by Griggs, Winnie; Pleiter, Allie; Hale, Deborah; Nelson, Jessica
Katrine planted her hands on her hips. “But—”
“Mrs. Fairhaven, don’t you let her leave until she’s satisfied with her purchases and don’t you let her put them on her account. I’ve strict orders from the reverend.”
“You’ve no such—” Katrine started to protest, but the door had already shut behind Clint. She was sure she heard his chuckle echo down the street.
She turned back from the door, only to find Polly Fairhaven eagerly hoisting two bolts of good broadcloth. “I’ve some lovely buttercream for a blouse, and what about gray or navy for the skirts? No sense keeping to mourning blacks all the way out here.”
If only she could tell Polly there was no sense in keeping to mourning blacks at all. In time, that would come—she had to hold on to the truth of that. Right now, the prospect of new and finely fitting clothes called to her like the sweetest of confections. Katrine shrugged and offered a smile. “You heard the sheriff. All of it.”
*
“Shall we say grace?”
Alice extended her hand to Clint, as joining hands for dinner grace had always been the Thornton tradition. It wasn’t so hard to take at Sunday afternoon suppers with lots of guests around and a groaning tableful of food.
Tonight’s smaller foursome for a midweek supper meant Clint had to take Katrine’s hand during grace. He tried not to make a fuss about it, but a cannon went off in his chest when Katrine placed her hand in his. He felt the smoothness of her skin alongside the roughness of the bandage that still covered the deepest of his gashes. Even as he tried to hold her hand as lightly as possible, his mind shot back to the night of the fire. He was grateful prayer required him to bow his head, as looking Katrine in the eyes would prove too much at the moment.
“Bless this food to our bodies, keep us grateful for Your provision and Your gift of salvation. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” Even Elijah’s short grace was far too long to be touching Katrine’s tiny hand. It twitched a bit in his grasp, and he knew the moment was as awkward for her as it was for him. It had become torture and bliss to be around her lately, like one of her beloved roses—too appealing not to risk the angry thorns.
“Gideon couldn’t come tonight?” Clint asked, wishing there were more folks around the table than just the four of them.
“Too busy with his horses,” Alice replied. “You know how he is with those animals. Plus, I think his side is bothering him again. That accident with the horse was weeks ago, but I told him he should still take it easy.”
“Never did do what he was told,” Lije teased, patting his wife’s hand. “Don’t take it personal.”
“He’s been paying us no mind his whole life,” Clint offered. “’Specially when it comes to animals.”
“And Walt,” Katrine added. “He is wonderful to Evelyn’s boy. They make a fine family.” Her voice held true admiration.
Alice handed a basket of bread to Clint. “Katrine made her potato bread, Clint. Lije said it’s a favorite of yours.” Clint didn’t care for the look in her eyes, as if she were making matches where she had no business doing so.
“I did say it was tasty.” He gave Alice his darkest nothing more than that look as he took a slice and handed back the basket.
“I like it, too,” offered Lije, ever the peacekeeper. He took the basket from Alice’s hands and gave himself two slices. “Lars must eat—must have eaten well.” He tried to correct himself before the comment, but there was no way to take it back. “I’m sorry, Miss Katrine, that was thoughtless. I miss him and still can’t quite believe he is gone.”
“It is how I feel, too,” Katrine said. Clint had to admire her careful choice of words. She was smart enough to push a change in subject. “How is the Nelson baby, Alice? She was so tiny. I have prayed for her every day this week.” Clint noticed she had barely eaten any food on her plate, and she hadn’t touched much of the picnic lunch they had the other day, either. Even though he imagined it was normal for folks in grief to lose their appetites, he wondered if Alice or Lije had noticed how much thinner she looked.
“Oh,” said Alice, beaming, “Daisy is just fine. She may be small, but she’s got lots of fight in her. I expect she’ll hold her own against all those brothers.”
“Five brothers,” Clint said, catching Lije’s eye across the table. “Can you imagine the fights? There were only three of us and we tore each other to pieces twelve times over.”
