Yankee Wife

by Linda Lael Miller

  Lydia gulped, putting the last hairpin in place. “You won't send the saloon women away?”

  Brigham shook his head, then said, “No,” in a hoarse and firmly decided voice.

  She whirled, waving her hairbrush at him as though it were a saber. “Don't you dare visit that dreadful place, Brigham Quade!” she blurted, amazed at her own courage even as the words were hurled from her throat. “If you do, you can be sure I'll hear of it, and I swear by God's suspenders, I'll come after you with a horsewhip!”

  The image made Brigham chuckle, which only infuriated her more. “So you do care a little, Mrs. Quade?” he countered quietly. His hands dropped from the framework of the door to his sides, in a motion of weary acceptance and the profoundest of frustrations. “You can be sure I'll be very careful of what reaches your ears.”

  Having said that, Brigham turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing as he crossed the small parlor, opened the front door and went out.

  Lydia was sure he would come back and that he would see reason and agree, on humanitarian grounds if nothing else, to close the saloon.

  Brigham didn't appear the next day, or the day after that. Lydia saw him at a distance sometimes, and he gazed at her from the depths of Millie's troubled gray eyes during daily lessons, but he did not return to her bed.

  Another day passed, then a week, then, incredibly, another week. Joe's combination office and house was completed on the outside and habitable on the inside, and a boatload of goods arrived to stock Polly's general store. More families came and cabins began to go up at the edge of town, and Brigham's clerk, Mr. Harrington, ran off to Seattle with Esther and got himself married.

  The work went on on the mountain, and in the mill at its foot. The saloon-brothel, now called the Satin Hammer, thrived on its spit of sawdust-littered land. Bawdy piano music flowed through its doors and windows day and night, and sometimes, late, Lydia lay in bed and tormented herself with images of Brigham carousing there with one of the strumpets.

  Still, she waited.

  As a doctor, Joe McCauley knew enough to catch a good night's sleep wherever he could, but his mind was full of Lydia as he lay beneath the rough cover of his army blanket. The house was small and new around him, raw with freshly planed wood.

  It had been a month since Lydia had left her husband, and even the hardened, tobacco-chewing lumberjacks gossiped and speculated, wondering if it would be safe to go back to courting the lady. There were those who said Brigham Quade had already gone to a judge and had the thing nullified, while others said he had taken up with Clover O'Keefe, the lady who ran the Satin Hammer, and planned to keep Lydia at the same time.

  Joe sat up on the edge of his cot. The straw-filled mattress was supported by a net of creaky new rope, and the wooden bedposts were still splintery.

  “Damn,” he said, reaching for his trousers. He pulled them on, raised the suspenders to his bare shoulders, and made his way through the dark house to the back door. The outhouse loomed in the moonlight, and the path leading toward it was still just a shadow in the grass.

  He supposed he could just have stood on the back porch and pissed on the ground, but between his genteel upbringing and the years he'd spent in the cavalry and in that Yankee prison hospital, Joe McCauley had had his fill of living like a vagabond. He started toward the privy, the quack grass cool under his bare feet.

  Reaching his destination, he grabbed the crude wooden handle and yanked open the door. The bright silvery light of the moon flooded the little shack, revealing a figure crouched on the bench, trying to fade into one corner.

  “I'll be goddammed,” Joe muttered, though he wasn't a man to swear. He'd already unbuttoned his trousers, and it was embarrassing to be caught in such an ungentlemanly state.

  The figure made a whimpering sound and shriveled like a wet spiderweb.

  Joe made out that the trespasser was a girl. She wore a ragged dress, and her blond hair hung straggly around a thin, defiant, and thoroughly filthy face.

  “Come out of there,” Joe ordered.

  The girl hesitated, then obeyed, standing square in front of Joe on the pathway. She was older than he'd thought, eighteen at least, and nearly as tall as he was. Her jaw trembled as she looked straight into his eyes, but the set of her face was as obdurate as a Yankee picket on his own ground.

