Springwater Seasons

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Is everything all right?” Miranda asked, her brow puckering a little, but prettily. Damn, but he hadn’t realized she was so fetching—had he?

  The boys were eating, mannerly as a couple of Jesuits fresh from some Eastern seminary. He wondered what that was about, even as he swallowed hard, feeling oddly guilty, and rummaged through his mind for an answer to her perfectly ordinary, perfectly simple question.

  “Fine,” he said, at some length. Now there, he chided himself, was an intelligent reply. Maybe he was never going to love this young woman, but if she was going to live with him for the next however-many years, she’d be likely to expect more in the way of conversation. Women were that way—even Caroline, sanctified by his memory into something resembling a saint, had wanted to talk from the moment he stepped over the threshold after a day’s work, straight on through supper and half the night, if he let her. It was as if they stored up their words all day, these females, and then unleashed them in a frightening torrent at the first sight of a man.

  Marcus leaped into the breach just then, bless his skinned knees and mismatched socks. “We ought to call that baby something in particular,” he said, gazing thoughtfully toward the gurgling infant waving both hands and both feet in the depths of the wash-basket. “What’s he need with two names, anyhow?”

  “Let’s call him Rover,” Jamie suggested.

  Landry sucked in a snicker at that, and saw Miranda schooling a smile of her own. She even managed to look like she was considering the idea carefully before reluctantly ruling it out with a shake of her head. “He has a name. Isaiah—” she paused and frowned. “Or Ezekiel.”

  “Rover’s a dog’s name, stupid,” Marcus informed his brother. Though he was the elder of the pair, he was usually a beat behind Jamie. It worried Landry a little sometimes. “He ain’t a dog.”

  “Isn’t,” Landry corrected his son automatically. He’d picked the habit up from Caroline and never gotten away from it, even after her passing. If she’d wanted one thing in the world, Caroline had, it was for those rapscallion boys of theirs to grow up into decent, hardworking, mannerly men. As far as Landry could see, there wasn’t a whole lot of progress being made toward that end.

  “How about George?” Jamie suggested. They were studying history in school, Landry knew, and the boy was probably thinking of the country’s first president.

  Miranda smiled at Landry, with her eyes, and continued to eat, without comment. She took small, delicate bites, despite the obvious fact that she’d been raised rough-and-tumble, and something about the way she moved, the way she held her head and shoulders, stirred him on a deep and very private level. He didn’t want to let her or any other woman into that place inside him, where he’d set up a shrine to Caroline.

  “George,” scoffed Marcus.

  “Enough,” Landry interjected quietly. “It’s Miranda’s place to decide on the baby’s name, not yours.”

  “Where’s that baby’s pa, anyway?” Jamie asked bluntly.

  Miranda stiffened, but only for a fraction of a second. Not surprisingly, she’d had a good deal of practice where that inquiry was concerned. “I don’t rightly know,” she said. “Somewhere between St. Louis and Laramie, I reckon.” For an instant there was a bruised expression in those near-purple eyes of hers that nearly closed off Landry’s throat.

  That was why it took him a moment too long to intercede. “Jamie,” he said, “there are certain things you just don’t say to people. One more step in that direction, and you’ll leave the table.”

  Jamie flushed with righteous indignation, but he backed down. Landry, for all that he’d set his son straight on the issue, wondered himself about the man who had charmed Miranda into a mistake that might well have ruined her life, and wondered mightily. Maybe at some point, when she’d had time to settle into the household, he’d just haul off and ask her. In private, of course.

  After that, Miranda seemed to lose her appetite. She left the table and scraped the remains of her supper into the scrap bucket by the stove, a wooden one reserved for slopping the hogs. Her shoulders were especially straight, almost to the point of rigidity, and Landry thought he heard her sniffle once or twice. The baby, as if sensing his mother’s discomfort, began to fret and fuss.

  “Sit down a spell, Miranda,” Landry told his bride evenly, but in a tone meant to convey that he was giving an order, not making a request. “The boys will do up the dishes.”

