by Diana Palmer
“Why do you look so sad, Tish?” Lisa asked.
“I’m feeling sorry for the poor worms,” Tish replied, and looked sadder.
“But, it’s all right…”
“No, it isn’t,” Tish said mournfully. “Their poor families, having to say goodbye forever, and the funeral expenses…!”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Russell said from the barn door, watching Tish freeze with a shovel full of black dirt under her booted foot in the middle of the worm bed.
“You don’t have a heart,” she told him smugly. “Any man who sends a woman a dandelion…”
“Woman?” he queried with an implication that was lost on Lisa.
She flushed and turned her attention back to the worm bed. “Lisa, will you hold the bait can for me?”
“Give me that shovel before you put yourself back in the hospital,” Russell growled, taking it away to spoon up two huge shovelfuls and drop them into the bucket. The black earth was squirming with pink, thready worms.
“Where’s Tyler?” he asked coolly. “I haven’t seen him around lately.”
“I don’t know, but I’ll be glad to file a missing person report with the FBI if you can’t live without knowing….” she began earnestly.
He glanced at her with an amused light gleaming in his dark eyes. “Brat,” he murmured, and made it sound like an endearment.
“The agony of aging,” Tish said to Lisa. “When I was your age, I was his baby. Now that I’m grown, I’m his brat. I think I liked it better when I was little.”
“Things were easier,” Russell said mysteriously. He picked up the bait can. “There’s only one thing left for you to be now.”
“What’s that?” Tish asked innocently.
“My woman.”
She blushed to the roots of her hair. Her eyes jerked up to his and froze at the laughter there. “You do love to embarrass me, don’t you?” she asked.
“I’d rather do it than eat. You blush beautifully, Saint Joan.”
“Don’t call me that!” she grumbled.
But he only laughed. “Come on, let’s go. I can’t afford the time, but I’m going to take it.”
“If you’d rather,” Tish said, tongue-in-cheek, “we could spend a few hours mashing grubs out of the cattle.”
His eyes narrowed, glittering down at her. “You’re getting into deep water, baby,” he said in mock anger.
She lifted the hem of her jeans quickly, and he threw back his head and roared.
On the way to the pond, Russell detoured by the house Tish grew up in, his eyes curiously watchful as he pulled the jeep up in the front yard and cut the engine.
The house was without paint. It was old, weather-beaten, and had cracks in the dark gray boards. The front porch sagged, the glassless windows looked black and forbidding. The tin roof was rusted, and the front steps didn’t look as if they’d hold a starving cat. Around the side of the house two lilac bushes stood bare. Chinaberry trees ran down the side of the yard, and a pecan tree towered over the roof in back. It was the picture of desolation.
But Tish was seeing it with a coat of yellow brown paint on the walls and a swing on the front porch; with the sound of singing coming out those windows, the memory of a little girl’s happy laughter mingling with it. The smell of baking biscuits was filling her nostrils along with the smell of the pink roses that bloomed on the bush that used to grow along the bank next to the road. And with her eyes closed she could see her tall, fair father and her small, dark mother as they were so long ago.
“Where are we, Papa?” Lisa asked curiously.
“Home,” Tish answered for him, and started to get out of the jeep. Russell caught her hand in his warm, strong fingers.
“Are you all right?” he asked with a tenderness in his voice she hadn’t heard for a long time.
She nodded and smiled. “The memories weren’t all bad. Mama used to sing in the kitchen when she cooked, until the pneumonia. And Papa…Papa…!”
Russell’s fingers tightened. “You watched it happen. I found you there in the fields. I took you home. Remember it that way, if you have to remember it at all. He never knew what hit him, Tish,” he reminded her quietly. “I swear to you, he never felt the tractor fall on him.”
She grasped his hand as if it were a lifeline and bit back the tears. She took a deep breath, and it calmed her. It was as if she’d laid all the ghosts, all the nightmares, to rest.
“Papa, can I go look at the house?” Lisa asked. “I won’t go in. I just want to see where Tish lived.”
