“Your baby,” she specified.
“What?” he questioned. His face drained of color, and he was speechless. “You sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”
Clairey swallowed hard, feeling her pulse in her temples. “Well, no. I ain’t yet,” she stammered. “But I been thinkin’ on it,” she admitted. “And it wouldn’t hurt none to be ready for it, you know. Don’t you think?”
“No?” Was he relieved or disappointed? One thing was for sure, he did not want to have that conversation. “No, not yet…” He was rubbing the back of his neck, a tell-tale sign. He ran his fingers through his thick dark hair several times and pursed his lips. He seemed to be looking for something to say.
She sought to fill the quiet by plowing on. “You don’t think it’s worth plannin’ on?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he answered evasively, and his response was a little too vague for her liking.
“Don’t you want a baby?”
“Ain’t gave it much thought,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said simply. She grew quiet and didn’t push it any further. It had taken all the nerve she had to even broach the subject, and he didn’t seem to be responsive to the idea. Rather than look any more foolish than she already did, she decided to shut her mouth.
Ellis felt remorse when he saw her blank face, how carefully she tried to control her emotions. He had hurt her whether she would admit it or not. If he could have, he would have been anywhere but there having that conversation. It was no secret how a baby came to be, and as his daddy had once told him, it certainly wasn’t from the cabbage patch. Although he and Clairey might have had a physical relationship, it wasn’t something they’d ever really discussed so candidly before. When they made love, there were no words, just one of them reaching out for the other, finding solace in one another’s arms. This was a dangerous conversation to be having in Ellis’s estimation because it involved a great deal of responsibility on his part.
For a brief moment, he had thought she was telling him she was with child, and in that moment he felt a strange mixture of panic and thrill. Then the walls were closing in on him, and the air grew hot and stale in an instant. When she had said there was no baby, he experienced a moment of regret, of dashed hope. His moods were so wide and varied that he wondered if there wasn’t something the matter with him. Clairey had obviously been let down by his uncertainty.
He could see the hurt in her eyes. In his guilty state, he looked for something to say to comfort her. “It’s not like we ain’t tryin’. If that’s what’s goin’ to happen, then I s’pose it’ll happen of its own accord.”
She nodded her head in quick agreement. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “But…”
“But what?”
“Nothin’. Just Elvira.”
“What about her?” Ellis asked.
“She tole me I might could be barren.”
“I wouldn’t listen to nothin’ that gal says.”
“What if I am?”
Ellis had no answer to that. She looked as if she might cry. The longer he looked at her, the more he was caving. He could not ignore his sympathy for her.
“Don’t reckon addin’ a room on there would be such a bad idea,” he acknowledged. “Just to be ready, and all.” He saw a small smile playing at the corner of her lips as she kept her hands busy with her sewing. “Could use it for extra storage till that time come anyway.”
She came to him and put her arms around him. He marveled over how she knew how to touch him, how she knew how to make him feel things that he wasn’t even aware he could feel. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, this making a baby. If she truly wanted it, then surely she should have it. And who was he to deny her?
The next week, true to his word, Ellis took Clairey into town to pick up supplies and equipment to build the room they had talked about and agreed upon. As she stood at the counter, paying for a spool of thread, she looked through the front window and spied Ellis outside. She saw his face and an expression that she had never seen him wear before. He had been a sad man since his talk with Doctor Fielding—not as quick to laugh or as willing to smile as he had once been—but his face was downright troubled at that moment. She craned her neck to get a better vantage point and saw he was conversing with two women, one older and one younger. It did not escape her attention that the younger’s deep green eyes were carefully focused on Ellis. She was a beautiful woman with a slender face and silky blond hair, delicate in her features.
Clairey asked the woman behind the counter politely, trying not to seem overly curious, “Who’s that girl?”
The woman looked up to see who Clairey was referring to. “Why, she was just in here a bit ago,” the woman informed her. “Had a sad tale to tell. That there’s Dulcie Mae Pond. Used to be a Prewitt, she did.”
The air went out of her lungs. That name was one that she couldn’t forget. Ellis had loved that girl long before Clairey had come along. “A sad tale?” she prodded.
The woman wrapped the spool of thread in a piece of brown paper with some twine. “Her man passed,” the woman said, sliding the small bundle toward Clairey and taking her coin.
“What become of him?”
“They say he’s bringin’ in a load of hay on his wagon, and the wheel broke. Well, he went to change it, of course. And while he’s about it, the jack come out from under the wagon, and the axel come right down on him and crushed him dead. Right there on the spot.”
“That’s awful,” she murmured.
“They only been murried for four years, and no children come of it, so she come on back home to her mama.”
Clairey was listening, but her eyes were riveted on Ellis and Dulcie Mae. What was he thinking right in that moment as he looked upon her? She couldn’t begin to imagine. What were they saying to one another? Did he know? Had Dulcie Mae told him that she was a widow, that she was free? Was he wishing that he was free too?
