“Pretty birds. Good morning, my darlings. There’s my good girls. You eat lots and stay fat and healthy, my pretty birds. Pretty birds.”
The woman’s voice was hypnotic. No wonder the birds were clustering fearlessly around her feet, busy at a second metal feeder. Except for the black-and-white one on her shoulder that was busy demolishing some vegetable delicacy cupped in her hand.
It was a scene straight out of Witness or a National Geographic special on nineteenth-century cultures living anachronistically in modern times. She was dressed in unrelieved black, even to the bulky lumber jacket she wore, and her brown hair was twisted up in a bun from which it appeared curls and wisps were trying to escape. But there was no white cap on that hair, and from what he’d seen of the kitchen behind her the night before, no shortage of modern electric appliances, either.
So, she wasn’t Amish. Was she Mennonite? Hutterite? Doukhobor? Some other rural sect about which even National Geographic knew nothing?
It didn’t matter what she was. What mattered was this was the same woman who had answered the door. Who had lost her father. Who had fed him.
“Good morning,” he said, and she looked up.
For a moment fear stamped lines on her face that hadn’t been there when she’d been singing to the chickens. Then she seemed to realize who he was, and the lines smoothed away. She stood a little straighter, and the bird on her shoulder adjusted its grip.
“They seem very happy,” he went on, when she didn’t speak. “I’ve never been close to chickens. One woke me up just now.”
“That was probably Schatzi,” she said. Her voice was low and sweet and wary. “You were sleeping where she likes to lay.”
“Do I have you to thank for the blanket?”
She said nothing. Instead, she tucked her skirts behind her knees and squatted. When she held one arm out, the black-and-white hen sidestepped down her sleeve like a tightrope walker and hopped to the ground.
“I apologize for using your barn without permission,” he said. “It was inexcusable of me, but I—”
“It’s all right.” She stood and shook her dress out. “We’re the last place on this road. You didn’t look like you would have made it far.”
“No. Thank you again for the supper.”
“When was the last time you had proper food?” She pulled the flannel shirt she wore closer around her, though the weak sun was warm.
He thought for a moment. “Wednesday?”
“This is Saturday.”
“Yes.”
Most people would have asked him what he thought he was doing, wandering the roads looking like a derelict, and starving in the bargain. But she just gazed at him, bundled in her ugly black, as though to ask would be getting more personal than she wanted.
For which he could hardly blame her.
“You’re going to need breakfast before you go,” she said at last.
An odd feeling fluttered in his chest. Gratitude? Humiliation? Whatever it was, it hurt.
“No. Thank you, but you’ve done far more than I have a right to expect. Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“It’s no trouble. Biscuits and eggs, that’s all. I’m making them anyway. My aunt and uncle are still here. And Phinehas.”
He had no idea whether Phinehas was a man or a rooster. “No, I can’t.”
“Of course you can,” she said briskly. She picked up a bowl containing eggs in more shades than he would have thought possible—green, blue, brown, buff. “You’re going to fall over where you stand. Don’t let false pride get in the way of being sensible.”
A little on the curt side, maybe, but correct.
Matthew watched her latch the gate to the chicken yard behind her and walk across the graveled expanse between the house and the barn. When the back door closed, he looked around.
The black-and-white hen cocked her head and regarded him with a beady eye. Then she bent and pecked at his shoelace, yanking at it as if it were a worm. He bent and retied the lace, and the hen scuttled out of the way.
The least he could do was to find some chore to perform before she came back out and humbled him once again with food. He might not be good for much, but he could clean up after chickens. Inside the barn, he found a wire brush and a rake standing against one wall. He soon found out what the brush was for when he saw the layers of waste under the poles on which he supposed they roosted. Some brisk elbow action took care of that, leaving him slightly out of breath and confirming that too many days between meals could do serious damage to one’s physical condition. A plastic bucket that had once contained paint and now contained what looked like vomit did duty as a trash receptacle, and what didn’t fit he raked into a pile.
He rested on the rake, panting. After days of hunger and rejection, it felt good to take control and do something constructive. Even if it was only shoveling chicken manure.
“What are you doing?” The woman stood in the doorway, fists clenched, the light behind her outlining a shape that practically shook with rage. “What are you doing with my bucket? And my birds?”
The rake tilted out of his hand and landed on the floor with a clatter. “I’m not doing anything with them. I’m—”
“Get away from there! How dare you?”
Matthew spread his dirty hands. “I wanted to do something to repay you for—”
It wasn’t rage, he saw as she stepped out of the glare. It was fear.
He was no good with rage. But he could do something about fear. After the last couple of months, he was well acquainted with it.
He lowered his hands and moved away from the area she obviously considered hers alone. “I wanted to repay you for your kindness,” he repeated quietly. “I don’t have anything but labor to give you, and I saw that you’d probably have to clean the roost area before long, so I went ahead and did it.”
“The chickens are mine,” she choked. Her hands lay flat against the wall next to the door, not clenched now, but looking as though they were holding her up. “Mine.”
Perhaps she was an only child, and not used to sharing.