“If you promise not to go on the porch,” Russell agreed sternly.
“I promise,” Lisa told him and let him lift her outside the jeep. She skipped toward the yard.
“Changed your mind about her?” Russell asked shortly.
“Changed my…oh…yes,” she faltered. She stared down into her lap. “She’s…very like you.”
He lit a cigarette, and she smelled the acrid smoke as it drifted past her face. “You know she’s illegitimate?”
“I…yes, I knew,” she lied. Her eyes went to the little girl, who was humming as she played with a tall weed. “She’s such a loving child.”
“Like her mother,” he murmured quietly.
Something sharp and merciless stabbed into Tish’s heart. She didn’t want to ask about Lisa’s mother; she didn’t want to know!
She felt his eyes on her averted face. “You’ve never asked, not once. Aren’t you even curious about her mother?”
She couldn’t answer him, but she nodded. She drew a deep breath. “Did you…love her, Russell?” she asked gently.
“Not, was she socially acceptable, or who was she? What a strange question, Miss Peacock,” he said. He sighed. “I don’t know, Tish. I was young, and my blood ran hot, and I wanted her like hell. I was on my way to war. I didn’t know if I’d be coming back. It was spring, and I took a sharecropper’s lovely daughter to a square dance, and the car broke down…” His eyes went dark with the memory. “I asked her to marry me before I ever left here, but there wasn’t time…. Her sister wrote me several months later. It was a breech birth, and the doctor couldn’t get there in time. By the time he did, it was too late for Lisa’s mother. I came home and arranged for Lisa’s aunt to take care of her in Jacksonville. I’ve spent the rest of those years trying to live with it. Sometimes,” he said harshly, “it gets rough.”
“That night when I first came home,” she murmured, “and I made that crack about a sharecropper’s daughter…”
“And, by God, you didn’t know, did you?” he demanded harshly, catching her roughly by the shoulders to stare down at her with eyes so fierce they made her blanch.
“Please,” she whispered, “it…hurts!”
He drew in a sharp breath and relaxed his hold quickly. “God, I didn’t mean to do that,” he said deeply. “You have a strange effect on me lately, Saint Joan. I wish to God I knew what to do about you.”
“What?” she asked incredulously.
He let her go. “Never mind. Lisa Marie! Let’s go!”
Tish watched him swing the child back into the jeep with undisguised curiosity. She’d never understand him. Never!
Sitting on the bank of the pond with Russell was like old times, when they used to fish here and she’d talk and he’d get mad and smolder.
While Lisa stood farther along the bank, lifting and lowering her cork, Tish closed her eyes, listening to the pleasant gurgle of the water running toward the spillway. Downstream, she remembered, was a place where the water ran across a dirt road and butterflies skimmed back and forth in summer on the yellow white sand, sometimes pausing on a damp spot to become temporary works of art. Sandflies buzzed there, too, with their vicious bites that left red welts on the skin. And there was always the smell of wildflowers.
“I thought you came here to fish,” he chided. He lifted his long, cane pole enough to see that the worm was still dangling from it before he submerged it again with a trail of lead s
inkers and a colorful red and white plastic float.
She glanced lazily at him. “I lied. I came here to remember.” But she checked her line all the same. And the worm was gone.
With a groan she pulled it in. “Something out there wants to eat without paying. How come they always get my worms, but they never touch yours?”
He chuckled softly. “You don’t hold your mouth right.”
She made a face at him and proceeded to dig a worm out of the bait can. “Lisa Marie,” she called, “do you need another worm?”
The little girl raised her line. “No, Tish,” she called back. “It’s still there!”
“Are you warm enough?” she persisted, eyeing the girl’s thin sweater.
“Oh yes, Tish, I never get cold!”
“Like her father,” Russell murmured with a disapproving glance at Tish’s sweater and windbreaker.
“Well, I’m not hot-blooded,” she said without thinking.
“Aren’t you?” he asked in a strange, deep tone.
