“Shall we eat?” he interrupted, pulling out the chair for, first, Charlotte, then Clara.
Arturo, mimicking him, hastened to squeakily scoot back the out-of-kilter chair for Romy, her customary place at the opposite end of the table from Duke. He glanced back at Romy, his speculation centered on her freckled face and more especially those lively eyes. Had she added yet another conquest with her crazy-ass appeal?
Amazingly, she had succeeded in manifesting a meal without burning any of its dishes, and the afternoon passed most agreeably, to his immense relief. She was eating little, pushing her food around on her plate and then surreptitiously passing bits to Ulysses, hovering beneath the table at her feet.
“Romy,” Charlotte prompted, “is there a similar day to Thanksgiving in Germany?”
“More like a harvest time celebration, Erntedankfest is.” She shifted about in her chair, as if uncomfortable with the subject, and looked from one ranch hand to another. “What about yuir Thanksgivings?”
Glen captured a hot butter-glazed roll from the chipped crockery plate being passed. “Hey, many years, I ate my Thanksgiving meal on a sawhorse at the Chicago Mission. That’s where Skinny Henry and I met.”
“What about yuirself, Jock?” she prodded.
“Auld Bob Kleberg, the manager of the King Ranch,” Jock replied between bites of the buttery garlic green beans he was shoveling in, “he made sure the lot of us Kineños got our bellies filled at Thanksgiving. And afterwards the Kings would host team roping, horseshoeing and rawhide braiding and such.”
Bud confessed, “I actually watched the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade. I remember seeing a giant balloon that was Felix the Cat.”
Clara’s eyes rounded. The girl reminded Duke so much of Charlotte at that age. “Oh, that must have been swell,” she said. “What is New York like?”
“Big,” he told her with a fourteen-year-old’s superior tone. “Like a giant maze. You could get lost in it and never find your way out.”
Duke looked at Micah. The quiet black man sat silent at the table’s far end, on Romy’s right. He, too, had been slipping Ulysses scraps that he thought Duke did not notice. “What about you, Micah? Any Thanksgiving memories?”
His spoon of creamed onions paused mid-way to his mouth. “Auh – uhh – Auh,” he stuttered, set down his spoon, and swiped his broad lips with the back of his fist. “Uhh, Auh can remember only one time. Mah mammy wrung the neck of a hen – and, uhh -- hung it on the clothes line for me to pluck its pinfeathers. Lordy, did it stink.”
“And yuirself, Duke?” Romy coaxed.
He could have contributed that last Thanksgiving, when his old man had drunk too much and picked up the baseball bat. “My ma made the most delicious pumpkin pie for Thanksgivings. Until the Great War, when the local food board urged sugar reduction. But no one could cook a Thanksgiving meal like she could.”
At the room’s sudden silence, he glanced from the tender turkey tidbit on his upraised fork to see Romy’s deflated expression, the merry eyes dulled, the gulp in her slender white throat.
“I think we each imagine our mothers were the best cook ever,” Charlotte interjected softly. “Whether true or not. And speaking of mothers, this mother needs to get her little one home to bed.”
In the brisk evening’s growing dark, with Ulysses padding behind, he walked her and Clara to their 1931 Model A, opening the door for each. Belatedly and ashamedly, he realized Romy had been right. She deserved the opportunity to learn to drive. If Charlotte could, why shouldn’t she?
He braced his palms on the driver’s side of the rolled-down window frame. “It was like old times tonight, Charlotte. You and Clara are welcome anytime at the S&S.” He bent his head to peer past her to her daughter. “Arturo can give you riding lessons, Clara.”
“Gee, that’d be swell, Duke,” the girl piped.
Charlotte said, “Don’t be a stranger in town, Duke. Our friendship, our relationship, means more to me than you most likely know.”
“The same goes for you, traveling this direction.”
She smiled up at him. “Well, you know the saying, ‘It’s a fur piece, friend.’”
He smiled, tapped the Ford’s door in farewell, and, thumbs jammed in his jeans pockets, slowly and thoughtfully strode back into the house to face another female.