  Amid wails of protest from Jamie and Marcus, Miranda stood stock still, plate still in hand, staring at Landry as if he’d told her to build a room onto the house before morning. He knew all too little about her, but it wasn’t hard to deduce that she was used to doing all the “women’s work” that needed to be done.

  The baby began to holler, tiny fists knotted, feet pummeling the air. He had gumption, that kid, Landry thought, with a peculiar sort of pride. He hadn’t fathered Little One-or-the-other, but he was already getting attached. He liked kids, especially the really small ones that didn’t give you much guff.

  Biting her lip, Miranda finally nodded in acquiescence, put aside the plate, and crossed the plank floor to lift her child from his basket and prop him against one shoulder, murmuring and patting his back. He was hungry, Little One-or-the-other, and Miranda was already headed toward the privacy of the spare room, in order to nurse him.

  The thought of that tightened Landry’s groin; in order to distract himself, he fixed his attention on his squabbling sons. “Get on with it,” he said, nodding toward the metal sink.

  Grumbling, the boys cleared the table, scraped their plates, and began scooping hot water out of the stove reservoir to fill the sink. Landry got his cherrywood pipe from the mantel, along with a match and a pouch of his best tobacco. He was no longer a widower, but somebody’s husband, he reflected, marveling at the changes one decision, one day, could make in a man’s life.

  Outside, he filled the pipe, struck a match off the heavy door frame, and tried his level best to concentrate on smoking.

  Jehosaphat. He was married.

  There was a woman living under his roof now, a stepmother for his boys, a companion, of sorts, for him. He couldn’t help thinking of her, there in the spare room, with one well-shaped breast bared to suckle the baby, and stopped trying to deny that he wanted a wedding night, wanted Miranda. He’d have done better, he reprimanded himself, to find himself an ugly woman. What had possessed him to choose one who was young and pretty and, well, plainly receptive to the intimate attentions of a man?

  He made himself remember Caroline. She hadn’t cared much for the private aspects of marriage, he had to admit, though she’d accommodated him willingly enough whenever he turned to her in the night.

  Irritated, for a reason he couldn’t precisely define, he thrust himself away from the support pole he’d been leaning against and strode off into the darkness. He’d make a pilgrimage to Caroline’s grave, sit there awhile in the dry autumn grass, and go through his memories of her one by one, feeling the shape and weight of each, like a man fingering holy beads.

  He hadn’t consciously planned to pass the spare room window, but he did, and he glanced in, too. Miranda was there, all right, seated in the soft glow of a single lamp, unaware of him, looking down at her suckling baby with an expression of such tender devotion that Landry’s eyes burned a little. He blinked and looked away.

  “Damn,” he muttered. The night seemed almost solid after that; it settled over him like a dark blanket. He went on toward Caroline’s final resting place, crossing the creek at a narrow place and heading for the copse of birches, alders, and cottonwoods that surrounded the fine wood cross he’d carved for her, working on it throughout that first long, impossible winter after her passing.

  “I got married today,” he said, as soon as he got near enough. The fall wind was chilly; he felt it through his shirt. “I know you’ll understand, if there’s a way you can hear me.” He thrust one hand through his hair; he’d forgotten his hat, in his haste to
get out of the house and away from his new bride. “I don’t love her, Caroline. Hell, I don’t hardly know her. But the boys have been running wild ever since you left us and I—well, sometimes I get so lonesome, I fear to die of it.”

  There was no answer, of course; just the whisper of the wind in the tree branches, the rustling of leaves as small woodland creatures went about their business, and the steady murmur of the creek. It usually made Landry feel better, at least marginally, if he came out here and told Caroline what was on his heart, but somehow tonight was different. He was more aware than ever that Caroline had long since gone on to some other, ostensibly better place, and left him behind.

  He crouched beside the creek, tapped out his pipe on a smooth, damp stone. He’d made a mistake in taking a new wife, he thought now, with rueful certainty. That was the reason he’d lost the precious sense of reaching out to Caroline, finding her there in the mystery just beyond what he could see or hear or touch.

  He sighed, raised himself to his full height again, and tucked the pipe into his shirt pocket, alongside the tobacco pouch. “I don’t reckon I’ll be spending as much time here, after this,” he said quietly, though whether he was addressing himself, God, or the surrounding countryside, he didn’t know. The sense of loss was profound, aching in every part of him, settling into the very marrow of his bones.

