“I thought if you had her gun, you must know how to use it. I can tell you one thing for sure. I wouldn’t have been nearly so bold if I’d had any idea you were planning to beat them to death with a spoon.”
She laughed at the remark, suddenly and without warning, when the situation didn’t warrant any kind of mirth whatsoever on her part. This man was a stranger and the confrontation with Halbert was nothing to laugh at.
But it had been so long since she’d laughed, and it just...got away from her.
The door behind her suddenly opened, and both girls rushed out and grabbed on to her before she could protest their disobeying her and before she could grow any more uncomfortable about her own behavior.
“I’m all right. We’re all right,” she said to them, kissing each of them on the forehead.
“I’m thinking later I might like to fry us up some taters and onions and crack a couple eggs in it,” Rorie said, stepping up on the porch. “Fighting with Halbert Garth always makes a body hungry. Come on, girls, I’m needing help now.” She shooed Beatrice and Amity into the cabin, and Sayer didn’t miss the look she gave the man who must be the mysterious Jeremiah as she went inside.
But Rorie popped right back out again in the cricket-in-a-hot-skillet way she had. “I reckon you ought to be introducing yourself,” she said, looking at the man hard. “We both know why I can’t do the introducing.” And that said, she went inside again.
“She never beats around the bush, does she?” the man said.
“Never,” Sayer agreed.
She waited, glancing at him from time to time, noting that he wasn’t quite bearded or clean shaven. He had spent a lot of time outdoors. His face was tanned and his hair streaked by the sun.
He came closer, and he kept looking at her, staring into her eyes as if he were searching for something he needed but hadn’t yet found. She could see that his hair color was similar to Thomas Henry’s, but he had very blue eyes, which were nothing like Thomas Henry’s at all. If she’d seen his eyes the day she had fallen down at the spring, she would have known.
But then perhaps she had and perhaps Rorie was right. She had seen only what she’d hoped.
“Yes,” he said, still looking at her. “I think you’re back.”
Sayer looked away then, afraid suddenly of what might be the consequence of his having declared that her lucid self had returned.
“My name is Jeremiah Murphy, ma’am. I—”
“Is my husband dead?” she asked abruptly, clearly surprising him with the directness of the question. “Is that why you’re here?” She supposed that he had thought she would need to hear whatever bad news he had brought piecemeal—and she had no doubt at all that the news was bad. But more delay was the last thing she needed. She had been waiting month after month, year after year, first for a letter or some word of him, then for Thomas Henry himself, and she couldn’t bear to wait any longer.
“Is that why you’ve come here?” she asked again.
He hesitated, then looked into her eyes again. “Yes,” he said with a bluntness of his own.
She made a small sound and looked away, clutching at her skirts in the great effort it took to stay upright and in control.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said again. “To bring you such bad news.”
“It’s what ‘Jeremiahs’ do,” she said.
“Ma’am?” He was looking at her again, clearly ready to revise his earlier opinion regarding her having returned to her right mind.
“Jeremiah. In the Bible. He brought bad news to the people of Judah—about their coming destruction. I’m afraid you’ve done the same to me.” Her voice quavered, regardless of her determination to sound as if she were not about to fall weeping onto the porch boards. She could feel how hard he was looking at her, but she didn’t say anything else for fear it would sound even more amiss.
“I see this isn’t the time for us to talk, ma’am—you aren’t well enough yet. I shouldn’t have said anything—”
“I have a right to know.”
“Yes, ma’am. But I will still take my leave. When you’re stronger—”
“I want to hear what you’ve come to say. I want to hear all of it, Mr. Murphy.”
“Not now,” he said, and he walked away, leaving her sitting with her spoon and a tea towel.
* * *
Big scared eyes.
Just like Thomas Henry had said. What he hadn’t said was that, scared or not, she would stand strong. Maybe he didn’t understand that about her. Maybe all he knew was that marrying him would both rescue her from the kin who didn’t want her and put her directly into Halbert Garth’s way.
Jack half expected Sayer to come after him, to hang on to him and try to keep him from leaving the way Elrissa had done. But she didn’t, and he kept walking, his fists clenched in a vain effort to keep his hands from shaking. The war was over; and so should this affliction—whatever it was—be, too, he kept thinking. At least he didn’t cry. He knew soldiers who were overtaken by fits of weeping when they least expected it. He was grateful for that, just as he was grateful that he hadn’t come undone when he was facing down Thomas Henry’s uncle. Father Bartholomew would be pleased that he could find gratitude in such a bad situation. He wouldn’t be pleased, however, at how ready Jack had been to kill a man, if not three of them.
When he was on the blind side of the cabin where no one inside could see him, he went down on one knee, his head bowed, ultimately sitting on the ground with his back against the log wall, his arms folded hard against his chest as he struggled to stop the shaking. Sweat poured from his body, and he forced himself to put his mind to remembering the poem again, the upstairs porch with his orphan family on a warm Saturday evening, the last remnant of the life and the people he would never know again.
