreed, "Yes."

 
"And I want you to do one other thing."

 
"What?"

 
"Saddle a horse and go for a ride. You need it far more than you need chicken noodle soup right now."

* * *

Wishing to avoid her father and the questions her red eyes were sure to raise, Emily went back to Jeffcoat's Livery Stable and saddled Tom's buckskin. Buck. She led him outside into a noonish day that couldn't decide between sun and cloud. She buttoned her jacket high, stuffed her hair into Frankie's cap, drew on her soiled leather gloves, and mounted. Heading in the opposite direction of Edwin's livery stable, she circled through town and headed upland, walking Buck, which suited her mood.

 
Think of other things. Look around you—life goes on.

 
Ravens wheeled and cawed overhead, scolding the horse and rider while accompanying them up-mountain. A pair of unwary ermine came swiveling out of a deadfall, then scampered back beneath. Upon a frozen cactus paddle two black-capped chickadees whistled, perkily tilting their heads. The sound of Buck's hooves breaking the crust of snow cracked like pistol shots in the still cold day. The winter air felt cool upon Emily's hot face while the sun on her shoulders felt cool upon Emily's hot face while the sun on her shoulders felt warm. The grease-wood trees hunkered close to the earth, tangles of black lace against the white, white snow. Beneath them deer had pawed away the snow, leaving great patches of exposed grass. Spires of brown grasstips speared up, connected by a network of mice tracks that looked like hieroglyphics on the snow. The ravens grew brazen and flapped nearer, their wings as black as Tom Jeffcoat's hair.