“Thank you for the thread,” Clairey said, shoving it in her pocket and hurrying outside. When she came out the door, she nearly collided with Ellis. Dulcie Mae and her mother were already crossing the street, but she saw the other woman turn and glance back over her shoulder. Clairey figured she was trying to get a peek at Ellis’s wife; she was being summed up. She immediately felt self-conscious, trying to conjure the impression she had left on Dulcie Mae.
“All ready?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She waited a moment before asking, “Who was that you was talkin’ with?”
“Huh?” He appeared not to know who she was referring to.
But she knew that he had to know, and she wouldn’t let it go. “Them women you was talkin’ with.”
“Uh, that was just a girl I knew from way back,” he said with an absent-minded shrug. “Haven’t seen her in a couple years now.”
He guided her over to the truck and let her slide in across the seat. The ride home was mostly silent. She couldn’t guess what he was thinking, but her thoughts were consumed with Dulcie Mae.
Clairey couldn’t help but notice that Ellis spent the rest of the day avoiding her, working away from the house out in the pasture and barn. She told herself that perhaps it was merely her imagination, but then he hardly spoke at dinner time, and she knew with a surety that it was no coincidence. And so for the next two days, she lived with the knowledge that Dulcie Mae, Ellis’s first and only true love, was free again, free to be pursued, free to be with him.
She could not sleep at night for thinking about it. Was that the reason he had been so reluctant to discuss having a baby? It was impossible for her to dispel the notion that maybe he wouldn’t have opposed the idea if it had been green-eyed babies with fair skin that he had been given the option of having. Clairey knew well that it was one thing to occupy his bed, quite another to occupy his heart.
Ellis had never told her that he loved her, had never let on that he felt anything for her but comfortable companionship. All the while had he been pining away for Dulcie Ma
e, keeping his most inner being for only her? Why wouldn’t he? Dulcie Mae was the kind of girl that any man would be lucky to have.
It dawned on Clairey that no matter how happy she tried to make Ellis, he would never really be happy with her. That stupid girl had let him go. She had missed her opportunity. But it didn’t matter because she was still the girl he desired. How could he give his heart to someone else and share his life with Clairey? It simply would never work.
It was not only foolish to believe that she could change his heart but futile as well. Dulcie Mae had not been thrust on him, unwanted and undesirable. Clairey was nothing but a discarded, broken thing. She had nothing to offer but what she had already given, and it wasn’t enough to keep him. Let it be me, she thought. Let me be the one you want to hold, the one you want to keep.
After grappling with her desire to be with Ellis and her longing to see him happy, she determined that she would have a frank conversation with him. Sooner rather than later would be best. She worked over in her mind how she would bring up the subject, imagining how he would respond. But, in truth, she really had no idea how it would play out.
It was over dinner, a silent one again, when she said in a quiet tone, “Ellis, I wanna say somethin’.”
He paused with his spoon mid-air and looked at her expectantly. “What is it?”
“I aim to leave come warmer weather,” she informed him. Just like that. It had come out so much easier than she had anticipated, so much more frank than the coy phrases she had imagined herself saying. This would be his test. Either he would protest or he would agree to it, and she would finally know one way or the other.
His mild surprise was evident in his face and the long pause while he tried to consider what his reply should be. “You ain’t leavin’,” he finally replied with a skeptical edge to his voice and dismissively finished taking his bite of food.
It stung worse than if he had slapped her full on the face. It was sheer indifference, hardly even a reaction from him. Her cheeks grew red with embarrassment. “I understand better’n you think,” she said. “I’m nothin’ but simple. Simple in my looks and manners, and I ain’t smart neither. I know you coulda done a sight better’n this. And I can’t live like this no more with the knowin’.”
“Clairey,” he began, but she scooted her chair back in a rush and breezed past him.
She wasn’t interested in hearing his feeble attempts at appeasing her. When she saw him reach his hand out as if he might stop her, she didn’t respond. It didn’t even slow her down as she made a beeline for the door, waiting until she was outside before her breath came hard and fast, and tears stung her eyes. She had opened herself up to vulnerability, and she had been humiliated. She paced the length of the porch a few times, still struggling for air.
It was then that she realized that she would really have to leave. She could no longer stay there with him, haunting the place like a ghost, a shadow. It was just too painful to love a man, to want him, to see him day after day, sit down to dinner with him, work side by side, lay down next to him at night, and not be permitted to truly have him.
Gathering what little nerve she had left, she went back into the house. Ellis was on his feet. He gave her a curious look when she came through the door again. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but his voice failed him.
“You ain’t gonna stop me,” she informed him, not caring that she was crying in front of him. “You aim to try to ’cause I know you enough to know you wanna fix it. You wanna do the right thing. But you can’t fix it, Ellis.”
“Clairey…”
“Say what you will, but I done made up my mind.”
“Ain’t I been good to you?” he reasoned.
“You been more than fair. But this ain’t the place for me,” she told him. “I don’t belong here.”
“You belong here much as I do. You worked this place just the same as I done. You don’t gotta do this, you know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“That’s what you want?” Ellis was calm.
She wondered how he could be, when she felt her stomach twisting in knots and her legs shaking, her control completely gone. “You’re nothin’ but kind to me, Ellis. More than I prob’ly deserved. But I don’t s’pose it’s fair to neither of us a-livin’ this a-way.”
