by Jo Goodman
“If it matters to you, I heard Cutter tell Zach he was going to bed down in the barn loft. Apparently sharing space with Annalea reminded him a little too much of home. He has a lot of sisters.”
A brief smile lifted Willa’s lips. “Four, by my count. There are a couple of brothers, too.”
Israel shucked his remaining boot and studied the imprint of John Henry’s teeth for a moment before he set it on the floor. “I can go and get her if you like. If she’s already asleep, I’ll just carry her back.”
Willa shook her head. It was a sincere offer, she saw that, but accepting it would have been unfair to Annalea, Israel, and even to her. This was her wedding night, and if she examined her anxiety to the root of it, she would not find Annalea. “She can stay put. There will be less fussing in the morning.”
“And John Henry’s with her.”
Quiet laughter bubbled. “Yes. She has John Henry. You were insistent about that.”
“I was thinking about my ankles. I don’t wear boots to bed.”
A single glance at the pair on the floor beside him filled her face with heat. She remained composed enough to say, “I don’t sleep with them on either.”
“Then we have that in common. It’s as good a place to start as any. What else don’t you wear to bed?”
Willa judged that if her face had been warm before, it was flaming hot now. He was set on provoking this reaction from her, and she told him so. Israel’s eyes widened a fraction, but Willa suspected that the surprise and innocence in his expression were feigned.
“It’s teasing,” he said. “Not provocation.”
Willa was still uncertain. “Teasing?”
“You’re warmer now, aren’t you? And you’re thinking about what I asked, maybe even wondering what else I don’t wear to bed. You might be considering what it would be like to ease the stranglehold you have on that pillow and slip it under your head. Or quite possibly under your bottom. Women do that sometimes to angle their hips, or men do it for them. It makes for better—” He caught the pillow easily when she lobbed it at his head. Grinning, he smoothed it out and tossed it back. “Perhaps you’ll smother me with it later. Something for you to look forward to once the preliminaries are out of the way.”
Willa’s hands fisted in the pillow. “Preliminaries?”
“Consummation,” he said. “You remember, don’t you? We talked about it. If not for John Henry, it would be behind us and you would not be sitting over there as if you were anticipating a blow. It’s not flattering. I am not going to attack you, Willa. I thought that was understood.”
She pressed her lips together, but her fingers uncurled. Lifting her chin a few degrees, she put the pillow behind her. “Last night . . .” She stopped and deliberately cleared her mind of everything but what she wanted to say. When she began again, her voice was quieter but recognizably more confident. “Last night was a succession of spontaneous moments, and I acted—reacted—impulsively, perhaps even instinctively, to every one of them. I was suspicious of your intentions when I accompanied you to the barn, skeptical when you wandered deep inside it to find a lantern, but amused by your transparent attempt to get me into the loft or the stall or wagon bed. You were clever about that because what you let me see wasn’t what you really wanted, and then we were talking, just talking, and you asked me to come to you, and I did. It wasn’t planned, not by me, and I don’t think by you either.”
She looked around the room that Happy had made ready and then vacated for her wedding night and gestured to all of it so Israel would understand her meaning. “All of this . . . it feels deliberate and forced and uncomfortable.”
“This is where your parents slept.”
“Yes. I suppose that’s part of it. I haven’t had any time to accustom myself to the idea, although I’m not sure I want to.”
“Then we will need a new bed.”
This was said in a manner of such practicality that Willa had to laugh. “All right,” she said. “We’ll do that first thing in the morning.”
“We will do that tonight.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “I wasn’t serious.”
“Well, I damn well am. Stand up.”
For no good reason that she could think of, she did. So did Israel. He went to the foot of the bed, took a fistful of sheets, blankets, and the down-filled comforter in each hand, and yanked all of it off the mattress in a single sweeping motion. There was considerable fluttering and snapping until he had everything bundled against his chest.
“You take the pillows and bring the lamp,” he said. “Follow me.”
She had a thought that her eyes might be as round and as wide as Pastor Beacon’s because she certainly was astonished. Again, without quite knowing why she was falling in with his plans, she scooped up the pillows and followed in his wake. His footfalls were padded by the thick socks he was wearing. Hers were not nearly so silent. Her boots tapped lightly on the wooden floor, which she supposed kept him from glancing back to see if she was behind him.
There were not many places in the house that he could take her. There was the bedroom she shared with Annalea, the kitchen and the adjoining pantry, and a cubby that her grandmother and mother had used for sewing and for storing a cornucopia of threads, needles, bolts of cloth, and every sort of whatnot, but was now a repository for all of that plus items no one knew what to do with. There was also a room with a desk, two chairs, an oak filing cabinet, and shelves for books that after fifty years in the valley still had too much space on them for anyone to mistake it for a library. Happy called it a study. Willa referred to it as her workroom. Annalea knew it as where-Pa-goes-to-drink.
