The Hired Man

by Lynna Banning

  “Filling up the tub isn’t ‘doing laundry,’” she called.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  She settled back to watch him. She knew the washboard hung on the back porch hook, but she made no move to tell him where it was. And he didn’t ask. Ha! He knew nothing about doing laundry.

  He shaved more soap into the tub and swirled the clothes around in the hot water. “Got a plunger?” he called.

  A plunger? She had no idea what he meant. She waited until she knew the water was beginning to cool, brought out the washboard and propped it in the tub. Then she started scrubbing the small undergarments up and down across the metal ridges. It was hard work, and she had to take frequent rests. Just as she reached for a pair of her laciest drawers, Cord knelt beside her and pushed her hands away.

  “You’re tired,” he said.

  “I am not tired. I do laundry every single week.”

  He bent over the washboard and started scrubbing. “Maybe that’s why you’re not getting well, Eleanor. You work too hard.”

  “I do not work too hard!” She had to stop for breath. “I...am...not the least bit...tired.” She reached to snatch her drawers away from him, but he batted her hand away.

  “On second thought,” he said, “you’d make a pretty good poker player. You’re getting to be an expert at lying.”

  She plunged her hand into the tub and scooped hot soapy water out onto his shirt. “Hey,” he yelped. “Cut that out!”

  “I couldn’t resist,” she admitted.

  He grinned and splashed a double handful of suds down the front of her skirt. She gasped and her mouth stayed open to shout at him. “You cheater!”

  “Truce!” he said with a laugh. “We’re even.”

  Molly was giggling from the back steps.

  Cord propped both fists at his waist. “You have to admit I know my way around a washtub,” he announced. “Don’t I, Molly?”

  “Yeah!” the girl yelled.

  Eleanor made a face. “Well, maybe.”

  “Maybe, nothing. I’ve won the bet.”

  She took a deep breath. “Maybe,” she said again.

  “After supper,” he said quietly. “Right now, my hands are all wet.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Cord tossed Eleanor’s lacy drawers back into the soapy wash water and to her intense relief began scrubbing one of Danny’s shirts. Eleanor busied herself uncoiling the clothesline from the corner of the back porch and attaching it to the ash tree near the chicken house.

  When she had pegged the last of the clean laundry to the line, she retreated to the kitchen, and Cord went off to the henhouse to see how raccoon-proof it was. Big holes gaped in the chicken wire, large enough for any animal smaller than a coyote to squeeze its way in.

  He hitched up the wagon and drove into town for lumber and more chicken wire. On the way back he picked up Danny, walking home from school at foot-dragging pace. The first thing out of the boy’s mouth was a question. “Did you prove you could do the wash, Cord?”

  “Sure did. Your ma’s madder than a wet hen about it.”

  “Women always wanna be right about everything, huh? I guess they’re partic’lar about a lot of things like washin’ clothes. It makes no sense.”

  “It makes sense to them, Dan, something we men ought to keep in mind. Women take pride in their work, just like we do.”

  When they rattled into the yard, Eleanor was gathering in the dry clothes and Molly was folding them none too neatly into the wicker basket and chattering away as usual. Cord unloaded the wagon, then noticed Danny and Molly were holding a whispered conference on the back porch. He caught the words “wet hen” from Danny and heard delighted giggles from Molly.

  Eleanor had made chicken stew for their supper that evening. When she served it up, along with a pan of biscuits and fresh-churned butter, she seemed unusually short-tempered and out of breath.

  They ate in uneasy silence. After his second cup of coffee, Cord pushed back from the table and stood up. “I’m gonna repair the holes in the chicken house. Danny, you want to help me?”

  “And me, too,” Molly sang.

  Eleanor’s face looked pasty. “Let’s wash up the dishes first,” Cord suggested.

  “I will wash the dishes,” Eleanor announced, her tone crisp. “I am not helpless, just a little tired.”

  Danny caught Cord’s gaze and raised his eyebrows. What’s going on with Ma? Cord tipped his head toward the brimming laundry basket in the corner, and the boy nodded. When he started for the back door, both children scooted out ahead of him. Before he could follow them, Eleanor gathered up the plates and stomped over to the sink.

  “I suppose you can iron as well as do laundry?” she shot at him.

  “You want me to answer that?”

  “Yes. No! I suppose you want to make a bet about that, too?”

  He chuckled. “I’ve never been within a yard of a sadiron,” he responded. “I wear my shirts wrinkled.”

  A glimmer of a smile touched her mouth. Before he reached the back door, she swooped over and brushed her lips against his cheek. “There. Now you’ve been paid!”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

  “But I just kissed you! Now we’re even.”

  “No,” he said again. “We’re not. A bet is a bet. I want a real kiss.”

  “But...”

  “And,” he continued, “I get to say when.”

  He didn’t think her eyes could get any bigger or look more steely. She opened her mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. “Now just one min—”

  “I won that bet fair and square, Eleanor, and I’ve been thinking about that kiss all day. You’ll just have to wait to pay up because I have to admit that I damn well like thinking about it.”

  She hurled the biscuit pan at him. He managed to escape out the back door, but he heard it bounce off the wood and clatter to the floor.