  He went to the barn, even though he’d already done all the evening chores, to check on the livestock. He was a prosperous man, thanks to years of single-minded hard work and prudence, and he’d doubled the size of his holdings a year before by buying up Trey Hargreaves’s homestead. He had healthy sons, friends aplenty, a good house, land and livestock, cash money stashed in the safe at the Springwater station and in a lard can hidden beneath a floorboard in the toolshed. Everything that was supposed to make him happy—except for a woman he truly loved.

  Oh, Miranda would sit next to him when Jacob McCaffrey preached of a Sunday, she’d probably even share his bed if he asked it of her. But it wouldn’t be the same. He was, he reasoned, as lonely as he’d ever been—maybe more so, because he didn’t even have the consolation of bedding this wife he’d taken on what seemed a foolish impulse.

  Presently, resigned, he returned to the house.

  The boys had finished washing the dishes, in their haphazard way, and were seated at the table again, bent over their slates. Miranda, holding the baby on one well-rounded hip, was supervising.

  “Is that the right way to spell legislature’?” Jamie asked, holding up his slate for her to see.

  Her gaze had connected with Landry’s as soon as he stepped through the doorway, then skittered away. Now, she bit her lower lip and narrowed her eyes. There was a slight flush on her cheekbones.

  “I don’t reckon I know,” she said, at some length, with a note of soft misery in her voice.

  Landry shut and latched the door, crossed to the table, looked over his son’s shoulder at the word scrawled across the small chalkboard. “Try again,” he advised, and glanced up at Miranda.

  She turned away quickly, busied herself tucking the baby back into Caroline’s basket. Her embarrassment was almost palpable, all the same, and Landry felt a stab of something resembling pity. He wondered if she could read at all, or if she simply had difficulty deciphering long words. One thing was certain: it would only make matters worse if he asked her about it in front of the boys.

  In good time, and under violent protest, Jamie and Marcus washed their faces and their teeth at the washstand by the fireplace, then took themselves off to bed. Landry watched them go with a feeling of fond good humor, standing with one elbow braced against the mantelpiece, his pipe and tobacco in the opposite hand.

  “You aren’t going to smoke, are you?” Miranda asked. He saw it then, the first spark of challenge he’d ever glimpsed in her. She did have a certain spirit, he thought, and was pleased.

  Still, the inquiry itself surprised him. In the first place, he hadn’t expected her to speak up so firmly, she’d seemed so shy around him. In the second, this was his house and he’d smoke if he damned well wanted to. It was just that he didn’t happen to want to, that was all—he’d only taken the pipe and tobacco from his shirt pocket so he could put them in the cigar box on the shelf over the hearth, where they belonged.

  Landry put the items away with pointed motions, and the lid of the cigar box closed with a little slap. “Are you against tobacco?” he asked, in a tone just this side of annoyance.

  She glanced at the baby, now sleeping soundly in his improvised bed. “It makes the air bad,” she said nervously, but with conviction. “I don’t much cotton to drinking, either. You don’t take liquor, do you?”

  Landry rarely indulged—he simply didn’t like the taste of wine or whiskey—but it was the principle of the thing. “I do my smoking outside,” he allowed quietly, evenly, not wanting the boys to overhear, “and I’m not fond of spirits in general, but I’m the head of this household and I wear the pants. I’ll thank you to remember that, Mrs. Kildare.”

  She looked surprised that he’d called her that; he was a little off-balance himself. Caroline was “Mrs. Kildare,” he thought. Miranda was merely, well, Miranda. She started to say something, then knotted her hands in the apron she’d probably appropriated from the bureau in the spare room and held her tongue.

  He looked her up and down, assessingly, without desire or any other emotion. He told himself that what he felt was cool detachment and wondered at one and the same time when he’d come to find lying so easy. “Do you know how to sew?” he asked, after clearing his throat once. It was a rare woman who wasn’t handy with a needle and thread, in Landry’s experience, but Miranda was not the usual sort of female.

