by Natalie Dean
‘We’re Americans here,” the woman continued, glaring at Kasia with vivid brown eyes.
“I’m an American, too,” Kasia said proudly. “I was born in America. We’re all Americans.”
“You certainly speak like you’re an American. You don’t have much of an accent; less than Bonnie has.”
She couldn’t explain to this woman that, all her life, she’d wanted to better herself and the way to do that was not to sound like an immigrant. She was an American and she wanted to sound like one. She had always taken pains with her speech. Hayes had noticed and commented on the way she spoke. She didn’t sound like an immigrant girl, he’d told her.
“Mama told us to speak the way we learned to in school,” she answered. “We spoke Polish at home and English in school, but she didn’t want our English to sound like Polish people were speaking it.”
“This is the mother who sent you across the country with a baby in your belly? To deceive a man who thought he was marrying someone else? Honestly, I don’t think very much of your mother right now.”
Kasia’s chin went up and her eyes fastened themselves to the old woman’s face. “She is my mother, and she’s a good one,” she said. “She raised us after Papa died and she made sure we had food to eat and clean clothes to wear. We didn’t have a lot, but we were always clean and cared for.”
The woman’s stern features eased slightly. “Family is what matters girl. You’ll learn that living here. We’re family and Bonnie is a Kennesaw now. We’ll figure out what’s to become of you, but this is your home now. I don’t hold with foreign names. You’re Katarina or some such nonsense, aren’t you?” Without giving Kasia a chance to speak, Grandmother went on. “You’ll be Katie. That’s short for Katherine.”
“My family calls me Kasia.”
“In Poland, maybe. This is Texas, and you’re Katie now.”
Chapter 11
Early December, 1885
Kasia preferred to take her meals with Elsie and Clem rather than sit down at the table for the evening meal when Will Henry was there. He never said anything to make her feel ill-at-ease, but his presence was a reminder that she was not Elzbieta and for that reason, she preferred to avoid him. Bonnie’s husband told her there was no need for that, but Kasia simply continued to eat with the Pearles, who seemed to enjoy her company. They had a little cabin close to the main ranch house. It wasn’t very big, but it felt cozy to Kasia and she felt welcome.
“Child, you have some more,” Elsie urged her. “Eat now while you can. In another month you’ll be scrambling to eat a forkful because that baby will be taking all your time.”
Elsie had never had children. She alluded to something that she described as a “woman’s complaint” but provided no details. However, she’d been with Mrs. Kennesaw since her girlhood and before the twins were even born and she had filled Kasia in on the family’s story.
“I’m going to get even fatter if I eat everything on my plate,” Kasia said.
Clem chuckled. “Nothing wrong with a round little momma,” he said. “Besides, the way you work, I don’t think any fat has a chance to get a head start on you.”
Kasia was used to working hard and she set to cleaning with zest. Mrs. Kennesaw didn’t comment but she’d noticed how much effort Katie, as she called her, put into scrubbing and polishing. Her parlor had never had such a glow to it; Katie seemed to have an endless knowledge of ingredients to make things smell better and do better. Kasia had learned of the praise from Bonnie, who had been told of her sister’s prowess by Mrs. Kennesaw directly.
Elsie had a different perspective. “You clean like someone used to own you,” she said.
Kasia wasn’t sure what that meant. Mama saw dirt as a foe to be vanquished and when Kasia went into service, she had impressed the housekeeper with her energy and her willingness to work hard. She’d started as a scullery maid, but she’d worked her way up to parlor maid in four years. She’d been proud of that. Was that pride her downfall? If she’d stayed a scullery maid, Hayes Gardner would never have noticed her. He’d never even have seen her.
“It’s so much easier to clean here,” Kasia explained. “There’s not the endless coal dust to fight. I almost don’t feel like I’m cleaning at all.”
“That coal must be something,” Elsie said, shaking her head at the thought. “Here, child, you have some more custard. It’s good for you in your condition.”
Kasia was smiling when she left their kitchen to return to the ranch. It was later than her usual return home, but she’d lingered with the Pearles over coffee and custard, talking about Christmas back home. When she was with them, she didn’t feel laden with the knowledge that she had broken the rules of the church and that she was damned for all eternity. She felt like a woman who was going to have a baby and, in the Pearles’ view, a baby was a blessing.
She was humming a Christmas song as she crossed the yard to return to the ranch, until a figure appeared from the house and she gasped. It was the walking man she saw almost every night, the one who walked across the grounds as if he were searching for something that daylight could not find for him.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said.
When he spoke, she realized that he wasn’t a lone stranger walking the earth like a spirit. He was the one Elzbieta was supposed to marry. She thought of him as the Texan, the twin brother to Bonnie’s husband. The silent man. The solitary man. He was standing in front of her with a saw in his hand. He saw her gaze fall to the tool he was carrying.
“Bonnie wants to start decorating,” he explained diffidently. “I figured I’d pick some branches from the holly trees.”
Helping to make a Christmas feel right for Bonnie was something Kasia could willingly do. “Do you need help?” she asked. “I can hold the branch while you saw it. I always helped my brothers at home.”