  “What was that noise?” Molly and Danny said in unison.

  “Just your mama letting off a bit of steam. Come on, kids, let’s go fix up the henhouse.”

  Eleanor sank onto the kitchen chair and gulped down the last of her cold coffee. Why, why did Cord make her so mad? For just an instant she considered adding a splash of whiskey to her cup, then thought better of it. She had bread dough to mix and set to rise. And Doc Dougherty had ordered her to take a nap every afternoon, so after she finished the dishes she guessed she should follow his advice.

  She was most definitely feeling uneasy. Maybe it was because she was extra-tired from being on her feet all day. Or maybe it was thinking about Cord kissing her.

  The last kiss she could remember was the morning seven years ago when Tom had gone off to war, and that was just one of his hasty pecks. Tom had never been demonstrative that way. Sometimes she wondered why she had married him. True, he had rescued her from her parents’ miserable household, where her preacher father lectured her every day at the top of his voice about sin and the devil and her schoolteacher mother constantly criticized her lack of refined manners and social graces.

  As a girl, Eleanor had preferred fishing and swimming and playing kickball with the neighboring children. But because her playmates had been immigrants from Poland, her mother had loudly disapproved.

  When Tom proposed, she knew she would never again have to spend Sundays on her knees in prayer or serving tea to dour, starched Portland ladies who were prejudiced against almost everyone. She couldn’t wait to leave Portland and come to Smoke River and the farm, where Tom planned to grow apples.

  But as the years passed, she’d grown increasingly unhappy. Tom had struck her just once, but once had been enough. After that she’d taken care never to annoy or displease him, and it had been just like living with her critical, disapproving mo
ther and her rigid, unsmiling father. Later, when Danny was born, she’d resolved she would never raise her own children without the love and understanding she had missed when she was young.

  Tom had always been more interested in the farm than in her, and she had to admit she had only the most elementary understanding of what was between a man and a woman. After he left for the War, all the responsibility of running the farm had terrified her at first, but as the years passed she grew increasingly confident. She was capable and hardworking, and she liked being independent. Her mother had always lectured her about a woman’s place, but Eleanor had observed such subservience in her mother’s marriage that deep down she knew it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t loving. It wasn’t even kind.

  A woman on her own could certainly prosper, even on an apple farm with two young children. Her long bout with pneumonia this spring hadn’t dimmed her zeal, though it had certainly decimated her stamina. She simply had to get her strength back because this year’s apple harvest promised to be ever better than last year’s, and she needed the money. She would be ready. She would be able to handle that or anything else that came up.

  But now Cord wanted to kiss her! The mere thought sent butterflies careening around in her stomach. It would be over in two seconds, but that thought didn’t help much. Still, she reasoned, after the dreaded two seconds, things on the farm would go on as they had before. A kiss was a small thing, really.

  She wondered why she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cord knew it was Sunday because once again the front porch was crowded with young men, all pressed and shiny, guzzling lemonade and gobbling up Eleanor’s molasses cookies. Molly was in the barn, trying to stuff a kitten into one of her doll dresses; Danny skulked near the honeysuckle-covered trellis, spying on his mother’s visitors.

  Eleanor reclined as usual in the porch swing, her legs tucked up under her blue gingham skirt, rocking listlessly back and forth and saying nothing.

  Cord jammed his boot down onto the shovel for the fortieth time in the last half hour, spading up the ground behind the two maple trees in the front yard where Eleanor wanted a flower bed. As he worked he kept half his attention focused on the porch. He wasn’t exactly sure why, since Danny’s sharp ears would hear anything troubling, but he kept his eyes on the porch.

  Today there were three gents perched on the front steps below where Eleanor sat rocking in the swing. Two of them must be brothers, since they were dressed almost alike, one in a green-striped shirt and one in red stripes, buttoned tight at the wrist even though the afternoon was scorching. The third male was the red-haired blusterer from last Sunday.

  Cord liked seeing two or three men on the porch with Eleanor. Just one man might sweet-talk his way onto the swing next to her and then slip an arm around her and...who knew what. He figured there was safety in numbers.

  Sometimes young Sammy Greywolf drove his mother, Rosie, out from town with a basket of tomatoes or some flower seeds, and occasionally old Mrs. Hinckley and her sister paid a short call. But usually the Sunday-afternoon visitors were male.

  Masculine laughter drifted from the porch and he clenched his jaw. Why did those men keep coming out here? As far as he could tell, Eleanor gave them no encouragement, and besides, she was a married woman. Today they’d brought no mail and no bags of dried beans or coffee from the mercantile had been unloaded. It was plain they’d come out to the farm only to see Eleanor.

  He turned over another shovelful of rich dark earth, chopped up the clods and tried to keep his mind on Eleanor’s garden plot instead of her pale cheeks and gray eyes.

  Molly appeared, clutching a wriggling kitten dressed in a bright pink doll dress. “Whatcha doing, Cord?”

  “Digging a garden for your mama.”

  “How come those other men aren’t helping?”

  Cord rested one hand on the spade handle and looked down at the girl. “I’d guess they don’t want to get dirt on their fancy duds.”