  “You've gotta help me, mister,” she said, but she was throwing down a challenge, not begging. “My pa means to sell me to those folks over at the Satin Hammer. He says all I'd have to do is sing once in a while and bring the men their beer, but I don't believe him.”

  Joe's southern gallantry was stirred. He took the girl's arm and shuffled her toward the house, forgetting all about the need to empty his bladder.

  “What's your name?”

  “Frodine Hearn,” the young woman answered, willingly enough. “You're not plannin' to use me or nothin' like that, are you? I didn't come here to get myself used, you know.”

  Joe smiled as he put his hand to the small of Frodine's slender back and guided her over the threshold. She stood just to one side of the door, shivering and barefoot, while Joe lit the kerosene lamp in the middle of the huge wire spool that served as a table.

  “I'm not going to hurt you,” he said.

  Frodine folded her arms. God-have-mercy but she needed a bath, and those clothes of hers weren't fit to serve as rags. “I'll carve a hole in your belly if you try,” she said.

  Joe laughed. “Sit down,” he said, gesturing toward one of the two upturned crates that were his only chairs.

  Warily, the girl took a seat, and Joe busied himself building up the fire in the small cookstove and setting the kettle on to boil. He found preserves in his pitch-scented pantry, along with a loaf of bread he'd bought from Mrs. Holmetz.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  Frodine tore off a chunk of the bread and stuffed it into her mouth. “Whaasss—scht-tme-” she said.

  Joe opened the jar of raspberry preserves, given him by Brigham's cook, and set them on the table, along with a knife. “You shouldn't talk with your mouth full,” he said.

  Frodine's black eyes mocked him. “Well, excuse me, Mr. Fancy Pants. I didn't know I was in one of them mansions with the prissy curtains!”

  Joe shook his head, amazed at her audacity and the amount of dirt she'd managed to amass. “I'm Dr. Joseph McCauley,” he said. “But you can call me Joe.”

  She ripped away another piece of bread, slathered it with a thick layer of preserves, and gobbled down the whole mess in no more than three bites. “Thanks,” she said.

  Heat was beginning to surge through the water in the kettle, and Joe got out a tin of tea and the cheap crockery pot he'd bought from Polly. She didn't have much on the shelves of the general store yet, but it seemed like new goods arrived almost every day on the mail boat. “Do I know your pa?” he asked.

  Frodine spoke around another mouthful of bread. “I don't reckon so. He likes to move around a lot, but we come here whenever he runs out of drinkin' money. He's a sawyer, but he's done some bull whackin' in his time, too, and Mr. Quade, he's always willin' to give Pa a job. Pa says that's because Brig knows a good worker when he sees one, but I think it's just that he's always shorthanded up there on the mountain.”

  Joe looked at the girl over one shoulder, figuring that any man who'd go along with the idea of naming a defenseless baby “Frodine” would probably be willing to sell that selfsame daughter to a brothel when he thought she was ripe. “You could get married, you know,” he said thoughtfully.

  Frodine sighed dramatically. “Sure. That way I'd only have to whore for one man instead of a hundred.”

  “Frodine!”

  “Well, it's the truth!” she wailed, looking at him plaintively with those black, black eyes. “Ain't it?”

  “Isn't it,” he corrected automatically, taking up the kettle and pouring hot water into the reapot. “And no, it isn't. There are a lot of nice young men on the mountain who'd be thrilled to have a pr
etty wife like you. Provided you were cleaned up a little first, of course.”

  Frodine sighed and looked very put-upon. “You try bathin' in a creek or somebody's horse trough,” she challenged.

  “There've been times in my life when I would have been glad to do just that,” he said, entertaining memories of prison camp for only a moment before he pushed them aside. Joe was a pragmatic man, but he didn't feel sorry for himself; he'd seen levels of suffering that went far beyond the trials he'd known. Some of those poor wretches would even have envied his luck.

  “You gonna turn me over to Pa?”

  “I won't have much choice if he comes here looking for you,” Joe said. Under the law, a man could no more confiscate another man's daughter than he could take his horse or his tobacco pouch.