She didn’t look big enough to hold a twig, Will Henry thought. The tune she had been humming had been pretty. He wouldn’t mind hearing it again. It was easier, in the shadows and outside, to accept the fact that she was part of the Kennesaw household. He had noticed that she avoided him. He didn’t know what to say to her and it was easier to say nothing at all. But she was here now, and she wasn’t avoiding him.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “You should get inside before it gets too cold.”
“Cold?” she asked incredulously. “This isn’t cold to me. Back home, it’s been freezing for a month by now. I can help if you want me to, I don’t mind. I like being outside here.”
There didn’t seem to be any way out of it without being rude and Will Henry, however much he might choose to avoid the girl Grandmother insisted on calling Katie, didn’t want to be rude to her, especially when she’d offered to help.
“Okay,” he said finally.
She knew the way to the holly trees. She had noticed them right away; it was Kasia who tended to the flowers and kept them growing in the spring and summer back home. Mama tended the vegetables with a vigilant eye but didn’t have time for flowers; they were just pretty, but they didn’t provide food. Elsie had told her the names of the plants and trees that were growing on the Kennesaw property, many still flowering, and Kasia marveled again that the landscape could be so different in the same country.
“Bonnie wants to get things done early, before the baby comes,” Will Henry said and then abruptly fell silent.
“She was always that way,” Kasia replied. “Here, this is a nice branch, good and sturdy but with lots of holly berries on it. I’ll hold it while you cut it,” Kasia continued with the previous topic as if there had been no digression. “Bonnie never waited until the last minute to get things done. Mama always said that Bonnie had a task finished before Mama finished telling her what to do.”
Relieved that the mention of babies hadn’t upset Kasia, Will Henry chuckled. “She’s like that here, too. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“We’ve been baking a lot,” Kasia nodded. “Th
at’s what we do at home. We start earlier, so that we have good things to eat for Advent. We clean the house for Advent, too. The house must be spotless before Christmas.” She took hold of the branch with a firm grip so that Will Henry could easily saw it. “If you cut it right there, you’ll get this nice, full part of the branch and it’ll look especially fine on the parlor mantel over the fireplace.”
“Last year, Bonnie made a special supper for Christmas Eve.”
Kasia picked up the branch that had fallen and followed Will Henry to another spot.
“Wigilia,” Kasia said eagerly. “The Star Supper. We always do that at home. That’s when our brothers would go out and cut down boughs to decorate the house with.”
“That upside-down tree top had me and Z going. Bonnie was dead set on having it; Grandmother was none too pleased at cutting off the top of one of her trees, but she went along.”
“On Wigilia, we dress up in our very best to celebrate. We have such wonderful foods, but we can’t eat them until we’ve seen the first star in the sky. All the children go outside so they can tell us when the first star shows up. I always went out too, even though I wasn’t a child,” she admitted. “In a year, when the baby is older, you’ll be celebrating Dzien Świętego Mikołaja.”
“Maybe Bonnie will, but Grandmother won’t. She won’t celebrate a holiday she can’t pronounce.”
Kasia laughed. “It’s St. Nicholas Day, when children get treats for being good. Or a lump of coal if they’re bad. My brothers always left coal for me; they said that I fooled St. Nicholas but not them.”
She fell silent. Will Henry wondered if she was thinking of how different this Christmas would be from the ones she was used to. “Me and Z didn’t have sisters, or St. Nicholas Day,” he said quickly to fill the silence. “But I reckon Grandmother would have handed out coal to us, just on principle.”
“Mama said the boys were easier to raise than the girls,” Kasia said.
“You have a lot of brothers, don’t you?”
“Five brothers. Seven sisters. My youngest sister, the baby, is Anushka. She loves Christmas.” Thinking of Anushka, Kasia felt a sob in her throat.
Will Henry heard it. “You miss her,” he said, surprised that her emotion didn’t alarm him. Maybe it was because he was more familiar with sadness than any other feeling.
Kasia, not trusting herself to speak, just nodded.
“I think we’ve got enough holly branches,” Will Henry said. “We’d best get inside. If you catch a chill, your sister won’t be very happy with me.”
“I’ll carry some,” Kasia said, eager to hide the fact that she’d been on the verge of tears. The Texan must think that all she did was cry.
“You sure you can carry them?”
“They’re not heavy.”
They walked into the parlor together, arms filled with branches.
“Kasia helped me,” Will Henry said when all eyes fell upon the two of them as they entered.
“It seems that nothing will do if we don’t have a foreign Christmas,” Grandmother grumbled.
“Maybe we should have an authentic Texas Christmas,” Will Henry suggested.
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” his grandmother concurred, surprised to find an ally.
“Since Texas was originally Mexican territory, we could have Spanish traditions.”
Z was the first to burst out into gales of laughter at his brother’s effrontery in suggesting to their grandmother that Texas also had foreign roots. Bonnie and Kasia, not understanding the humor, looked at each other in bewilderment.
“You see,” Will Henry began, “before Texas joined the Union, Texas belonged to Mexico.”
“Before Texas joined the Union, Texas was an independent country,” Eldora Kennesaw snapped.
“And before that, it belonged to Mexico,” Will Henry reminded her.