And finally there was the front room. In homes Willa had visited when she lived in Saint Louis, she had heard the room referred to as a parlor, a drawing room, sometimes a salon. Some homes had all three, although the purpose of that had eluded her then and still eluded her. The front room was a serviceable name for what it was, a gathering place for the family, a place to welcome guests, and it was situated along the full front of the house. They rarely used it anymore, tonight’s ceremony being an extraordinary exception.
But it was back to the front room that Israel led her. There was a stove in one corner that had gone cold hours earlier. After the first toast, Happy had declared there should be a fire in the hearth because on such a momentous night as this, a home needed more than heat. There needed to be sparks and crackling flames. Willa had smiled rather numbly in response, but at Israel’s nudging, she lifted her glass and sipped.
There were no sparks now, literally or figuratively. Willa felt a little cold inside. Because Israel’s hands were full, he tipped his head to indicate the rocker positioned to the left the fireplace. “Sit there. Hold on to the pillows if that helps.”
If it seemed as if she took his suggestion, it was only because the rocker had always been a place of comfort and she had no intention of surrendering the pillows anyway. She set the lamp on a side table and adjusted the wick for more light.
Israel dropped the bundle of linens and blankets in the middle of the long, thickly upholstered couch. “It’s claret,” he said.
“Pardon?” His back was to her and she was sure she had not heard him properly. The thought of a glass of wine chasing the whiskey she had already drunk made her stomach roil.
He turned around and pointed to the curved back of the sofa. “The couch,” he said. “Not as deep a color as burgundy, not as red as a cherry. Claret.”
She stared at him, unblinking, and her thoughts fell back to their somewhat heated exchange in Beech Bottom. “I think you mean my goddamn couch.”
There was no hint of embarrassment in his quicksilver smile or in his short laugh. “That’s the one.”
Willa’s cheeks puffed as she blew out a mouthful of air. “What are we doing here?”
“Well, I am going to improve on what’s left
of this fire, and you, unless you have a mind to do something else, are going to watch me.”
It bothered her some that she did watch him. He exerted no effort to compel her attention, and yet he had all of it. She did not watch him build the fire; she simply watched him. He moved with unconscious grace, lightly and fluidly. There was a rolling rhythm in his step when he strode across the yard. More than once she had stopped what she was doing to take it in. He had never caught her at it, but Annalea had, and she made gooey, smacking noises until Willa threatened to throw her in the watering trough.
Israel had not merely healed since he arrived in the valley, he had become strong. Incarceration was not meant to be kind, and it hadn’t been to him. It was not easy to tell in the beginning, but beneath his bruises, his skin was pale and pasty. When healthy color should have returned, he had almost none of it. Work had been a balm for him. His shoulders had filled out, straightened, and muscles, not bone, defined his arms and chest and back. If he was aware of the transformation, it was probably because his shirts fit a bit more snugly or tasks that he had once performed with labored breathing no longer stressed his endurance.
It was a pleasure to watch him hunker in front of the fireplace. The match he struck bathed his flawless profile in a flash of golden light, and when he set it against the kindling, the glow enveloped him. He regarded the fire for several long moments, mesmerized perhaps, or merely thoughtful, the threads of silver at his temple glimmering like ice, and then he suddenly turned his head toward her and met her eyes.
She did not, could not, look away from one of the Lord’s fallen angels.
“I’m not sorry that we’re married,” she said.
“Then that’s something else we have in common. Probably should keep a list.”
“You start it. I’m too tired.”
“Later. I’m tired, too.” He stood, brushed his hands off on his trousers, and inspected them. “I’ll be right back.”
Willa smiled to herself when she heard the pump in the kitchen and the sound of running water. Ranching had not made him any less fastidious. She was still smiling when he returned to the front room.
“What?” He halted in the archway and leaned casually against the frame, arms crossed, one foot on top of the other.
“You,” she said, as if that single word explained everything. “I swear you could muck stalls all day and leave the barn smelling only of leather and newly mown hay.”
“‘Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.’”
“Is that from the Bible?”
“Francis Bacon. Or put another way, cleanliness is next to godliness. Even out of proper context, my mother was a believer. Nails. Hair. Shoes. And definitely behind the ears.” Shrugging, he pushed away from the wall and went to the couch. “I was a better student of tidiness than Quill. Mostly he looked like an unmade bed.” He pulled the down comforter from the bundle of linens and held it up. “For the bottom, I think.”
Before Willa could ask him what he meant, he was snapping it open and spreading it wide across the floor in front of the hearth. The displacement of air fanned the flames. The embers grew brighter, glowed brilliant orange, and the tongues of fire twisted and fluttered and licked the stack of wood.
He did the same with both sheets and then added the quilt and wool blankets. When there was nothing left on the couch, he turned down the top sheet and then held out his hand. She thought he meant for her to put her hand in his, but then he said, “Pillows.”
Realizing she was getting ahead of herself, she flushed a little and tossed both pillows to him, one after the other. He laid them out side by side and looked to her as if for approval. She nodded and came to her feet without being invited to do so. She bent over the lamp and turned back the wick. “Less light now, I think.”
“All right.”
