My spoon slipped into the gluey concoction of oatmeal and milk. I’d never liked oatmeal, not even when Mom fixed it with cinnamon and brown sugar. Yet something else was definitely off here. I couldn’t help grimacing as I forced a bite down my throat. It wasn’t the oatmeal. Something was wrong with the milk.
Penelope craned her extraterrestrial neck to better razor me with her glare. “Whatever is wrong with you now, you spoiled little strumpet? Does my food not suit Your Highness?”
“It’s the milk, Miz Ross,” Cook said. “She’s probably not used to goat’s milk. Sometimes it does get to tastin’ a little ‘goaty’ depending on what ol’ Methuselah’s been gettin’ into out in the pasture.”
Penelope’s scarred lips spread in a counterfeit smile. “We don’t have enough use for a milk cow these days,” she said to me. “Need a whole family to drink what one cow would produce. Methuselah puts out just enough milk and is cheaper to keep. Get used to it. Simon will be teaching you how to milk her.”
~ ~ ~
Simon turned out to be the handyman. He lived up east beyond the house in what had once been the carriage house back in yesteryear. The old man didn’t look as if he got enough to eat, and his chambray work shirt and faded overalls hung on his frame as they’d likely hang on a badly-stuffed scarecrow. He’d moved in here, he told me, when his daddy came to work for Miss Ross’s father in 1945, just after the Second World War. Simon had just turned six back then which made him totally ancient now.
“My mama, she done run off with some other fella ‘bout the second Daddy come home wounded from the War. He an’ me, we done left Alabama an’ traveled northwest lookin’ for work. ‘Bout the time we hit Oregon, Miss Ross took us both in. ‘Spect I been a-workin’ for her nigh on sixty-nine years now.” He scratched the white fuzz circling his head below a generous bald spot. “She done taught me some ‘bout readin’ an’ writin’ and numbers an’ such-like, but I never did go to school.”
We’d arrived at the chicken coop where Simon showed me how to toss scratch to the hens and gather their eggs while they weren’t looking.
“If you’ve been here that long, you must have known my grandmother, Charlotte,” I said, carrying the egg basket out of the coop.
Simon gave me a frightened look as though I’d conjured up a shrieking ghost. “Yes’um. Reckon I did know Miss Charlotte. ‘Member right back to the night she were born. I was ‘round fifteen back then. ‘Bout the same time as Daddy took sick with the heart trouble. I’d been fixin’ to leave an’ go my way, but I couldn’t go off an’ leave Daddy. If I hadn’t done his work when he was laid up, Miss Ross woulda done thrown us both out.” He fiddled with his overall suspenders and aimed his eyes at the horizon. “Please, Miss Emma. Don’t be tellin’ yer great-grandma I said nothin’ ‘bout that.”
“Don’t worry, Simon. Your secrets are safe with me.”
He grinned then, showing gaps between leaning crooked teeth. “Anyhow, Daddy died after a month, an’ then I couldn’t run off an’ leave Miss Ross who’d been widowed. She were alone with baby Charlotte, all defenseless-like. I had to stay an’ work ‘round the place. Guess I just stayed an’ stayed, an’ here I am today.”
I followed him into the dim light of a monstrous barn. My nose twitched at the smells of grass hay, manure, and old wood long ago attacked by dry rot. He opened a peeling stall door to reveal a buckskin mare with her ears pricked at us.
“This here be Tashunka. She’s gentle an’ smooth-gaited. You like horses?”
“Tashunka,” I said, tasting the shape of the word. “What sort of name is that? She’s beautiful.” I reached out with two fingers to stroke the soft wrinkled spot between her nostrils.
“Tashunka is a Sioux Indian word. Means ‘horse’.” Simon threw her a flake of hay, grabbed her water bucket and filled it.
“A horse named Horse? Would you teach me to ride her?”
I was rewarded by Simon’s gap-toothed grin. “Hopin’ you’d ask. Once you can ride her, an’ that won’t take you more’n a week or two, you can ride to Sweet Creek to pick up the mail or do a little shoppin’. That’d take some of the strain of’n Miss Ross.”