“Of course they’re yours,” he said. “They’re beautiful birds. Well brought up. Even Schatzi was polite when she asked me to move this morning.”
She regarded him for a moment. A smile fought briefly with the downturned corners of her mouth, and lost. “There’s a plate outside, here,” she said. “A paper plate, with breakfast. Please take it and go.”
He nodded over his shoulder at the fallen rake and the overflowing bucket. “I’ll just pick up after myself.”
“No. I’ll do it. Good-bye.”
Matthew dusted off his right hand. “Let me introduce myself on my way out. I’m Matthew Nicholas, from Cornwall via California. And I’m very grateful to you.”
She kept her gaze on his face until, awkwardly, he dropped his hand.
“Dinah,” she said at last. “Dinah Traynell from right here.”
He couldn’t tell if the quiet words held regret or resentment. It was none of his business anyway. His business was to move on without further imposition on her time or kindness.
The plate of food was warm in his hands. With all the self-control he could muster, he restrained himself from wolfing it down on the spot. “Do you mind if I eat this here?” he asked. “It’s difficult to eat and walk. I’ll go right away after I do justice to it.”
She nodded and picked up the bucket and took it outside. As soon as she was out of sight, he sat on the nearest bale of hay and practically inhaled the food. As fast as he chewed, he could still appreciate the flavor of fresh scrambled eggs containing bits of red pepper and onion and warm biscuits with butter melting down their sides. He could not remember the last time he’d tasted butter, much less a biscuit as fluffy as these. Months ago, possibly. In another life.
For a moment he considered not licking the plate, and then discarded that notion as ridiculous. He licked it with relish.
“I can get you seconds.” Dinah Traynell�
��s voice was dry as she set the bucket down and began to refill it from the pile he’d made. She seemed to have recovered from whatever had upset her. Or perhaps he had reassured her by not invading the chickens’ area again and sitting in the plastic chair.
A flush burned into his cheeks. “No, that’s not necessary. I’m completely full.”
“It’s nice to see someone enjoy their food.”
Was she blind, or were the effects of homelessness not as obvious as he’d thought? “Enjoy is not the word. Every molecule I ingest now will take me a step further down the road before my appetite gets the better of me again.”
“Before you get hungry, you mean.”
“Well, yes.” He had no doubt she thought he was pathetic, but she hid it well. Possibly a woman who dressed as she did was used to feeling ridiculous and, as his students used to say, she could relate. “I suppose you’re wondering how I came to be in this position?” he asked.
She swept up more dry balls of manure and tipped them into the bucket. “It’s none of my business.”
“I feel as though I owe you something. If not labor, then at least an explanation.”
Eyebrows with the shape and tilt of bird wings drew together over her eyes, which he now saw were brown and devoid of makeup.
“You don’t owe me anything. All I ask is that you keep yourself out of sight until you get on the main road.”
Hints didn’t come much broader than that. “You don’t want anyone to know you harbored a vagrant?”
“No. I’d never hear the end of it.”
“Why? I would think giving a homeless man a bit of food and a bale of hay would be seen as admirable.”
She shot him a quick glance and bent to pick up the bucket. “Your blood sugar must be rising or you’d never be able to talk like that.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re not one of us. The Bible says to help a brother, which would be one of the Elect.”
“Elect?”
“Yes. The Elect of God. His chosen people. Us.”
Not just a cultural anachronism, then, but possibly a cultic one as well. And yet, she had fed him. The red peppers were still sweet on his tongue.
“I see. So you would be consorting with publicans and sinners, then.”
“Yes. Not keeping myself separate.”
“You must come in contact with the outside world occasionally.”
“Of course. But you were going to tell me how you got into this position.”
He rolled the paper plate into a tube, and she took it from him and stuffed it into the bucket.
“I thought I didn’t owe you anything.”
“I changed my mind.”
He rather thought she wanted to talk about her church less than she wanted to hear about him.
“It started out as a . . . well, as a quest of sorts. To find myself.”
Another dry look. “That’s very California. Were you lost?”
More like thrown away. He got up and paced slowly to the wall and back. With two square meals, the muscles in his legs no longer trembled with the effort to hold him up. “Yes, you could say so. Very lost. People do walking tours of Cornwall all the time, so I thought I would do the same, starting in the Pacific Northwest.”
“At the tail end of winter? Not very sensible, Mr. Nicholas.”
For a woman who put so much stock in being sensible, she seemed to have some odd beliefs about the nature of believers in God. He shook off the thought and answered her question.
“In February, actually. After . . . an event that precipitated my course of action. But I didn’t count on that wretched transmission going out about a hundred miles north of here. So my walking tour became a reality, especially after my wallet was stolen.”
“Oh, dear. Couldn’t you get a job? Or call someone to ask for help?”
“No.” He looked away. Somehow the lack of someone to call made him feel poorer than ever.
“Anyone can get a job,” she said. “You could check groceries. Clean motel rooms. Until you get some money for the next leg of your tour.”