  She swallowed. “I can mend,” she said, sounding a mite defensive. “I can darn socks, too. I can do the wash and use a flat-iron and make soap. I can hoe and weed and slop pigs and chase down lost cows—”

  He almost chuckled at her earnest expression, but stopped himself just in time. God knew, he was no hand with the ladies, having married Caroline right out of school, after living on the next farm from her father’s place virtually all his life, but he knew better than to laugh at a woman. That was straight-out asking for trouble, even when you didn’t mean anything by it.

  “What I meant was, you’ll be wanting some dresses and the like.” He was afraid he might have reddened a little, just to touch on the subject of the fripperies women wore beneath their everyday clothes. Caroline had liked to wear lace, and ribbon, too, though they were hard to come by, so far from a big city. “I reckoned you could make them.”

  She looked almost wretched. “Well, I ain’t—I’m not very good at such. I could manage dresses and petticoats, I figure, but drawers and camisoles take a fine hand—”

  Now it was Landry who swallowed. Drawers and camisoles? Dear God. “Maybe June-bug McCaffrey would be willing to teach you,” he said, and the words came out sounding like bits of rusted metal run through a grinder. “I should have the hogs butchered and strung up in the smokehouse in a week or ten days. We’ll take the stage into Choteau and get whatever you want.”

  Her eyes widened. “You mean, you’re going to buy things? Brand new?”

  He smiled. “That’s what I mean, all right. You’ll be wanting yard goods—something heavy to make a cloak, too. It gets right cold around here, long about the end of October.” He paused thoughtfully, glad of a mental errand to take his mind off things he oughtn’t to think about. “Those shoes won’t last another season,” he decided aloud, looking at her feet. It should be safe, looking at her feet, since he couldn’t see her ankles or anything. “We’ll get you some sturdy boots for when the snows come, and a pair of high-buttons to wear to church.”

  That fetching color bloomed on her cheeks again, turning them pink as wild sweetbriar blossoms. “I can make do with what I’ve got,” she said. “I been doin’ that for as long as I can remember.”

  He wanted, not so suddenly, to touch her, even if
it was only to cup that proud little chin of hers in one hand, but he didn’t dare. He was on the verge of sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her off to his bed as it was, and he had given his word that she’d have ample time to get used to living in a new place, with new people all around her. He was not a man to go back on his promises.

  “I don’t plan to buy out the stores, Miranda,” he pointed out, with a gentleness he hadn’t known was in him. No, he’d wanted to present himself as matter-of-fact, even stern. Head of the household, wearing the pants, making the decisions, etc. “We’ll just get a few things. Maybe some knickers for little—” he’d been about to say One-or-the-other, but he caught himself just in time, “for the baby, there.”

  She blinked, pressed one splay-fingered hand to her bosom, and sank into a chair at the table, as though overcome. “Well, don’t that beat everything?” she murmured.

  “Doesn’t,” Landry corrected, and started into his nightly routine of lowering the door latch, shuttering the windows, turning down the damper in the stove, banking the fire. When he thought to look toward her chair again, Miranda was gone.

  *

  She sat on the edge of the narrow bed, both hands pressed to her cheeks, which were as hot as if she’d taken a fever, and tried to stop her mind from spinning. She’d carried the baby’s basket-bed along with her when she left the main room, and little Isaiah-or-Ezekiel was sleeping as peacefully as if his mother’s life, and therefore his own, hadn’t been turned upside down and shaken loose, just since the sun rose that morning.

  Miranda had kept house for her father following her mother’s passing, and she’d waited on him afterwards, too. Not once had he ever offered so much as a ribbon for her hair—even though she’d once prayed for a strand of blue grosgrain for a solid six months—let alone suggested going into a real store and laying down cash money for woman things. Miranda had been clothing herself in hand-me-downs and cast-offs for as long as she could remember—even when her ma was living, and sewing when she could, there usually hadn’t been money for yard goods. The garments Mrs. McCaffrey and Rachel and Savannah had given her since her arrival in Springwater showed barely any wear. She was grateful for them, and hadn’t imagined having anything better. Anything made just for her.