Shaking her head, Rachel proceeded to her room, where she changed out of her good clothes and into a plain calico dress, suited to working around the station. When she was at her sewing, which was often now, June-bug was willing to accept a helping hand.
The following morning, directly after breakfast, Rachel packed herself a sandwich and a bottle of tea, saddled Sunflower, and set out on her visiting rounds, choosing the Kildare place for her first stop. Mr. Kildare was a widower, she recalled, consulting the notes she carried in the pocket of her riding skirt, with two young sons. Someone, precisely who she could not then recall, had warned her about the Kildare boys, but she was not concerned. In a decade of teaching, Rachel had encountered a great variety of children, and she’d never been bested by a single one of them.
She was thinking not of her future pupils, but of Trey Hargreaves, when the Kildare ranch house came into view. It was a small place, but more prosperous looking than the Bellweathers’, with a painted barn and two horses, one black with three white boots and a blaze on its nose, the other a smaller sorrel, prancing in the corral.
Her heart nearly stopped beating when two lithe little shapes dropped from the branches of the leafy birches she was passing between, shrieking like wild Indians on the warpath. The boys were the spitting image of each other, covered with freckles, their hair carrot red and shaggy. They wore nothing except loincloths improvised from flour sacks, and they had painted themselves with streaks of what Rachel devoutly hoped was berry juice. War paint, no doubt.
“Halt!” commanded the smaller of the pair. The difference in height was so marginal as to be barely discernible. “Who goes there?”
Rachel took a few moments to school her mouth, which wanted to laugh, now that her heart had settled back into its normal place. She introduced herself, as seriously as possible, adding, “I’m the new schoolteacher.”
The larger savage spat with truly splendid contempt. “Pshaw!” he cried.
Who goes there? Pshaw? What sort of Indians were these? Again, Rachel had to work to contain her amusement. There was nothing to be accomplished, ever, by making a child feel foolish. “Nonetheless,” she said, with all the dignity of a noble captive facing certain death at the hands of barbarians. For all she knew, they meant to lash her to a tree and build a bonfire at her feet. “You will be attending class as of the last week in August. I’m afraid you’ll have to wear trousers and shirts, though. Loincloths are not acceptable.”
The savages looked at each other in plain consternation.
“I would like to speak with your father,” Rachel went on, when the silence lengthened. “Is he here, please?”
The smaller Indian gave a despondent wave toward the barn. “He’s out back, shoeing a horse,” he said, sagging at the shoulders.
Rachel got down from Sunflower’s back and held out a hand. “How do you do,” she said, addressing the nearest boy. “Would you be Jamie, or Marcus Aurelius?”
One of the lads burst into such raucous laughter that he doubled over with it, while the other blushed furiously behind his freckles. The laughing boy was Jamie, then, Rachel concluded, and the embarrassed one was Marcus Aurelius.
She was proved right in the next instant. The red-faced Indian stepped forward to accept her hand, however tentatively, and give it a brief shake. “Just Marcus,” he said.
“All right, then,” Rachel said, still keeping a straight face, “so it shall be. Marcus, I am pleased to meet you.” She turned to Jamie. “And you, as well,” she added.
Jamie remained where he was, hands clasped behind his back, eyes narrow and suspicious. “I don’t need to go to school,” he said. “I can already read and write and count to a thousand. Ma taught me.” He glanced at Marcus. “Taught us both.”
“Ma’s gone,” Marcus pointed out to his brother, none too gently, “and there’s a heap we still don’t know. I stand in favor of it. Going to school, I mean.”
“A wise choice,” Rachel said sagely. Looking up, she saw a man coming toward her, a broad smile on his face. He was dressed in work clothes, of course, and perhaps thirty years of age, with twinkling hazel-colored eyes and a headful of thick brown hair, lightly streaked by the sun, as if he often worked without a hat.
“How-do,” he said. “I’m Landry Kildare. These galoots, I guess you know by now, are my boys, Jamie and Marcus—”
“Just Marcus,” the latter put in quickly, pointedly.
Mr. Kildare’s very fetching smile widened. “Just Marcus, then,” he agreed.