My wide grin faded. “Ride to town? Seriously? Dressed like this?”
Simon peered around to make sure we were alone. “Just put a shirt an’ jeans on an’ slip the dress over that. Half a mile down the road, take off the dress. You’d best remember to put it back on afore you get to home, though.”
My grin returned. “Did Great-grandmother make Charlotte wear clothes like this too?”
Simon went all serious and stern looking. “Yes’um. An’ she didn’t like it no better’n you. Now let’s get to Methuselah afore her milk curdles.”
We walked through the barn to a small paddock out back where a sleek brown goat lay chewing her cud in the shade of an apple tree. Her coat was splotched with irregular metal-gray patches and long gray ears hung on either side of her head. Simon brought a shiny tin bucket out of a shed tacked onto the backside of the barn and whistled to the goat as he stood by a low wooden platform with a stanchion. Methuselah scrambled to her split hooves, walked over and jumped up on the platform.
“Come see how it’s done, Miss Emma. You’ll be finishin’ this milkin’.”
He fastened the goat into the stanchion and placed the bucket beneath her swollen udder before perching on the edge of the platform and going to work.
“See? Goats are plumb easy to milk. They done got ‘em two teats ‘stead of four like a cow.” He demonstrated how to hold and squeeze each fat teat sending alternating streams of milk ringing into the bucket.
Eager to try this, I scooted in front of him on the platform and took over. The teats felt like soft warm zucchinis. “Did Charlotte used to milk the goat?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer for six or eight squirts of milk and then sighed. “No, Miss Emma. Yer grandma Charlotte done used to milk the cow. What with the hired hands, Miss Ross, Charlotte, me and Cook, then the baby, a cow did us fine.”
What baby?
I finished and turned Methuselah into the pasture where the beef cattle grazed and traipsed after Simon back through the barn and up to the front porch where he set down the egg basket and the milk pail. Cook came to retrieve them as Simon led me around the west end of the house under my bedroom window where split firewood had been stacked in the shade of the giant oak for the wood stove and fireplace.
“So tell me about my grandmother Charlotte,” I urged.
I saw him wince as he picked a piece of split cordwood from the stack and carried it over to an old stump where an axe and a hatchet leaned.
“Now watch closely,” he advised. “This here is how we make kindlin’ to start the fire.”
He stood the firewood on end using the stump as a table and picked up the hatchet. “Lissen up now,” he warned, raising the hatchet. “You get careless an’ you’ll cut yer dang hand clean off.” He brought the hatchet down on the merest edge of the wood and sliced off a slender stick. Then another. “Here. You try it now.”
He handed me the hatchet which felt heavy and cumbersome in my grip. Next he forked over the length of split firewood. My first strike missed the chunk of firewood completely, sticking the hatchet blade into the stump. This was harder that it looked.
“Concentrate,” he said.
I bit my lip and didn’t raise the hatchet quite as high. It dropped into an edge of the wood and stuck there.
“Gotta hit it a little harder,” Simon said.
“Tell me about Charlotte and I’ll hit it a little harder.”
Simon frowned. “Ain’t supposed to talk ‘bout Miss Charlotte.”
This time the hatchet sliced off a nice thin stick. “I won’t say anything, Simon.”
He sighed. “Them two, Miss Charlotte an’ Miss Ross, they
didn’t get on together much. Miss Ross was forever findin’ fault with most ever’thing that poor child did an’ had her all trussed up in strange dresses like what you be wearin’. That’s how come Miss Charlotte never made any friends at school, on account of lookin’ terrible odd’n old-fashioned.”
And that, I surmised, was the future I could look forward to.
“From what Cook done told me, Miss Ross, her grumbly old self, had no luck makin’ friends at school neither back in the 30s and 40s. Cook said it was on account of that harelip of hers.”
Another stick split off the main chunk. I went for a third. “Do you know what sort of scandal happened to the family?”