  Tears glistened in her great dark eyes, and she brushed back a lock of dirty hair with one grungy paw. “Please,” she said. “You gotta help me.”

  Joe sighed. Leaving the tea untouched, he rose from the table and went out back to get the tub down from its nail on the wall. He set it in the middle of the kitchen with a clatter and reached for the two buckets sitting by the stove.

  “All right,” he said. “But first you've got to take a bath so I can stand being in the same room with you.”

  He went back and forth to the pump in the yard until he'd nearly filled the tub, then put the last two bucketsful of water on the stove to heat. Frodine wouldn't get a hot bath, but at least he could take the edge off the cold.

  She put a grubby finger into the tub and winced. “Hellfire, Joe, that's cold enough I could write my name in it and have it stay.”

  Joe was getting out his bar of yellow soap, the stuff he used to scrub up before delivering babies and stitching up torn flesh. “Can you write your name, Frodine?” he asked moderately.

  The expression in her eyes was one of chagrin. “No. And I can't read it, neither.”

  “Then I think you should go to school. I know just the lady to teach you.”

  Frodine gave a derisive hoot. “School? School? Are you blind or somethin', Doc? I'm near on twenty years old! Besides, what need have I got for readin' and writin' and figurin' anyhow?”

  Joe found a clean towel, also bought from Polly's general store. “Everybody needs to know those things. They help you look after yourself.”

  She clenched one fist. “I can look after myself just fine, thank you all the same.”

  He nodded. “That's why you were hiding in my outhouse like an escaped criminal, no doubt.”

  Frodine's eyes widened, then narrowed. “I was afraid Pa would send the hound out after me. I figured that would throw ol' Homebrew off the trail, if I hid in the outhouse, I mean, but it turned out your privy was practically new and it don't stink much.”

  “Thanks,” Joe said, biting back a grin. He'd seen chicken coops cleaner than this girl, and yet she brought a certain freshness with her, like a cool breeze blowing in off the water.

  She glanced around speculatively, and it was clear that his humble quarters looked pretty luxurious to her. “Where's your wife?”

  “Don't have one,” he said. Then he cleared his throat because the words had come out sounding so hoarse.

  “Oh,” said Frodine. “Then you don't got nobody to keep house for you and the like.”

  With an index finger he tested the water heating on the stove. “I'm content to look after myself,” he said.

  Frodine made a sound of contemptuous disbelief. “No man likes doin' for hisself. It ain't natural.”

  Joe took out his pocket watch and saw that it was eleven-fifteen. He wondered if Lydia was sleeping already, or maybe entertaining her husband. In either case, he wouldn't want to disturb her, and yet he needed help.

  “You get into the tub as soon as I'm gone and scrub yourself good. I'll see about getting you a decent dress and some night things.”

  Frodine looked at the water, now steaming on the stove top, and swallowed. “You ain't cleanin' me up just so you can take a turn at me, are you?”

  “No,” Joe said quietly, aching with pity, which he kept well-hidden. “I'm not going to bother you, Frodine. I just want to help.”

  She was untying the strings that held the front of her dress together when Joe went out the back door. He rounded the house and walked resolutely to the end of the street, toward Lydia's cottage. To his relief, there was a light in the front window, and as he came up the walk, he could see her sitting quietly in a rocking chair, reading.

  He made plenty of noise coming up onto the porch, so he wouldn't startle her.

  “It's Joe,” he said after knocking.

  The door opened readily. Joe saw signs of strain in Lydia's violet eyes and in the set of her mouth, and he wished he could take her into his arms and hold her.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, stepping back to admit him.

  “No one's sick or having a baby, if that's what you mean,” he answered, shoving one hand through his rumpled hair. It was only then that he realized he was still barefoot, and wearing only his pants and suspenders. He blushed, more embarrassed than he'd been since his father had presented him with his first mistress at the age of fourteen.

  Lydia pretended not to notice his state of dishabille. “Then what's wrong?”

  “I found a woman in my outhouse,” he blurted out, “and I don't know what to do with her.”