He knew he had amends to make. Damn’t, this was exactly the sticky mess he knew he was opening himself to when he had agreed to hire on a female cook. If one of his hired hands had a problem with another ranch hand, he did not sulk eternally or weep or go off on a caterwauling tirade the way females did. No, he’d throw a few punches, letting off steam, and that’d be it.
In the kitchen, Duke found her vigorously scrubbing a scummy cast iron pan with steel wool, a monotonous task he had done all too often before he had left home. She didn’t look around as he entered – and he had to wonder if she didn’t hear him, as, curiously, happened occasionally – or if she was ignoring him.
He snagged a clean dish towel, its pattern duplicating the feed sack that now hung in pairs from the kitchen window.
At that point, she must have sensed his presence. She glanced up at him, and he scanned that small, angular face and tried to read the quicksilver thoughts hidden behind it. That green-eyed gaze was clear, without rancor.
From this mite of woman, a balls-to-the-walls reaction to his earlier unthinking and insensitive comment wouldn’t have surprised him. That should have eased his concern. Except she was a magician in concealing her feelings.
“Look, I’m sorry about what – ”
“Dunna be,” she replied in a matter-of-fact voice. “We both know me cooking isna to yuir taste. Besides, today was for getting a clearer idea in yuir noggin about the woman ye want to take to wife.”
He scrubbed his mustache. “I think I need a new noggin, putting up as I seem to be with this matchmaking nonsense.”
“Next month, at Christmas,” she went on blithely, “we’ll audition Sally Kirtley for yuir wife.”
Sally was like him, one of his own kind who was quite content stuck out in the brush, miles from nowhere.
“Meanwhile,” Romy went on, “what do ye think about taking Bud with ye on that trip to Galveston next month? Give him a chance to practice his tennis on one of those fancy city courts?”
That trip – for which, originally, he had sworn he would haul her back to the good rabbi in exchange for an ordered swamp cooler he was to pick up.
He took the weighty cast iron pot she lugged over and began drying it. “You know, tonight you were the only one who didn’t share a Thanksgiving memory. You let it slide by with some kind of generality about a German celebration.”
With diligent attention, she began scouring a grubby skillet. “Well, traveling about as Old Duke and I did, it would be no surprise to find us on the road at special times, like Christmas or Easter.”
“Claptrap.”
Her hands gradually stopped, like a clock running down. Her delicate profile betrayed a finely sculpted jaw clenching. Without looking at him, she said in a hushed voice, “Duke, we canna go back in time, so why try?”
He set aside the dried pot. “Beats the shit out of me, Sunshine.”
She must have had more than her own share of unhappiness. No one escaped this life without tasting sorrow and horror, but the point of all that pain . . . well, as crassly arrogant as he was, he wasn’t arrogant enough to think he had an answer.
But he did know the greater the distance he kept between himself and her the next eleven months the better . . . better for him, and most certainly better for her, now that he had incredibly, foolish, stupidly, let things get out of hand, despite, and damn, his agreement with the rabbi and Johnson.
§ § §
With some pride that afternoon, Micah, axe in one hand, helped Glen drag into the parlor the scrubby mesquite Romy had persuaded the ranch hands to chop down.
“Ejoli,” Arturo said, “eet ees not much for a Christmas tree
.”
“At least, it’s taller than your stubby self,” Skinny Henry shot back.
“Laddies,” she reproved, “tis Christmas.”
The next day would see Sally and her father joining the S&S crew for the Christmas dinner, and she shared the ranch hands’ excitement over the holiday celebration she was staging.
“In the corner, over there, by the radio,” she directed them. The radio took up nearly one entire corner of the parlor. That significant and new piece of communication was almost as important as the bloody kitchen telephone.
“Not yet,” Jock said. “A wee pruning at the tree’s bottom and top is needed if we mean to stand her upright, and then we’re whole hog to go.”
“Auh got it, Miss Romy,” Micah said, stepping forward with his pocket knife to make short shrift of the offending branches.
“All right,” she told the five, “back to your duties.”
Duke, who had driven to Galveston to pick up the ordered swamp cooler, had taken with him an excited Bud – along with his tennis racquet.