“And where would I sleep and eat while I waited the week or two before my first check? It’s not as simple as it looks. What do you do for a living, Ms. Traynell?”
The hurt cascaded over her face like a bucket of cold water, and he regretted the impulse behind the question, though it had been phrased kindly.
But before he could apologize for the impulse, not the words, a voice carried over the yard outside.
“Dinah! Where are you?”
The rake clacked against the bucket and she gathered both into her hands. “I’m in the barn,” she called. To Matthew, she said, “Hide somewhere. That’s my mother.”
“What are you doing in there?” the voice demanded. “Phinehas is down and waiting for his breakfast.”
“Everything is on the counter, Mom.” The woman—Dinah—went to the barn door. “All you have to do is heat up the pan and pour the eggs in. The biscuits are in the oven.”
Her mother made an impatient noise that Matthew could hear from behind his hay bale. The little gold hen called Schatzi hadn’t moved from the niche between the bales that was her nest, despite his abrupt arrival. She glared at him and covered her newly laid egg protectively, spreading her wings low. He returned his attention to what the unseen woman was saying.
“Phinehas would like his breakfast from your own hands, dear. I suggest you get in here now so you don’t keep him waiting any longer. The work of God comes first.”
The kitchen door slammed and Matthew peered above the hay to see Dinah silhouetted against the light.
“I’ll be back,” she said. “To hear the rest of it.”
“I thought I was supposed to go,” he whispered.
“There might be leftovers. Phinehas is a holy man, but his appetite is a little on the picky side.”
“I’ll be right here.”
Her hands gripped her thighs for a moment, as if she were willing her legs to move, and then she walked out the door. Each step looked so painful she could have been walking on ground glass.
That was odd. He had been talking with her for fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen any sign she was in that kind of pain.
But then, he was notoriously bad at reading body language. Which was part of the reason he was sitting in an empty barn, his only companions a chicken and a strange woman, both of whom wanted him gone.
Chapter 3
HERE SHE IS, Phinehas. Honestly, I don’t know what was so important out there that it would keep you waiting.”
Dinah hung up the flannel shirt and edged into the kitchen. Through the archway, she saw the two of them sitting at the dining room table with the good Royal Albert china mugs in their hands. “Good morning, Phinehas. I’m sorry I—”
He waved her apology away with genial grace. “No apologies necessary, Dinah. I’ve been enjoying your mother’s excellent coffee, and I’m sure you had chores to do before breakfast.”
She’d made the coffee before she went out, but it would draw attention to herself if she said so. Dinah scrubbed her hands at the sink, turned on the gas under the skillet, and pulled the beaten eggs out of the fridge.
“I’m glad I could spend this first morning with you. The loss of husband and father, even though we’ve been expecting it since they diagnosed the cancer, is always tragic.” Phinehas watched as Elsie Traynell bowed her head and sniffed. “But he’s in a better place now, worshipping at the throne of God, and we are left to make our way as best we can. What will you do now, Elsie?”
Dinah handed her mother a tissue and turned the eggs with a spatula.
“I don’t know.” Elsie blew her nose.
“Did Morton leave you provided for?”
“Yes. He was very clever with the stock market, though it’s a mystery to me. And of course, there’s his pension.”
“Strange how the devil’s playground can be turned to the good of the kingdom, isn’t it?” Phinehas mused. “Microsoft
and General Electric will never know how God’s work has been promoted through your father’s gifts.”
“You can be sure they will continue,” Elsie said hastily. “Dinah has the head for figures. I don’t.”
“She does, does she?” Dinah felt his gaze on her back. “I am much comforted by that.”
She got two biscuits out of the oven, put them on his plate, and spooned eggs beside them. As she leaned over to put the plate in front of him, he reached for his coffee cup, and his sleeve brushed her breast.
She had been schooled in discretion, though every cell in her body leaped and the muscles in her jaw flexed.
Her father’s brother and his wife came out of the downstairs guest room just then, and as Elsie’s mouth quivered and Aunt Margaret bent to hug her, Dinah caught Phinehas’s eye.
Just as quickly, she glanced away. Maybe it had been accidental. But with Phinehas, it seemed, nothing ever was. Every word, every physical movement, every item of clothing, he’d once told her in a private Visit, was examined for effect, for correctness, for suitability under scrutiny. It was probably second nature by now. God watched them constantly, it was true, but Dinah often felt she’d prefer that to the vigilance of the Elect on the subject of their example. One’s example to a lost world included dress, speech, possessions, entertainments—everything, in short, that was visible from the outside.
That was why her own was beyond reproach, and why, she supposed, none of the other girls in the Hamilton Falls area liked her. Even Julia McNeill, who came from as favored a family as the Traynells, which you would think would give them something in common, hadn’t been all that friendly. She and Julia and Claire Montoya were all around the same age, but even in school Claire and Julia had been chums and Dinah had followed them around feeling left out. Last summer Julia had shocked everyone by dumping Derrick Wilkinson, to whom she had practically been engaged, going Out, and then running off with a biker who had an illegitimate child. So her judgment was obviously flawed to begin with.
“Dinah?”
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