“What happened?” Kasia wanted to know. “Was it like the war?” She has just been a very young child when the Great War that divided North and South had ended, but she’d heard of it. The mills, they said, ran night and day. The mine workers were always busy. The North fought the war with Pittsburgh steel and coal.
“To a Texan, it was The War,” Will Henry told her. “And, to a Texan, if it happened in Texas, it was bigger and more important than anything that happened anywhere else.”
“I’ll remind you both that you’re Texans through and through.”
“What she means is that we’re loud-mouthed braggarts,” Z said.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you two,” his grandmother complained. “You’re as impudent as two little children.”
“St. Nicholas is going to give us coal instead of treats,” Will Henry warned, trying to hide a smile as the others began to laugh, except for Grandmother, who scowled. But this time, Bonnie and Kasia both understood the jest and laughed as much as the men did.
By the time the evening came to an end, even Grandmother had mellowed, although she continued to chide them for their nonsense. Will Henry said that, on Christmas Eve, they were all going to go outside and watch the sky for the first star to appear, and they couldn’t eat until that star showed up. Grandmother said she’d never heard of anything so silly and then Will Henry replied that if the Wise Men could follow a star all the way to Bethlehem, he reckoned they could just watch for one to show up overhead. Kasia, not as familiar with Eldora Kennesaw’s antipathy to foreign ways, chattered about the foods that the family had eaten on Christmas Eve and Z kept everyone laughing as he tried to pronounce the words that Kasia and Bonnie spoke with familiar ease. Grandmother might have been more critical, but Will Henry was laughing too, and she’d have listened to someone recite the dictionary in every tongue but English if it kept that smile on her grandson’s face. She didn’t care about St. Nicholas Day or any of those other heathen-sounding words, and she’d never heard of eating carp for Christmas, but Will Henry was smiling and that was enough.
Later that night, as he lay in bed, Will Henry realized that he was still smiling about the pleasant evening they’d all had. It had felt like family. If he and Kasia had been married, they would have all been family. But the baby she carried . . . belonged to another man. And he was supposed to marry Elzbieta, not Kasia. He wondered what she thought about all of this? He couldn’t write to her now; there was no longer a connection between them.
Despite the mistake she’d made and the baby she carried, Bonnie’s little sister was in many ways an innocent girl. She was young for her years. She seemed as if she took a child’s joy in things that adults forgot to find delightful. What kind of man was that rich man’s son to seduce such an innocent girl and then abandon her with a child? If that man showed up in Texas, he’d soon learn the proper way to treat a woman, Will Henry thought.
Did Kasia still miss him, that rich boy who’d fathered the baby she carried? She kept herself busy during the day; he’d heard Elsie say that there never was such a girl for cleaning. A rich man’s son wouldn’t value a trait like being a diligent housekeeper, probably. They had servants to do that. Servants like Kasia. Then they seduced them, got a baby on them, and left them to fend for themselves. She was better off in Texas.
Chapter 12
Mid-December, 1885
“Why’s Kasia so jumpy?” Z asked Bonnie a couple of weeks later as they rode back from town with the provisions they’d need for Christmas dinner. “She doesn’t say much, and she seems kind of spooked. I just said good morning to her yesterday and she about jumped out of her shoes. Is it the baby?”
Bonnie hesitated. She hadn’t talked to Z about Kasia’s fears that the baby would be damned for being born out of wedlock and that Kasia was worried that she herself was to be punished for what she had done in conceiving a child to a man who wasn’t her husband. For a while after the night that they’d all shared in the Christmas decorating, Kasia had seemed happier, and not as uneasy when Will Henry was in the same room. She even seemed to be forgetting Hayes Gardner, perhaps beca
use he had certainly forgotten her. There had apparently been a peaceful acceptance between Kasia and Will Henry, although neither one gave any indication of anything more than that.
But lately, the closer the date came when Kasia expected her baby to be born, it was as if her unspoken fears haunted her. Bonnie knew that she herself could feel the weight of the anticipation for the coming of her baby, but she was a married woman with none of the apprehension that Kasia could not ignore. For Bonnie and Z, the birth was the culmination of their hopes and plans, the reason why men and women got married, and they were eager to meet their child.
Grandmother, too, was excited, although she showed her anticipation by complaining about unimportant things. No one paid much attention; everyone understood that for Grandmother, this first great-grandchild was the proof that her efforts to raise her grandsons to manhood had been a success.
“Yes . . .” Bonnie told him. Then she continued on to tell him about Kasia’s fears. Fortunately, Cabot was hitched to the wagon and even when Z stared at Bonnie and dropped the reins in disbelief at what she said, Cabot continued his easy, plodding pace.
Kasia, having none of those comforts, was dwelling on her fears. Mama had, no doubt, drawn a vivid picture of what torment awaited the damned who broke God’s laws. Bonnie would have tried to ease her sister’s mind had Kasia expressed her fears, but Kasia had been silent of late.
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Why would God send a baby into hellfire just because it was born?”
“You know it’s not that simple.”
“She’s not going to find a husband in the next week,” Z pointed out rationally. “She’s going to have to figure that God will forgive her.”