Once the men had filed out, she set to decorating the tree. Lately, as the crisis with Germany and growing tension in Europe had been mounting, she had taken to listening to Edward R. Murrow on the ‘CBS News World Roundup.’ But late that afternoon she had tuned in to The Campbell Playhouse and Orson Welles’s “A Christmas Carol.”
Standing on the kitchen stool, she looped the mesquite’s top prickly spines with strands of corn she had popped along with pieces of strung tin salvaged from the chicken coop. Skinny Henry had used wire cutters to clip the tin into snow-flake-sizes.
The room’s scents made her almost dizzy. She loved the sweet smell of mesquite burning in the fireplace those cooler mornings. And she was ever grateful for Duke, who arose at dawn to start the aromatic coffee that still lingered in the air an hour later to be combined with her super-fried eggs and burnt bacon.
As she added tufts of chicken feathers for what she imagined could pass as cherubs’ wings, her shouted name caused her to whirl abruptly, arms out flung and toppling. Feathers went flying. At the last moment, she balanced herself.
“Damn’t, you have the radio so loud,” Duke snapped, “you wouldn’t have heard a Panzer tank rolling through.” Both his arms toted large, brown paper bags – like the toaster, another novelty that still amazed her, the way the sturdy sacks folded so compactly.
Climbing down from the stool, she turned off the radio and trailed him into the kitchen. She began helping put away the grocery items from a list she had laboriously scrawled – soup, peanut butter, applesauce, oranges, bread, and more.
The clicking of jars and cans and the labored hum of the refrigerator made for domestic sounds, but the silence between Duke and her was unbearable. Even Ulysses, tail between his legs, slunk back into the parlor.
“Did Bud get to practice tennis?” she ventured.
“Yeah,” he gritted, not even bothering to glance at her.
At that, she slammed down the sack of sugar. “Ye dunna have to treat me like I got no feelings, Duke McClellan. Just because I’ve the radio turned up loudly.”
He braced his saucer-sized palms on the counter. Too long, he stared at one of its cracked, colorful tiles. Then, “You’re right, Romy. It’s just that I’ve grown used to living alone.”
She wasn’t going to let him off that easily. “Canna ye not admit ye might be a wee bit interested in meself?”
With that, he spun on her, gripping her upper arms. The air was suddenly hot-wire charged. “Yes. But then living in close quarters as we are, I’d be interested in a gun moll. So, if you want, we can get it on right here.”
He released her right arm to sweep the sack of sugar from the counter top. The sack hit the floor with a thud, and she saw the precious sugar spill like sand onto the flagstone. Her startled gaze swung back to his – explosive with pure, intense desire.
“We can fuck like rabbits, Sunshine. Is that what you want?”
That word, fuck, coming from him, shocked her. She might not be good enough for his taste, but the vertical length of bulge, stretching tightly the metal riveted crotch of his Levi’s, betrayed that he was having a hell of a time tamping down his rutting urge.
Nervous, she feigned a smile. “What I want is for ye to help me clean up the sugar, if ye please – and then help me with me reading and writing after dinner.”
His head fell back, and mirthless laughter rumbled from deep in his chest. “If that doesn’t beat all, no interest – and coming from the runt of the litter.”
§ § §
Straddling the kitchen stool for height, Romy was having a devil of a time placing a call through Mamie, the switchboard operator, to reach Gideon at his Capitol office.
“Gideon Goldman,” crackled his cognac-warm voice over the line.
“Uhh, Gideon, tis Romy.” This talking into a wooden box was so nonsensical. She needed to see a person. See the light come or go in their eyes, watch the play of their brows, and observe both the shift of their lips and the color that might flood their neck and cheeks.
“Romy?” Gideon’s silk-smooth voice tightened ever so slightly with tension. “Is everything all right?”
She twined the short cord around her short forefinger. “Aye. No deportation looming . . . yet.”
A pause, and then, “Yes?”
She could hear his puzzlement. “Ummm, the S&S is having Christmas dinner, and . . . well, you being a Jew, I thought you might be alone on this Christian holiday.”
“Is this an invitation?”