God save thee, ancient Mariner...from the fiends that plague thee...plague thee...thus...
God save thee….
When the shaking finally passed, he got up again, and after a moment to be sure that this latest episode was truly over, he walked a little unsteadily toward the mule he’d left tied to an anchor post in the split-rail fence.
He kept thinking about Halbert Garth’s so-called visit. When he’d realized that there were three horsemen in the front yard, he’d held back and listened for a time to the exchange between Sayer and the man clearly in charge, standing carefully under the open-sided lean-to shelter at the back of the cabin, trying not to rattle the gourds hanging down from the eaves. His thinking was that he could stay where he was and no one would have to know about his presence at the Garth place, but in no time at all, he realized that he was in that classroom again and that he was going to have to intervene in some way. Thomas Henry Garth had done him no favor by dying in his arms.
Jack wanted to think that he had nothing to worry about in the aftermath of the encounter, that Halbert Garth couldn’t possibly know who he was or why he had come to these mountains. At worst, he’d made himself another enemy, one who could get in line behind Farrell Vance.
He untied the mule, led it to the barn and retied it to the hitching post. He had no trouble finding the horse harness. The only plow in evidence was standing out in the fallow field on the slope to his left, he supposed where somebody had left it. Thomas Henry? No, he decided. It didn’t look weathered enough. But if he had left it, it was good that Jack intended to use it or at least move it someplace else. Sayer didn’t need that kind of constant reminder that Thomas Henry was permanently gone.
“You as hardheaded as Rorie says?” he asked the mule as he worked to get the tack and harness on. “Well, I’m hardheaded, too. Anybody who knows me can tell you that. And before you decide to give me your version of a plowboy’s nightmare, you’d best remember this. You won’t be the first mule I ever took a bite out of. Men like Farrell Vance saw to that.”
“What are you looking at?” he said to the mule, because it was seriously considering where to bite him.
He gathered up the reins. “Yaaa!” he said as masterfully as he knew how, sending the mule forward toward the field he hoped to improve.
Getting a mule into harness was one thing. Getting it attached to a plow and of a mind to pull it over hard ground was an entirely different matter. But it gave Jack something real to concentrate on. The mule did understand the concept of “gee” and “haw,” and in time, a truce of sorts was established in their battle of wills. The mule would at least plow a row or two before they had to discuss the merits of doing such a thing again. It occurred to him that his recent army experience could have been worse—he could have been drafted to be a mule skinner. He had been taught to never hate one of God’s creatures—Father Bartholomew had read them Moby Dick on the upstairs porch to make his point. But Jeremiah decided somewhere after the third or fourth row that if he ever did, he’d start with a mule—this one.
But even as hard as the animal was to manage, Jack’s mind still wandered to the place he would just as soon it not go.
Sayer Garth.
Thomas Henry had said she was pretty. She was definitely what he would call pretty, too, not polished up and expensively arranged and unapproachable like Elrissa, but pretty in her own...soft...way. There was something about her. The eyes—he’d been forewarned about her eyes. Still, she didn’t seem fragile, regardless of having suffered a blow to the head or being half-starved, likely for years. She didn’t seem delicate at all—except for her petite size—but he still had felt an unwelcome inclination to take care of yet another orphan—of her. He wasn’t going to take the job on, of course. Strictly speaking, he hadn’t actually made any promises to her husband. If there was a promise at all, it was one made by proxy on behalf of someone named Graham.
Had Thomas Henry said that Graham was dead? Jack couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. A false promise he had agreed to in order to give peace to a dying man couldn’t be binding. Thomas Henry’s mind had been somewhere else entirely at that point, and he had completely lost his awareness of the enemy soldier who had given him a drink of water from his canteen.
Jack was firm in his conviction that he would stick to the plan he’d devised on the road to Knoxville and then refined on the hard trek toward Jefferson. He would give Sayer her husband’s letters and his personal belongings with all due courtesy, as if he weren’t her husband’s sworn enemy, and hers as well if the truth be told. And he wouldn’t behave as if he were on the run and he had a motive for showing up in this high, lonesome place other than to give her some peace of mind. He would tell her the things her husband wanted her to know and not tell her the things he didn’t. Then he would go on his merry way and try hard to attend to his own decidedly significant troubles, leaving one dead Rebel soldier to go to his reward with a satisfied mind.
He hoped.
And what of his widow?
He could ask and answer that question in the span of one breath. Sayer Garth, big sad eyes or not, was not his concern. But another question immediately arose. What, then, was he doing out here fighting with a plow and a hardheaded mule?
He looked around because someone had called his name—Rorie, standing at the edge of the field.