She kept her eyes on the worm and hoped he wouldn’t see the color in her face. “I never realized how horribly cruel that is,” she said, hedging, as she threaded the worm onto the barbed hook.
“The taste of fried fish makes up for it,” Russell told her with a grin.
“Nothing bothers you, does it?” she asked in all seriousness.
His eyes spared her a quiet glance before they went back to the muddy, deep water. The corks bobbed gaily a few yards away from the raw dirt bank where they sat on upturned minnow cans.
A short, mirthless laugh pressed his lips. “Don’t you believe it, baby.”
She shrugged, lowering her eyes to the bits of weed and bark at her feet, crushed by her restless shoes. “You’re very hard to read. Nothing shows in your face.”
“So I’ve been told. It’s damned handy when I’m playing poker. Watch your cork, Tish, I think you’re getting a bite.”
She watched the colorful float go under the water, bob up, and bounce down again. Unthinking, she jerked on the pole and tore the hook out of the water. The worm was gone. The hook was bare again.
“Tish, did you get one!” Lisa called excitedly.
“Not unless it’s invisible,” Tish wailed. “Oh, damn,” she moaned softly as she sat down and reached for the bait can.
“You’re slipping, Saint Joan. That was a curse,” Russell chuckled.
“Stick around,” she told him, “I’ve got quite a repertoire when I start.”
“I remember. Painfully. You were damned near as hardheaded as I was. It took weeks to break you from profanity alone.” He glanced at her with a grin. “But I did.”
She grimaced. “Did you ever!…Ugh, the taste of that horrible soap!”
His eyes studied her quietly. “This is the way I always remembered you,” he told her seriously. “Not in Dior gowns or expensive sandals…but in jeans and old blouses with your hair floating like black silk over your shoulders.”
His voice was deep and caressing, and she was afraid to look at him for fear she might break the spell. The soft, deep tone was vaguely seductive; it made her pulse throb, her breath come in soft, sharp gasps.
“Is that why you took me by the old place today?” she asked. “To remind me…”
“To get rid of the ghosts,” he corrected. “We did that, didn’t we, Tish?”
She nodded. A smile touched her mouth. “We did.”
“No more shame?”
She shook her head. “There was something about actually looking at it again, through Lisa’s eyes…she didn’t think there was anything shameful about it.”
“There isn’t.”
She leaned forward to rinse the dirt off her fingers in the cold lake. “Are you going to keep her here?” she asked, nodding toward the little girl down the bank.
“I don’t know, baby. They’ll crucify her in school,” he said solemnly.
“And you wouldn’t step in and take the blows for her, would you, any more than you took them for me.” Her eyes met his accusingly.
“I made you fight your own battles, not because I didn’t care,” he told her, “but because I did. I wouldn’t have done you any favors by putting crutches under you, Tish. The day would have come when you’d have had to fight one on your own, and I wouldn’t be standing behind you. You make your own security. You can’t depend on anyone else for it.”
“They’ll hurt her,” she said, watching the little girl play with her pole.
“Life hurts, honey, didn’t you know?”
She drew in a deep breath. “I’m learning.”
“Watch your cork. It’s moving again,” he said.
She jerked on the line too quickly again, and drew out a wet, bare metal hook. She sighed as she reached for the bait can once again.
“I hope I brought enough worms,” Russell said carelessly.
“Oh, shut up,” she grumbled. She fished out another pink, struggling victim and threaded it onto the hook. “I might as well just stick the worms in the water and drown them by hand!”
Russell chuckled down at her. “They’re getting even.”
“The fish? What for?” she asked innocently.
“For being talked to death,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed, and she glared at him. “You haven’t once told me to shut up.”
“I don’t have to tell you,” he murmured, and, catching the point of her chin, he brought his mouth down on hers in a brief, hard, bruising kiss. “I can think of other ways,” he added, smiling gently as he saw the shock in her pale eyes.