“Rachel English,” Rachel replied. “I hope I’m not intruding. I’ve just come by to introduce myself and to tell you that classes will begin on the last Monday in August.”
“It would be an honor if you’d step inside and have some coffee, Miss English,” Kildare said, in his cheerful and mannerly way. Rachel wondered where he came from originally, for she could not recognize any particular accent to his speech. “We don’t get too many visitors out our way. Hope these little scoundrels didn’t scare you out of your hide. They’ve got a bad habit of dressing up like African cannibals and jumping out of trees when somebody comes toward the house. Like to have sent poor old Calvin T. Murdoch, the peddler, splashing over the Jordan River into the arms of his Savior.”
Leading Sunflower by the reins, Rachel found herself walking alongside Landry Kildare. It was a wonder, in this wild and desolate place, that such an attractive and personable man should go unmarried. June-bug had told her little about him though, merely saying that he was friendly enough when a person met up with him but kept to himself most of the time, so for all Rachel knew, he already had a lady-friend somewhere.
The inside of the cabin was surprisingly tidy and well-furnished, given that this was a household of men. The wooden floors were not only planed smooth, but polished, and there was a colorful, if very worn, scatter rug in front of the hearth. Closed doors indicated several bedrooms, and the area surrounding the cookstove was as clean as if it had been scrubbed down with soapy water and a hard-bristled brush.
“Have a seat, if you’d like,” Landry said, indicating a sturdy rocking chair facing the fireplace. Beside the chair, on an upturned fruit crate, was an open book—Curwen’s the Husbandry of Horses—a cherrywood pipe, and a small tin of tobacco. “Might be you’d rather stand, after riding out from Springwater.”
Rachel did prefer to stand; her legs were a little cramped.
“I could make some coffee,” Landry offered once again, washing his hands at a basin near the stove.
Rachel was about to refuse when she realized that it was important to him to offer hospitality. Visitors, as he’d said, were rare. “I’d like that,” she said.
He dismissed the boys, who were plainly eager to get back to their marauding, and made himself busy, putting a small amount of water in the bottom of the large enameled pot, measuring in some coffee grounds, and setting the concoction on the stove. When he was finished building up the fire, he crossed the room and drew up the only other chair to sit astraddle of it, his arms resting easily across the back, looking up at Rachel with those strangely guileless eyes.
If she had to be drawn to a man, if she had to endure all the sweet, secret stirrings, the conflicts and heartaches, why couldn’t it have been someone like Landry Kildare, instead of Trey? There was certainly nothing romantic about her instant affection for Kildare, however—it was strictly that of a friend for a friend or, at most, a sister for a brother.
“I reckon you’ve already discerned that you’re going to have your hands full with my boys,” Landry said, with a twitch at the corner of his mouth and a light in his eyes. In a flash of insight, Rachel knew that he’d been exactly the same sort of rascal when he was young as his children were now.
Rachel permitted herself the particular smile of amusement she could not have indulged in front of Jamie and Marcus. “I’m up to the challenge,” she said, but modestly.
Landry’s eyes clouded briefly with memories. “They run wild around this
place, I’ve got to admit that. Since their mother passed over, well, I haven’t had the heart to rein them in much. The devil of it is, Caroline would strip my hide off if she saw how they are now, with no manners and all.”
“They’re good boys,” Rachel said quietly.
Landry nodded. “That they are. But what kind of men will they grow up to be, with no proper churching, and them just starting to go to school at eight and ten years old? Caroline always schooled them, and she taught them well, but I don’t know that there’s another human being in all God’s creation who could get those two to sit still and listen for the better part of a day, let alone ’most every day, and for months at a stretch.”
“We’ll manage,” Rachel assured him. She felt slightly less confident, however, than she made herself out to be.
The coffee began to boil, richly fragrant, and Landry got up to add cold water and a dash of salt, to settle the grounds. When that was done, he poured them each a cup, adding generous portions of fresh cream and brown sugar, with Rachel’s permission, before serving the brew. It was delicious, and Rachel was glad she’d accepted Landry’s offer of refreshment, for the concoction braced her up a little. When she left the Kildares, she would visit the Johnsons, the last and most remote family, living in a hollow higher up, in the hill country. The household, like that of the Bellweathers, had just one child, a girl called Christabel according to June-bug, a shy and skittish little thing, with one club foot.