“But we always had each other,” Lije said with a warm look toward Clint. His hand covered his wife’s. “And good things have come along.”
“A big family is a wonderful blessing,” Alice added, her eyes on her husband. “Especially out here. Come harvest, Don Nelson will be glad for all those strapping young boys and their strong backs.” She dished herself some more potatoes, handing the bowl to Clint when she was done. “I only pity Louise—that’s a passel of hungry mouths to cook for and it will only get worse as they grow.”
“A happy task, ja?” Katrine smiled at Alice. The longing for a home and family of her own was all over her face, Clint recognized. No wonder Lars had spent so much time pondering how God would send her a husband—it was plain she wanted one, and she was of more than sufficient age to be settling down on her own. Clint kept waiting for the day when such a notion of a wife and family wouldn’t stab him in the ribs, when he’d find a way to be satisfied with his role as uncle and protector. It wasn’t coming near soon enough. The way Katrine kept poking into his thoughts, it had better hurry up and arrive.
“Have you written down any stories since…the fire?” Lije’s voice was full of tender concern. “I saw your journals by your cot and hoped you found some comfort in that. It’s a marvelous gift you have. Don’t lose it.”
“Mostly, I write to Lars.”
Clint’s jaw tightened. Were she Lije or Gideon, Clint would have found a way to kick her foot under the table for the slipup.
“It is my way of saying goodbye, I suppose,” Katrine went on, and Clint felt a stab of guilt for his first reaction.
“Well, no one can fault you for that.” Clint found himself wondering if Lije had told Katrine the story of his own loss, having watched his fiancée succumb to the same influenza epidemic that took Gideon’s wife and child. Yes, sir, the Thornton men were no strangers to grief. Some days that was the only silver lining Clint could find to his solitary future. If a man had no family, he had no family to lose. “Perhaps when we order church supplies we can include more journals for you.” He turned to Clint. “Were you able to order all the supplies for Katrine’s cabin?”
Clint was glad for a safer subject of conversation. “The smithy’s making the last of the nails and hinges, so it’s just a matter of manpower from here on in. The foundation’s laid, so it’s just the walls—”
“And the windows,” Katrine cut in. Hang her, every time he got to thinking she was a frail thing she’d go and show him the strength of her spine. It did something to his heart he didn’t like one bit.
“And the windows. And the roof.”
Alice raised an eyebrow. “Windows?”
Clint parked an elbow on the table and tried to keep himself from rolling his eyes. “Miss Brinkerhoff has insisted the new cabin have a window.”
“Two,” Katrine corrected.
“Well,” said Alice, clearly aware that there was more going on here than the finer points of cabin structure, “windows are a fine thing to have, and I need the good light for nursing. I only wish the flies and the winter wind didn’t share my opinion.”
Now it was Lije’s turn to look beleaguered. “Alice has been after me to get some pane glass for the home and the infirmary.”
“What?” teased Clint, glad to feel the earlier tension clear the room. “Before stained glass for the church?”
“I have plans,” Lije replied.
“And I have patients,” Alice added.
“Now all you need is patience, my sweet.” Lije softened his jest with a tender kiss to his wife’s cheek. Clint tur
ned his attention to his plate while Katrine found something important to adjust in her long blond braid. He was happy for his brother—he truly was—but watching all that wedded bliss with Katrine just one seat away stung worse than a whole nest of hornets.
He’d put in twice the hours at the Brinkerhoff cabin tomorrow. For crying out loud, he’d work all night getting Katrine’s walls and roof in place just to keep from having to endure another dinner like this.
Chapter Ten
Frustration proved to be a mighty fine incentive, for Clint seemed to do twice the work in half the hours on the Brinkerhoff cabin Thursday morning. It helped that he’d managed to convince Katrine to stay home and make use of Evelyn’s sewing machine. It didn’t help one bit that he’d gotten the walls up far enough to begin setting the holes for the window—windows, he corrected himself with an unsuppressed smile. The thought brought a whole mess of distraction with it.