“Come and eat something,” she called. “We got enough for you.”
He waved her away and walked on, sending the mule to the far end of the row. Rorie was still waiting when he came back around.
“I said come and eat with us,” she said when he was close enough.
“You know that’s not a good idea.”
“Ain’t my idea. It’s hers. She wants you to.”
“She must still be addled, then. I just told her her husband is dead.”
“I don’t reckon you told her anything she didn’t already know in her heart. That Thomas Henry was as faithful to her as the day is long. He wouldn’t be silent all these weeks without a bad reason. So come and eat.”
A bad reason, Jack thought. A very apt way of putting it.
“No,” he said.
“You ain’t got the shaking now,” she said, and he looked at her sharply. “I told you before. You ain’t the first no-name soldier to turn up in these mountains.” She gave a small shrug. “Some of them might even have been kin. And some of them might have been underfoot long enough to where a body gets so they can just look at one of them and tell when one of them shaking spells is coming on—or did you think you was the only one to have that kind of aggravation? Besides which, I ain’t hearing you deny it.”
“There are a lot of things you’re not hearing,” he said pointedly, and she laughed her cackling laugh and punched his arm.
“I reckon they is, Jeremiah. I reckon they is. It’s getting too dark to plow. Unhook that ornery creature and come to the table. I left you a bucket of water on the porch so you can wash the dirt and sweat off you. If we got to suffer your company, you might as well smell better than you do now.”
“I told you I’m not coming,” he said, certain that he meant it. “She’s not well enough,” he added around the mule’s decision to challenge his authority again.
“Maybe not. Maybe her heart is broke all to pieces, but she went and put the good china on the table anyway. The china what come from her own mama’s house—the mama what died when she was just a little girl and left her at the mercy of that hateful aunt of hers. Most treasured thing she owns and here she is, wanting to honor you with it. You going to walk yourself away from a kindness like that? And then there’s them two little girls. Somehow they got the idea you hung the moon.”
She was looking at him in that forceful way she had, but it wasn’t going to do her any good.
“Funny thing about that there china,” Rorie said after a moment. “Sayer had two boxes of it. Ain’t got but one now. She reckons somebody done took one of them. Ain’t but one time that I know of when she wasn’t here—well, she was here, but she didn’t know nothing. None of them did. Them girls was too sick, and she was knocked out cold down yonder at the spring. You want to know what I reckon?”
“No,” he said, and for once she seemed to accept something he said as fact. She turned and began walking back toward the cabin. He watched her go, still trying to hang on to the rambunctious mule. He knew exactly what she “reckoned,” and she knew he did. There was a good chance Sayer Garth hadn’t slipped and hit her head after all.
“You’re not always going to win!” he called after her.
“I know, Jeremiah,” she called back, chuckling to herself. “I just do my best. Leave the rest to the Good Lord.”
But she stopped then and turned around to look at him. “She needs to do this, Jeremiah. She ain’t ready to face the bitterness of what you told her yet, that’s all. She knows she’s got to be strong for them girls, and she needs a little time and something to keep her hands busy until she can hold up under it. You ain’t never been in a situation like that, I reckon.”
&n
bsp; Jack expected more conversation, but that apparently was the last of it. She walked away for good this time.
“What are you looking at?” he said to the mule.
He decided, after both the mule and his own mount had been watered and hobbled to graze, that the cooking aromas coming from the cabin were what made him change his mind. He knew Sayer Garth had little in the way of provisions, but there had apparently been enough to make bread. He could smell it baking, and it had been a long time since he’d had hot bread. He more or less convinced himself that that was reason enough to accept the invitation.
The mule appeared to be as content as a mule would ever allow its cantankerous self to be, and there was nothing left for him to do—except cede the field. He went into the barn and got his only other shirt out of his saddlebag. It was clean, but that was the best that could be said of it. It was clear to him now that he was going to follow Rorie’s most recent commands even beyond the letter. He was going to wash up and put the shirt on, and then he was going to go see for himself why this woman, distraught or not, wanted him at her table. He’d seen her face when he’d told her Thomas Henry was dead. He might as well have stuck a dagger in her heart—and she was still getting out the good china and inviting him to dinner. He had never understood Southern women, not in all his four years of war and breaking into their houses and barns and either stealing or burning whatever he could find, if not the house and barn right along with it. And it didn’t look as though he was ever going to. Things—people—women—who wouldn’t bend were supposed to break, but so far he hadn’t seen any evidence of it. He supposed that Sayer Garth and Elrissa Barden had that in common, despite their political differences.
The bucket of water was still on the porch where Rorie had left it, along with a thin square of flannel and a small sliver of brown soap. He made good use of all of them, pouring the last of the water over his head. He didn’t have a comb or a straight razor. He just had to do the best he could. The smell was gone; he did know that.
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