“What’s changed? Why you wanna go now? I’s only tryin’ to do right by you, you know.”
“I know it. And you been real good to me, you have. But I can’t go on this a-way. And I’d leave now, if it wasn’t for the winter.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Ellis said.
“You don’t gotta feel bad over it, Ellis. You done what you could for me. And it’s a sight more than most woulda done. But I don’t wanna be here no more. And you was the one that tole me I could do what I wanted, didn’t you?”
He faltered with an answer then simply said, “Yeah.”
“Well, I wanna go,” she told him. “It’s what I want.” Before he could argue any further, she left through the door again, out into the frigid night.
Ellis felt numb. Part of him wanted to follow after her, to coax her back in where it was warm, where she belonged. But then he thought how unfair it would be to her. If she really did want to go, then who was he to stop her? He remembered his solitary life before she had come along, and he dreaded the thought of returning to it. He’d come to depend upon her, to crave her company, to yearn for her tenderness. To him, she was a soft place to fall. And all of those reasons for wanting her to stay—they were all selfish. Completely and totally selfish. All about him and what he wanted, what he needed. And so he didn’t follow after her; he didn’t try to stop her.
Chapter 25
A FINE POWDER COVERED THE GROUND in just the faintest sprinkling of snow. It was too cold to do much of anything. Cold outside, cold inside. At times, cold to the marrow of one’s bones. The fire was kept going round the clock. Ellis and Clairey chopped wood at a steady pace to keep up fuel for it. Despite the fire, the chill seemed to creep in through every crack and gap the walls, doors, and windows had to offer.
During the night, they huddled under great piles of quilts to keep warm. In the morning, Clairey’s nose and ears felt like ice. There were few moments when she wasn’t frozen through. It made the task of cooking seem like a blessing. Not only did it give her something to do and keep her mind off of weightier matters, but it also kept her warm, working over the black stove or next to the hearth. That was what kept both of them going—working on a task and avoiding one another.
On a day much like all the others, the doctor broke the monotony of their existence. Trapper barked loudly, and it echoed over the skeletal trees, calling Clairey from the kitchen and Ellis from the barn. They heard the automobile before they saw it coming up the lonely drive.
Doctor Fielding gave a wave as he pulled up. He bent down to retrieve a pan from the floorboard before he came up the steps to the front door.
“How do, Doctor,” Clairey greeted.
“Fine, thank you.”
Ellis followed him up to the house, his shoulders rounded and his eyes down. He hadn’t seen the doctor since his visit months before when he had finally found out the truth of his origins.
Doctor Fielding saw him and nodded a hello. “Ellis,” he said.
“Doctor Fielding,” Ellis answered with his own quick nod. “What brung you out this a-way?”
“Oh, had someone to tend to, and when Mrs. Fielding got wind that I’d be this close to you all, she made me promise to drop by some of her famous date pudding.”
Clairey opened the door to him and ushered him in. “What is it?”
“Date pudding. Dates. They’re a fruit. Well, you don’t see them in these parts. Every Christmas, I have to send for them special so that she can make her pudding. It was her mother’s recipe. A tradition. And, well, it isn’t too bad, really, if you like sweets.” He held the dish out as an offering to Clairey.
“It’s awful good of you,” she said
as she accepted the pan from him.
“Take a chair there next to the fire,” Ellis suggested.
Doctor Fielding smiled. “Don’t mind if I do. Gets awful cold driving in this.”
“Them roads is dangerous in winter,” Ellis added. “Surprised to see you out.”
“Duty calls. Doctoring isn’t for the faint of heart.” He chuckled.
“How’s the missus?” Clairey asked.
“Mrs. Fielding is well. She sends her regards. She was anxious that I see how the two of you were getting along.” He tugged his gloves off and rubbed his hands together then drew his chair closer to the fire. “I’ll be glad to report you both look fine.”
“Managin’ anyhow,” Ellis confirmed.
“Yes, well, that’s the best any of us can do. But, now, you’re getting around all right, aren’t you?” His question was more of an observation than an inquiry.
“The leg’s comin’ ’long.”
“It troubles him some in this here cold weather,” Clairey divulged. She knew Ellis was far too modest to tell the truth. “’Specially in the mornin’.”
“Give it a good rubdown before you go on about your day, and it should be a little easier for you.”
“If I knowed you was a-comin’, I woulda made somethin’ special for you for supper,” Clairey told the doctor.
“Well, it’s hard to know from one day to the next where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing. Just this morning, I didn’t have any notion that the Gunney family would have need of me until I got the summons, you see.”
Clairey had no idea who the Gunneys were, but Ellis seemed to know them. “The Gunneys? They all right then?”
“Nothing too serious. The children have all come down with the pox. The youngest was having some complications with it. He should pull through, though.”
“Glad to hear it ain’t nothin’ too bad,” Ellis said.
“Mrs. Gunney, she had the poor mite sitting out in the yard so that the chickens could fly over him to try and cure him. The poor child ended up with the pox and the croup.”
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