Willa thought he might extend his hand again or invite her to come stand beside him, but he did neither. He knelt on top of the blankets and began to unbutton his shirt. She felt rather foolish standing there with her arms hanging at her sides, so she unfastened her belt. It was akin to putting the cart before the horse because she had not removed her boots, and her trousers were not coming off until she did.
No one had thought to ask her if she wanted to put on a dress before the ceremony, and it certainly had not occurred to her. Now she rather wished it had. She had several pretty dresses that she visited in her wardrobe from time to time. Cutter’s mother, acknowledged to be the finest seamstress in Jupiter, had made all of them, and she was not shy about telling Willa that she needed to stop admiring them and actually wear one. Now Mrs. Hamill would have it from her son that Willa had not worn one to her own wedding.
She couldn’t help it. She sighed.
“What is it?” asked Israel.
She simply shook her head. How to tell him it was a stray thought too depressing to run down? She carefully balanced herself on one foot while she removed the first boot and then shifted legs and did the same with the other. She put them beside the rocker before she unfastened the fly of her trousers and shimmied out of them. She kicked them to the side and looked down at herself. The wrinkled tails of her shirt hung almost to her knees and her cotton drawers ended a few inches below that. If it had been colder this morning, she would have been wearing a pair of long underwear, or maybe a union suit, but she had plucked the drawers out so now she was showing the small length of naked calf that was between the hem of her drawers and the tops of her thick woolen socks. She doubted it was a fashion Israel was used to seeing in the bedroom.
Willa dropped down to the bed he had made for them, first to her knees, and then lower until she was sitting cross-legged in front of him. Her entire left side absorbed heat from the fire, and she shifted just enough to feel more of the heat on her face and neck. She closed her eyes briefly, savoring the warmth and the moment, and never felt Israel’s hand coming toward her or passing behind her until he had the tail of her thick braid in his fist.
He pulled it forward so that it lay over her right shoulder and released it only after he had dragged his fist lightly down the length of it. “You don’t know how often I’ve wanted to do that or how much I want to see your hair unbound. Will you do that for me now? Unwind it?”
She was silent while she gave the request the consideration it deserved, but in the end she said, “No.” And then, “You do it.”
Israel exhaled a long, slow breath punctuated by a crooked, vaguely guilty smile. “I had prayed.”
Willa started to laugh softly but the sound was aborted when her breath hitched. He did not give her a chance to change her mind; his fingers were already tugging the tightly knotted rawhide string that kept the plait mostly intact. He undid the knot far quicker than she ever had, but then perhaps it was because he was more motivated.
Israel’s fingers slipped between the braided chains of hair, unwinding them slowly from the bottom up. Her hair revealed itself as one silky wave after another, a tide of dark water cascading under his fingertips, across his palm, and around the back of his hand. Strands of it circled his wrist, brushed his skin with the delicacy of a hummingbird at rest.
When the last three cords were unwound, he carefully combed them with his fingers, and where his fingers dipped more deeply and skimmed her shirt, he stroked her from shoulder to breast.
Willa held herself very still. It felt as if a shiver might go through her but it didn’t, not then. Instead a pinwheel of sparks skittered through her belly, and where Israel touched her, his fingers left a wake of fire.
Israel’s hand drifted to her knee and lay there lightly. His eyes searched her face, and she wondered about the view he had. Did she look anxious, eager, or perhaps afraid? She felt some measure of all those things, but then she reasoned that every woman since Eve, regardless of experience, likely felt the same.
Israel changed position so t
hat he mirrored hers and sat cross-legged opposite her. He took her hands in his, brushing the knuckles with his thumbs. “You look as if you are entertaining very deep, possibly very dark, thoughts. Is there something you want to say or maybe ask?”
Willa’s tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Even if she had a thought she could pluck and present, she would not have been able to speak it aloud. Israel seemed to have correctly interpreted what was happening because he rose suddenly in a single fluid motion and disappeared into the hallway. He was not gone long and returned somewhat triumphantly with two glasses and what remained of the last bottle of whiskey Happy had brought to the table.
“I think a drink is in order,” he said, dropping easily into the cross-legged position he had abandoned moments earlier. “I could use one, and I am realizing that we never toasted each other.” He splashed both glasses with whiskey and set the bottle aside.
Willa accepted the glass he handed her and turned it so the firelight reflected in the amber liquid began to dance.
Israel nodded his head toward her glass. “Go on. Take a drink first to loosen your tongue, then we’ll toast.”
Willa sipped the whiskey, and now the fire inside it danced on her tongue. She let it play there before she swallowed. As heat lined her throat, she said, “It’s occurred to me that all the usual things have been said tonight.”
“There are no rules. Say what is unusual.”
“All right.” She raised her glass and was glad to see that her hand did not tremble. “To you, Israel Court McKenna, for having the uncommonly fine sense to accept my proposal. I mean to be a good wife to you, and I hope, a better friend.” When his hand did not rise, but rather seemed suspended, she extended her arm several more inches and touched her glass to his. She thought it might have been the soft clink of the glasses that made him start. He withdrew his hand and drank, taking all of it in a single swallow.