  Lydia stared at him for a moment, then started to laugh. “You found a woman in your outhouse?”

  “A girl, really, for all that she says she's twenty. She talks like a sailor and has about as much education as the average bilge rat, but she's in trouble and I can't just turn my back on her.”

  “Of course not,” Lydia said reasonably. “But what are you going to do with her?”

  He sighed. “I don't know. She says her father means to sell her to the people over at the Satin Hammer, though, and I can't let that happen.”

  Lydia's cheekbones glowed with crimson. “At least there's one man in this town with some decency.”

  By all rights he should have refuted her remark, since he'd been to the saloon several times, and taken his fleshly comfort upstairs with various women as well, but he didn't have the heart. Everybody knew the Satin Hammer was a very sensitive subject with Lydia. “She needs something to wear,” he said gruffly, after an awkward silence. “And I told her you'd let her go to school. She can't read or write, either.”

  Lydia sighed. “There's a big market for brides around here. Maybe she should just marry one of Brigham's men. At least she'd have a home that way.”

  “I suggested that, but she said…” Joe paused, flustered again. He couldn't repeat what Frodine had said when he'd brought up the marriage idea. “She didn't want any part of that.”

  “Great Scot,” Lydia said, but she marched into her room and in a few minutes came out with a neatly folded stack of clothes. Joe could see a couple of calico dresses the pile, along with a nightdress and some underthings. “You'd better send her over here to stay, or the whole town will be talking by morning.”

  Joe knew he should have been relieved by Lydia's willingness to take Frodine off his hands, but oddly, he wasn't. During those few minutes with the ragamuffin he'd found in his outhouse, he realized, he'd been free of the grinding loneliness that had possessed him from the moment he'd gone away to war. Even Lydia, with all her gentle practicality, hadn't been able to reach that part of him.

  “We'll see,” he said. Then he thanked Lydia for the clothes and left again. He knew Frodine wouldn't be through with her bath, so he sat on his back step in the moonlight, holding the pile of clothes and listening with a smile as his house guest splashed happily beyond the door.

  When she'd been quiet for a time, he called her name, softly.

  “You can come in if you keep your head turned aside!” she called generously.

  Joe stood, drew a deep breath, opened the door. He was careful not to look toward Frodine, and yet he was painfully conscious of her nake
dness. He caught the pleasant scents of her freshly washed hair and skin, and he felt his groin tighten.

  He set the clothes on one of the crates and made his way around the tub like a blind man.

  “I'm still hungry,” she called after him as he took refuge in the room where he saw his patients. “You got anything to eat around here besides bread?”

  Joe chuckled, and a fine mist of tears covered his eyes, though he couldn't think why. “There's some cold meat. I'll get it for you as soon as you're dressed.”

  “I could eat the north end of a southbound skunk,” Frodine marveled.

  Joe leaned back against the door of his surgery and smiled in the darkness. “That won't be necessary,” he replied.

  He heard splashing as she rose from the water. “You could probably use a woman around here,” she said.

  “You know, somebody to cook and clean and sew and stuff like that.”

  “Like a wife?” he inquired, unable to resist teasing her.

  “Well, yeah, except for the part where we'd lie down in the same bed and all,” she said.

  “You can have my bed for tonight,” he answered, anxious to put her at ease. “I can bunk on the floor.”

  She was quiet for a long time, so long that he began to suspect she'd crept out the back door and vanished into the night. The thought filled him with an unaccountable loneliness.

  “You're right nice, for a man,” she said. “You can come out now.”

  Joe was surprised at his eagerness. After all, Frodine was the complete opposite of all he'd ever admired and reverenced in a woman. She wasn't gentle-spoken, Lord knew, and her manners would have embarrassed Genghis Khan. She couldn't even read, let alone discuss the great books, and her appreciation for music probably didn't go beyond jug bands, mouth harps, and fiddles.

  Still, when he came out of his office and saw her standing there, wet-haired and wide-eyed in Lydia's white lawn nightdress, something inside him, something long dead, was resurrected.