Simon said nothing for a bit. I split off a fourth and fifth stick before he spoke.
“It was a scandal sure an’ true. I knowed it for a fact seein’ as how I lived it with the family. An’ I knowed how it bothered young Benjamin, yer daddy. He used to come home from school with a split lip or a bloody nose three or four times a week on account of it. Townsfolk never seem to forget nothin’. Cain’t say that what with livin’ with Miss Ross an’ her peculiar ways an’ fightin’ half the town over the scandal, that I blame yer daddy one bit for hittin’ the road after high school. Oh, Miss Ross tried to stop him. Set up a horrible caterwaulin’ she did when he done up an’ packed his things. By then it was too late for her to do nothin’ to stop him. He never wrote his grandma. I never did hear tell what became of the boy. Leastways, not ‘til you showed up. Mighty sorry to hear of yer daddy’s passin’, Miss Emma.”
“Thank you. But I still don’t know what the scandal was about.”
Simon took the hatchet from me and tossed my kindling pieces into a woven basket under the eaves. “This here’ll be one of yer chores from now on, choppin’ kindling. That, along with takin’ care of the chickens ‘n’ eggs, carin’ for Tashunka an’ milkin’ the goat mornin’ an’ night.”
“Simon? What about the scandal?” I couldn’t help liking the old man, but he sure could be frustrating.
He stopped and turned toward me, grabbing me firmly by both shoulders. His rheumy blue eyes drilled into mine. “Now you lissen, an’ you lissen good, Missy. That there scandal ain’t none of my affair an’ it shouldn’t be none of your’n neither. Let it alone, Miss Emma. If yer great-grandma wants you to know, then she’ll tell you her own self. I jus’ cain’t do it. She’d give me the heave-ho so fast the wind’d whistle ‘round my ears. I’d never get me another job at my age. What I got is all I got. Besides, it ain’t my place to go sayin’ nothin’. Best let it go. Hear me?”
I nodded, but only because I heard him. Not because I agreed with him. I was a Ross. I had a right to know about this old scandal and my invisible grandmother’s role in it. I had a right to know what became of Grandma Charlotte and why she never raised my father. I also had a burning desire to know who my grandfather was. Nobody ever spoke about him. It was as if he never existed. If I could locate my grandmother or my grandfather, maybe I could go live with one of them and wear normal clothes. The more I didn’t get any answers, the more obsessed with solving this mystery I became.
Chapter 4
July 4, 2016. While this was a major holiday for everyone else in the country with picnics, barbeques, parades, and fireworks, it went unmentioned and unobserved on the Ross Ranch. Four days had inched by since my arrival with a monotony and blandness that sucked the marrow out of any desire I had to get out of bed in the morning, though sleeping in was never an option in Penelope’s world.
I’d imagined that once my great-grandmother got to know me, she’d warm up and we might actually become friendly. If anything, she’d become more prickly with each passing day. Penelope was never satisfied with anything I did and when she wasn’t finding fault or chewing me out, she ignored me as if I’d evaporated. Cook and Simon always had a big grin for me and seemed eager to talk about anything. Well, anything but Charlotte and the scandal, of course, and I didn’t dare bring up that subject with Great-grandmother Penelope.
My major problem in this strange new life, aside from terminal boredom that is, was splitting the kindling. I nearly took a finger off twice as I worked to fill the kindling basket. When I carried my efforts into the house, Penelope jumped all over me about how uneven the sticks were. I‘m generally not one for talking back to adults, but that lady made it nearly impossible to hold my tongue.
Kindling was what consumed my dying patience and fueled my bad mood this morning as I struggled with it under the shade of the oak tree. Just as I was about to shout a nasty word and hurl the hatchet, a dusty RAM pickup truck rattled up the road and stopped a few feet away, powdering me and the air I breathed with that infernal dust.
Another bad word hovered on my tongue.
“Sorry about that,” said a cheerful male voice as its owner climbed out of the truck.