“Yuirself and me might not be bosom buddies, Gideon, maybe more like foxhole buddies, but aye. Tis an invitation.”
She felt an affinity for the knave. They shared a fearsome past, t’was true. But it was more than that. In a sense, she supposed they were essentially alike, always looking for an angle. Just one of life’s little ironies.
And, as for the present, she had been thinking how his sophistication could ease the tension between herself and Duke. But now it did not seem like such a grand idea. Especially since she had yet to advise Duke of her invitation.
“Most likely, though, you don’t have transportation,” she backpedaled, “so maybe at another – ”
“I’ll be there.”
§ § §
He was Jewish. Worse, he was deformed. At least, according to the mediocre standards of the rest of the world.
Those attributes most certainly did not endear him to Nazi Germany.
Nor did they endear him to the WASP’s ruling class of the United States. He had spent an abbreviated year in Dallas through an international exchange program for gifted scholars in finance and business. His scholarship had not been renewed. Excuses had been given, but he knew why. His kind was not acceptable to the elite White Anglo Saxon Protestants.
Nevertheless, he knew how to prove himself indispensable. Had he not fed the Nazi’s information machine, while keeping his own Jewish hide intact?
Had he not diverted the almighty American dollar, specified for Berlin’s American Jewish Joint Distribution office, supposedly to furniture requisitions and sundry running expenditures, without leaving a paper trail?
He could not go back. Go back to the Nazi ideology of a superior race of the tall, fair, and strapping Nordic individuals of Aryan stock. And, especially, not when in Germany and even here in America Nazi adherents would quite eagerly take him out upon learning of his double-dealing.
He could only go forward. And forward meant not suffering any foolish folks to stand in the way of a better life for himself.
§ CHAPTER ELEVEN §
Christmas Day. At that moment, Berlin’s Spandau district would be lit with fairy lights. Its Christmas market would feature Scandinavian flame-salmon, Ukrainian Christmas tree decorations, and the obligatory mulled wine. Snowflakes as big as a vase doily could be lacing the frosty air.
Outside Berlin, years before the Nazis had come into power, swarthy gypsy men had stamped and clapped, while r
aven-eyed women swirled their long, brilliantly-colored, flounced skirts and danced around caravan fires in honor of the birth of Jesus.
Like the Gypsies, He was a wanderer and had chosen to rely on whatever pickings He could get. Romy, a wanderer, also, was doing the same essentially. Relying on whatever pickings she could get.
In weather that was doubtlessly like the Holy Land’s, what with Texas’s kicked-up dust clogging her nostrils and smarting her eyes and scouring her skin, she and Glen straddled the corral’s top rail.
“Hot as a Billy goat in a pepper patch,” he bemoaned.
“Hot enough the hens are laying hard-broiled eggs,” Jock quipped, perched on the railing on the other side of her.
They were watching Skinny Henry grip the flat braided rope in an attempt to stay astride the brawny bull about to buck from the chute. The dry, heated wind blasted her ringlets, billowing below the sun-bleached red handkerchief, knotted at her nape.
Sally, accompanied by her pistol-packing father, Sam, also perched atop the corral’s railing, across from Romy and Glen. Where Sally was willowy, her father was rangy. Plagued with arthritis, he had moved like a puppet with all its joints hinged when he had delivered a bottle of tequila into Duke’s hands an hour before.
It was obvious even to the most unknowledgeable that the old man wanted Duke for a son-in-law.
But what did Sally want? Romy was having a hard time reading the horsewoman. She was both a composite of the old world and the new one. Charging determinedly as Duke was into the future, she was what he might need.
But, more importantly, what did Duke want?
Well, this Christmas Day dinner might well unfold that for him.
“So, what do you think, Romy?” Glen asked, his Adam’s apple climbing up and down the flimsy ladder that was his throat.
“Me thinks Skinny Henry is in for the ride of his life.”
As she was. Hiding out from the Nazis’ long-reaching tentacles – hopelessly yearning for her Irish ancestral land and her Irish Traveller clan – and all the while fecklessly locked in a duel to her death with Big Guy there, manning the chute gate that festive afternoon.
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