After saying her farewells to Jamie and Marcus, as well as to their father, of course, Rachel mounted Sunflower again and set out. She ate the sandwich she’d packed at the station as she rode up and up, deeper and deeper into the wilderness, home of wolves and grizzly bears and mountain lions.
The silence was underlaid with a hundred different sounds—birds, small animals rustling in the brush, twigs snapping. She strained to hear each one, to separate it out from the others and identify it. By the time the Johnson shack came into view, Rachel was full of foreboding.
CHAPTER
5
A SHOTGUN BLAST rent the air, loud enough to split the sky. Sunflower tossed her head and pranced in agitation, while Rachel struggled to rein her in. In the process, the bottle in which she’d carried her tea fell to the hardscrabble ground and splintered. A crone-like woman stood on the slanted stoop of the Johnsons’ tumbledown shed of a house, shotgun in hand. Smoke curled blue from the barrel.
“That’s jest about far enough!” yelled the old woman.
Rachel’s initial fear had given way to supreme irritation by the time she’d calmed the horse. Fretful that the animal would step on the shards of glass and cut one of the soft pads inside her hooves, she got down and tried to kick and scuff the remains of June-bug’s bottle aside as best she could. That done, she faced the welcoming committee with hands on hips. “Put that thing away,” she commanded, in her most authoritative schoolmarmly tone, “before someone gets hurt.”
Evidently Mrs. Johnson, or whoever she was, had never been to school, for she did not seem intimidated. In fact, she balanced the considerable weight of that shotgun as easily and as expertly as any man Rachel had ever seen. “Nobody bound to get hurt but you, Miss. Now you take that sorry excuse far a hoss and git.”
Rachel tethered Sunflower to a sturdy bush, well away from the place where the bottle had landed, and took a few purposeful steps forward. “You just go ahead and shoot me, then. I’m not leaving until I’ve done what I came here to do!”
For an interval that might have been the length of either a heartbeat or a season, the two adversaries just stared at each other, each one waiting in vain for her opponent to back down.
“What do you want, then?” the old woman finally demanded. Her hair was snow white, her eyes brown, and all but lost in the loose and weathered flesh of her face. She was small of stature, and probably didn’t weigh much more than a wet barn cat. “Spit it out and git.”
Rachel cleared her throat and squared her shoulders. She’d made a lot of home visits in her time, but she’d never been met with a shotgun before. She wanted to choose her words carefully. “My name is Rachel English, and I’m the new schoolteacher. I’d like to see Christabel and her mother or father.”
The old lady spat. “Her pa got hisself hanged over in Virginia City five years back. God only knows where her ma might be by now. Probably took up with another waster by this time, if she’s still breathin’.”
Rachel was careful not to let the rush of pity she felt show in her face or countenance. “And you must be—?”
“Her granny. I got me a Christian name, like everybody else, but you don’t need to know it.”
“But you look after Christabel?”
“Christabel looks after herself. Sometimes me, too, when my rhumetiz kicks up. Anyways, she ain’t got no yen nor need for schoolin’, so you jest git back on that old nag and point yerself toward home, wherever that might be.”
By now, Rachel’s irritation had given way to an interest and amusement she wouldn’t have dared to reveal. “I’d still like to speak with Christabel herself, if possible.”
As dry and brittle looking as an old grasshopper, Granny Johnson spat again, a stream of what appeared to be tobacco juice this time, into the dooryard, scattering a flock of ropy chickens in every direction. She had yet to lower the shotgun. “It ain’t possible. Now, git.”
Just then, the cabin door creaked open and a girl about Emma’s age hovered on the threshold, squinting against the glare of daylight. She was a plain little creature, with ragged clothes and stringy, unwashed hair of indeterminate color. Even at that distance, the stench from inside that shack struck Rachel hard enough to rock her back on her heels. She hoped her nose hadn’t twitched, and pretended to sneeze, just in case.