The voice belonged to a tall teenaged boy who looked like he spent most of his off time working out in a gym. He walked over, dusting his hands off on his jeans.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m Brad. Brad Ryland.”
I felt suddenly mortified to be standing next to a stupid stump dressed in one of the seven church-cult dresses Penelope had hung on a pole in my bedroom. One of the cutest boys I’d ever seen stood right in front of me dressed in faded jeans, a sleeveless red T-shirt, and cowboy boots. He held out his hand to shake mine and grinned. I wanted to vaporize. He must think me some religious-nut-loser whose anti-social weirdness must nest in the DNA of every Ross going back eight generations. I shook his hand all the same.
Brad cocked his head and narrowed one blue eye at me. “You’re that girl everyone is talking about, aren’t you? Miss Ross’s great-granddaughter?”
Everyone was talking about me? I hadn’t even met anyone yet.
“Yeah, guess so. I’m Emma Ross.” I needed to find some semi-graceful excuse to leave before I died of embarrassment.
He aimed a lopsided grin at me. “With all the talk going around about you, nobody’s bothered to mention how pretty you are,” he said softly. “Welcome to Sweet Creek, Emma Ross.”
My cheeks suddenly flamed. I hated blushing. Made it hard to disguise what I was feeling.
“Brought up a load of cordwood for Miss Ross,” Brad said, running his eyes over me once again. “Guess I’d best get to stacking it.”
He peeled his T-shirt off over his head and tossed it onto the hood of his truck. My face turned hot again. Tan and muscular, he moved with the grace and confidence of a pro athlete. Thank goodness he didn’t glance my way as he worked. It was impossible not to gape at his tight jeans and Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles as he emptied the truck bed of stove wood and swung it piece by piece onto the stack under my bedroom window. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but his pumped-up muscles rippled in the sun and mesmerized me. Unlike the vain god-like musclemen in LA who practically lived their silly lives in a gym and admired themselves in every store window they passed, Brad clearly didn’t spend his time in a gym. The whole outdoors was his gym. I tried to concentrate on my kindling, but it was hard to drag my eyes away from him. I kept stupidly sticking the hatchet in the stump in a clean miss, nearly de-fingering my left hand, or cutting off thick unacceptable pieces that Penelope hated and would yell at me for later.
My memory played a re-run of her scratchy crone voice yelling, “Might as well try touching a match to a whole damned log in the fireplace, you useless pup. How long have you been this stupid?”
“You come from a long way off?” Brad asked as he swung stove length pieces of oak and madrone up onto the top layer of the stack.
I gave up on the kindling. “Southern California.” His body glistened in the early July heat. Maybe now, when he wasn’t looking, I could make a run for it. Go hide in the well house or the tractor shed, anywhere he couldn’t see me dressed like a residual character from Little House on t
he Prairie without even a molecule of makeup. How I was going to manage that when my eyes were frozen to his every move like a bird hypnotized by a king cobra I had no clue.
This must be quite a change for you,” he said as he worked.
“You have no idea.” I couldn’t hide the sarcasm.
“Why did your parents send you up here to live?”
I shook my head and forced my lips into a plastic smile. Brad didn’t mean to stick a power drill into the most excruciating pocket of my heart, and I wasn’t ready to talk about my parents’ deaths to anyone. I shook it off.
As swiftly and efficiently as he worked, Brad Ryland never registered that I was staring at his muscles or the back pockets of his jeans. I just hoped I wasn’t drooling in case he glanced my way.
He chuckled. “It may be a different life here, but it’s a good one. Beautiful mountains, forests, rivers and lakes, clean air. Great fishing and hunting, though I don’t suppose you’re into that kind of stuff.”
“What do you mean everyone is talking about me?” I sat down on the stump and gazed up at him. I could have stared at him stacking wood until the stars came out, but Brad moved too quickly. He was done stacking long before I was done staring.
He settled the last piece of firewood into place, ran a hand back through his thick brown hair, and slapped the dust and bark shards off his jeans.
A Certain Twist in Time Page 3