He stood inside the walls, looking overhead to judge the angle of the sun. One window facing east, one facing west. Only not directly opposite each other, so as not to give a strong wind too much of an invitation in winter. Squinting to measure against his raised hand, he tried to imagine the best height. She was nearly as tall as he.
Hang it, he knew exactly how tall she was. His chest remembered the exact place where her shoulders had fallen against him as they rode from the fire. He knew, without actually remembering if she had ever been that close to him, exactly how she would tuck under his shoulders if he held her. His memory had somehow catalogued the angle of her neck as she looked up at him. It was as fixed in his brain as the sideways glance she gave Lars when she was annoyed with him, or the way her entire face changed whenever she spoke to children.
He pulled a pencil from his pocket, marked a spot on the wall log and went to fetch the ax.
“I hope that’s not for me.” He hadn’t even seen Lije come around the corner of the cabin.
“Very funny.”
Lije walked around the half-built walls, giving a low whistle once he’d made the complete circle. “You’re in the wrong line of work, brother.”
“I thought you were in favor of my being sheriff. Peace and justice, order and such.”
“Oh, I am.” Lije pulled a bandana from his pocket and wiped his brow. The morning had been hot and windless. Clint’s own shirt was already soaked. “Only I never realized how fast you can raise a cabin. I think this is going up even faster than Gideon’s did, and there were a whole mess of folks helping out with that.”
Returning the ax to its place among his other tools, Clint eyed his brother. “What’s it to you? You two newlyweds missing your privacy?” It came out sharper than Lije deserved, but his brother’s overflow of marital happiness last night stuck in Clint’s craw.
Clint deserved every bit of the scowl Lije gave him. “You know me better than that. And I know you better than to wonder just what it is you’re chopping out here.”
This was the hard part of having a minister in the family. Lije was forever tending to the state of souls, and brotherly souls were entirely too close at hand.
“I’m chopping wood.” Clint overemphasized the words, as if explaining it to young Walt rather than a learned older brother. “Takes such a thing to make a cabin.” Trying to outguess Lije’s thinking, Clint added, “And no, I’m not working out my grief over Lars. Although I’m not sure what it’d be to you even if I was.”
Lije always looked after his brothers, but now he wore what Clint privately called his “Pastor Face,” a compassionate look usually accompanied by a firm hand on a shoulder. “You’ve lost a dear friend in the worst possible way. No one would fault you for taking it hard.”
Clint chose not to reply. Not that it stood any chance of ending Lije’s pastoral care, but it was worth a shot.
“Still,” Lije went on, “this doesn’t look like grief to me.”
Clint shifted back on one hip and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Really, now.” This felt too much like the time Clint cut down one of Cousin Obadiah’s apple trees and Lije decided he’d been showing the guardian how much he hated him. Truth was, Clint was just tired of getting stung by the bees gathering outside his bedroom window. Lije was always stuffing emotional complications into simple actions. “What all does this look like, other than a man building a cabin? And if I tell you I don’t really want to know, will that change anything?”
“Gideon likes to take things apart when he’s frustrated. You, you like to put things together. Judging by the rate of speed here, I’d say you’ve got a king-size bee in your bonnet.”
“I’m not much for bonnets, if you haven’t noticed.”
Lije narrowed his eye, as if analyzing why he’d chosen to respond about the bonnet rather than deny his irritation. Some days talking to Lije was like poking a path through a field of bear traps. “Bothered by a bonnet, are you?”
“No.” Clint nearly growled the word, feeling like the aforementioned bear who tread wrong and heard snap. He picked up the ax again, hoping to cue Lije into an exit.
Lije simply removed his coat and picked up a hammer. “Need some help?”
Not from you. It comes with too much conversation. Against his better judgment, Clint nodded toward eight shaved planks and a tin of nails. “Think you can square those up?”
“Miss Katrine’s pair of windows?”
Suddenly Clint was sure he didn’t want help, not especially with Katrine’s beloved windows. Still, if he changed his mind, Lije would be on him like flies to honey. Lije was looking at him funny enough as it was. “Yep. But you won’t help me much if you can’t square ’em up.” He hoped Lije would take his scowl as perfectionism.