“Don’t go shootin’ the schoolmarm, Granny,” Christabel said. “You’ll bring the law down on us for sure.”
Granny spat yet again. Rachel had never known a person who could summon up so much saliva, seemingly at will. “I done told her to git, but she don’t seem to hear too well. Tell her you don’t want no book learnin’ and maybe we’ll git shut of her.”
Rachel folded her arms. “Is what your grandmother says true, Christabel? Wouldn’t you like to learn to read and write and speak like a lady?”
The yearning in Christabel’s dirt-smudged face was clear to see, and it squeezed hard at Rachel’s heart. “What use would that be?” she asked. “Ain’t no books out here. Nobody but Granny to speak to.”
Rachel gestured toward the timbered country falling away behind and around them. “There’s a whole world out there, Christabel, and a lot of it is pretty wonderful. An education can take you places.”
Again, it showed in Christabel’s expression and every line of her body, that desperate yearning to be so much more than she was, have so much more than she had. In the end, though, she merely shrugged. “Who’d tend to Granny if I went galivantin’ off somewheres?”
Granny said nothing, and she even lowered the shotgun, though the stock made a sharp thumping sound where it struck the warped boards of the porch.
Rachel drew a deep breath and plunged. “With all due respect,” she said evenly, “your Granny won’t live forever. And even if you stay right here until the end of your days, if you just go to school, you’ll have books to keep you company ever after.”
“Don’t need no books,” Granny grumbled. “We got by jest fine without ’em all this long while.”
Christabel took a step forward, her gait awkward because of her twisted right foot. The child was a bed-wetter, that could be told from the miasma surrounding her, but the knowledge only made Rachel all the more determined to rope her in. Of all the pupils who might come within her charge, with the possible exception of Toby Houghton, this one was most in need of her attention and care.
“I could learn to read?” Christabel asked, in a tone of muted wonder.
“Folks would jest laugh at you,” Granny put in, helpful to the last. “They�
�d call names, too.”
Rachel bristled. “No one will laugh, unless they’ve a mind to pass the rest of the day with their nose stuck in a corner. Name-callers will meet with the same fate.”
Christabel limped another step forward. “I ain’t got a decent dress to wear,” she said. “No shoes, neither. Come winter, it’ll be a long cold walk down this here hill to Springwater.”
Rachel had brought a few yard-goods with her from Pennsylvania, and she suspected that her Sunday shoes might come close enough to fitting Christabel. She and June-bug could put their heads together and come up with a way to get the child into a tub of hot water. Plenty of soaking and scrubbing and combing would do wonders. “I’ll sew a dress for you myself,” Rachel said, with resolution and reckless optimism, “and I’ve got an extra pair of shoes.”
“We don’t take no charity,” Granny put in. Her berry-bright eyes were snapping, and her scrawny hands looked fidgety where she held the shotgun, as though she’d like to raise it up again, and draw a bead on the center of Rachel’s forehead.
Christabel made her way down the single step and hobbled slowly toward Rachel, her moon-shaped face revealing a careful, tentative hope. “It ain’t charity, Granny,” she said, without looking back at the old woman or pausing, though it seemed to Rachel that walking on such a foot must be painful. “Not if I make it up in work. I can scrub floors and windows, Miss Rachel, and sweep, too. I can round up stray cows and saddle mules and pitch hay. Ain’t much of anything, work-wise, that I don’t know how to do. I’d admire to come to school, if there’s a way I can make it right to you.”
Up close, the odor of that poor child was enough to make Rachel’s eyes burn and water. She did not react, however, but simply laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder, trusting in the Lord, June-bug McCaffrey, and her own devices to make Christabel presentable. “Lessons begin the last Monday in August,” she said. “Do you have a calendar?”
“Don’t need one,” Christabel said, with the first glimmer of a smile. It changed her plain appearance quite dramatically, that smile. “Granny and me, we can tell what day it is by the signs.” At Rachel’s puzzled expression, she added, “You know, the rings around the moon and the color of moss and the like. We mark it off on a bit of paper.”
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