  “You don’t got dirt on you,” Molly pointed out.

  “My duds aren’t fancy, honey. My duds are just plain old duds.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m working, not visiting with your mama.”

  “Do you ever wear fancy duds?”

  He chuckled. “Not often, no. Last time I wore anything fancy was the day I got marr—” He bit off the rest.

  Molly patted the kitten’s pink dress. “Do you think Roscoe’s dress is fancy duds?”

  “Roscoe! Is that your kitty’s name? Seems kinda funny to put a pink dress on a boy cat, doesn’t it?”

  She turned wide blue eyes up to his. “I din’t know how to tell if it was a boy cat or a girl cat, so I decided Roscoe was a boy.”

  Cord chuckled and poised his boot over the spade again, but her next question stopped him cold.

  “Cord, how do you tell a boy cat from a girl cat?”

  He worked hard to keep from laughing out loud. He sure wasn’t going to get into another explanation about sex with one of Eleanor’s kids. “You ask your mama to show you, all right?”

  Before he could stop her, she was racing for the porch, the kitten clutched in her arms. “Mama! Mama!”

  He stomped down hard on the shovel. After a minute he heard guffaws of laughter coming from the front porch, and he risked a peek. Eleanor was cradling both Molly and the kitten on her lap. Her face was a study, her cheeks bright red and her mouth pressed into a line straight as a fence post. The men at her feet were slapping their knees and laughing.

  All at once he wanted to toss a shovelful of dirt all over their shiny Sunday shoes.

  * * *

  Eleanor set Molly on her feet and watched her scamper away to the barn. Roscoe. Well, why not? It was easier to misname the kitten than explain why “Roscette” would be more appropriate. She gazed down on the Mankewicz brothers, and suddenly she wanted to be anywhere but sitting on her porch swing discussing the price of winter wheat with two—no, three—of the dullest men in the county. She wanted to be in her kitchen rolling out piecrust, or at the dressmaker’s in town, selecting calico for a new dress for Molly, or...working alongside Cord spading up the soil for her new flower bed.

  Well, why not? She brought the swing to an abrupt halt. “Gentlemen,” she announced, “I am afraid I must draw your visit to a close. There is something I must attend to.”

  The men goggled at her, then rose, stammered polite goodbyes and edged off the porch to the buggy hitched outside the front gate. The minute they were out of sight, she raced up the stairs to her bedroom, threw on her blue denim work skirt and an old chambray shirt of Tom’s and jammed her worn work boots on her feet.

  Cord looked up when she walked out past the maple tree. “What happened to your gentlemen callers?”

  “Urgent business,” she said blandly. She needn’t tell him it was her business that was urgent.

  “All three of ’em gone?”

  She didn’t answer. He glanced down at her partially spaded garden plot. “I’m only half done, Eleanor. It’s too soon to plant anything.”

  “There’s another shovel somewhere in the barn, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah, I think so. What do you want a shovel for?” he asked suspiciously.

  “So I can spade up some dirt,” she said pointedly.

  “What for?” he repeated.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cord. So I can plant the flower seeds Rosie Greywolf gave me before I have to start supper.”

  He leveled a long, penetrating look at her. “Shovel’s in the barn. Might be you left your good sense in the house.”

  She found a small-size spade with the other tools hanging from sturdy hooks on one wall. Funny, she didn’t remember hanging up any tools. She’d always just leaned the hoes and rakes and shovels in one dusty
corner.

  When she returned, Cord studied the spade in her hand, gave her a look of disbelief and exasperation, and bent over his shovel. He had outlined the plot with wooden stakes and string; she decided she would start digging at the opposite end from where he was working.

  Her first shovel stroke clanked into a rock. She repositioned it and drove it into the earth again. Another rock. She tried to dig around it, but the spade kept hitting nothing but a big stone of some kind. Cord stopped digging, walked over and lifted the spade out of her hands. “Whatever it is, it’s bigger than a rock.” He made short, shallow strokes in widening circles until the cuts outlined an oblong shape, and then he started to dig in earnest. At last he stopped, one foot resting on his shovel.

  “It’s a marker of some sort,” he said.

  “What kind of marker?”

  “I think it’s a gravestone.”

  She dropped her spade and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “You want me to uncover it?”

  She nodded. Ten minutes later he smoothed the dirt off a slab of stone with some faint words chiseled on it.

  “‘Amanda Martin,’” he read aloud. “‘Eighteen thirty-three to eighteen thirty-six.’”

  “Oh!” Tears flooded into Eleanor’s eyes. “Oh, she was only three years old!” She turned away and clutched her belly. She heard Cord’s shovel hit the ground and then his arms were around her.

  “I... Oh, the p-poor little th-thing.” His hand moved to the back of her head, pressing her face into his shoulder, but her tears kept coming. She couldn’t seem to stop them, even though she was wetting his shirt.

  “Do—do you think there are more graves here?”

  “Don’t know. I’ll have to dig around some to find out.” His voice sounded rumbly inside his chest and so somber it started her crying all over again.

  “I’m s-sorry, Cord. It’s so sad, only three y-years old. I wonder why—”