Lije put the hammer down. “I have many gifts, but despite the example of our Lord, carpentry has never been one of them.”
Clint laughed. It was true. Gideon and he had enjoyed several laughs at Lije’s expense over what the Brave Rock Church would be like if the reverend were required to build it. The structure was coming along nicely, but only because Lije supervised rather than lent a hand. “I think God sets fine stock in men who know their limits.”
He immediately regretted uttering a sentence with the word God in it. There were no short conversations about faith with Lije. “I think God sets fine stock in men who save lives. Still, building Miss Katrine a new cabin doesn’t have to be your penance for not being able to save Lars.”
Clint didn’t look up, but sunk the ax blade into a log to start the notch that settled it into the log underneath. “That’s what you think this is?”
“I think you’re working too hard at something others could help you do. I don’t know why you think you have to do this alone.”
It hadn’t struck Clint until just this moment that he had, indeed, taken it on himself. Only it wasn’t as Lije thought—it wasn’t some self-inflicted punishment. It felt more like the only true part he could play in Katrine’s life. There was no “have to” about it—this was a “want to” kind of thing. “You know I like doing things on my own.” It sounded like a weak excuse even to his own ears.
“No, I don’t think you really do. I’ve seen you at our table, at church, with folks. Gideon may prefer the company of animals, but you deny yourself the company of people. I think you believe you have to do things on your own because—”
Clint cut him off with a mighty swing of the ax—so hard it split the log instead of finishing the wedge cut. “That’s about enough, Lije.”
“I know it’s not—”
“I said leave it.” He kicked the log off the rack that held it in place. “Go tend your flock however you like but I’ll ask you to back down off this right now.”
The look in Lije’s eyes, however, held little yield. A silent standoff began between them, Clint shifting his grip on the ax and Lije holding irritatingly still. Clint hated when Lije got this way—it always made him feel as if his private feelings weren’t all that private.
“Lars’s death is not your fault.
” Lije’s words were low and steady.
Clint came dangerously close to shouting “Lars’s death isn’t even real!” Short of his own blood, Lars was about the only man whose safety would drive Clint to the extreme of keeping such truth to himself. Honestly, if Lije stayed one more minute, Clint couldn’t be sure if he would tell his brother, or sock him. Instead, he did the only thing he could think of to do: he turned his back and walked away.
Let Lije think it was guilt that drove him to work so hard. Clint knew what it really was. And he knew why it was so much worse.
*
Some June afternoons Katrine found the Oklahoma territories to be as close to Heaven as she could imagine. When the heat let up and the whole prairie turned out in freshly sprung color, Katrine could tell herself the happiest of stories. Almost without effort, she could build a picture in her mind of a big noisy family tending a bursting vegetable garden, of pink roses turning their faces up to fluffy white clouds like the ones that filled Friday’s wide blue sky. Days like today she could almost lay aside the dark images of their burned house, replacing them instead with the vision of a white board cottage with blue calico curtains fluttering in the breeze. Someday—soon, she prayed—Lars would come down out of his hiding place and back to life. They’d put this whole awful episode behind them and make new lives. Big, wide-open-space lives filled with happiness.
Years ago she and Lars had talked about such details, dreaming together about the families they would raise side by side. Of course, back then it had taken much more imagination, and never had she dreamed it would be so far out west as Oklahoma. Still, she and Lars had invented their futures together often—it had served as their favorite diversion on the nights when that future felt far away. Their sharing had offered distraction from hungry nights back east when all they’d had to eat was what she could scrounge together from scraps at the saloon. They had sat on the floor of the tiny, dingy boardinghouse room and taken turns describing their houses, losing themselves in complicated, flowing Danish descriptions, never having to reach for the right English word. They’d shared stories again as they ventured out west, using the same distraction when hunting was poor or Lars’s traps would come up empty. Now, she used the diversion to keep her from loneliness or worry.