He let go before she could react physically or verbally, and then it was too late. He pulled his hat low over his eyes and tugged gently on his line. “Now, this is how you catch a fish,” he began coolly.
They went home with six oversized bream on the mud-stained white fishing line, and Russell had caught all but one of them. The last was Lisa’s.
Eight
Except for the parade on television and an immense meal prepared by Mattie, Thanksgiving was much like any other day. All too soon, it was over, and Baker and Mindy were on their way back to Florida. Tish wandered around the house with a strange sense of emptiness, of hopelessness. Before many more weeks had passed, she’d be back in college and everything that had happened would be a memory.
A memory, her mind echoed, and it reached back to pick up pieces of the past. Russell’s dark, quiet face in the doorway of the Tyler beach house; the deep, slow sound of his voice on the porch that first night as he held her so fiercely; the feel of his hard mouth burning against hers as the sun burned against her head in the fields. A long, shuddering sigh left her lungs. The way he’d kissed her in the kitchen that night and stormed out because of what she’d said about Lisa. If only she’d known!
She paused in the doorway of his den, her eyes on the big oak desk he used for record keeping. Despite that brief kiss on the banks of the pond, he was keeping a discreet distance between them. It was almost as though he was afraid to let her come too close. She frowned thoughtfully. Could it be…?
“Tish!” Lisa called from the front door. “Come quick, Papa’s going to let me ride a horse!”
“Now?” Tish murmured. “It’s almost dark.”
“If you’re going to come, damn it, come on!” Russell growled at her, looming up like a tall shadow behind his daughter, his irritation showing plainly. “Why she can’t move five feet without you to stand and watch is a puzzle to me!”
She felt flayed, not only by the lash of the words, but there was an angry darkness in his eyes that cut her.
“Tish is my friend, Papa,” Lisa protested gently, looking up at him with melting brown eyes.
Tish lifted her chin proudly. “I’d just as soon not…” she began.
“What’s this about going riding?” Eileen called from the stairs. She came down laughing. “Oh boy, I need a little exercise. Can I come, too?”
Russell said a long word under his breath. “Oh, hell, I’ll hire a b
us and we’ll take the field hands, too. Come on!”
Eileen grinned at Tish as they started out the door. “Just one big, happy family,” she said.
“Blow it out your ear,” Tish replied. “I hope his cinch breaks.”
“The way Russell rides,” Eileen reminded her, “it wouldn’t matter much.”
Burying a dread of horses she wouldn’t let show, Tish sat quietly in the back of the jeep with Eileen as they bounced roughly over a trail through the fields and along one of the barbed-wire fences that kept the cattle confined to the pasture that seemed to stretch to the horizon.
“Look at the horses!” Lisa breathed, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “Papa showed them to me before, the Appaloosas!”
Tish smiled at the child’s enthusiasm. “Apps,” she said voluntarily, “or Appys. Did you know that they’re born snow white? It isn’t until they lose their first coat that they begin to show their spots.”
“That’s why they’re called the Spotted Breed,” Eileen chimed in.
“God save me from back-seat experts who can’t even pull a damned cinch strap tight enough to keep the saddle on the horse,” Russell growled, his eyes never leaving the narrow field road.
“Just because I once, only once,” Tish returned, “let a stubborn little pinto blow out her belly…”
“See the way Tish is stretching her neck, Lisa,” Eileen instructed, “if she were a horse that would be called the look of eagles. A horse with a particularly good conformation, with his head held high so that he looks as if he might fly away any minute, is said to have it.”
“Eileen…” Tish threatened, dramatically lifting her fist.
“Want some oats, Tish?” Eileen grinned.
Lisa burst out laughing. “You’re funny,” she giggled.
Tish marveled again at the neat, modern installation that housed Russell’s prize Appaloosas and his riding stock. The barns were well insulated and the stalls were roomy and meticulously cleaned. A paddock adjoined each side of the barns and Russell’s prized handler lived just a stone’s throw away—with the shotgun he kept to discourage midnight visitations.