by Jane Hoppen
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Evelyn said. “Breakfast will be ready before you go.”
“Nice to meet you,” Helen said to Sarah.
Sarah nodded and said, “Good night.”
When Helen left the room, Evelyn looked at Sarah.
“I don’t think I can stay awake another minute,” she said.
“Me, either,” said Sarah.
Evelyn led the way up the steps with Sarah trailing behind her.
“You can sleep with me in my bed tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll set up the cot in here.”
“Okay,” said Sarah.
When they reached the small bedroom, Evelyn went to the dresser and took out two nightgowns. She handed one to Sarah.
“You’ll probably drown in this, but it will have to do for now, until you decide what to do. If you decide that you’re going to stay here, at some point Will can take you home to gather some of your things,” she said.
“I don’t think I have any choice but to stay here, at least until I figure things out,” Sarah said glumly, looking at Evelyn. “I believe my days in Pine Creek are over. I would never feel safe there with Sam so close by and feeling as if the house is as much his as mine. I could never trust him again.”
Each of her words was wrapped in defeat.
“Well, I’m happy to have you here,” Evelyn said.
Sarah began to remove her clothes. Evelyn quickly turned her back to her and also began to undress. Sarah watched her from behind, and as Evelyn reached for her gown, Sarah caught a full glimpse of her. She was striking—a voluptuous woman with full curves. Sarah knew that when her hair grew back she would be even more attractive. As she reached for the nightgown Evelyn had given her, Evelyn drew back the covers on the bed and sat on the edge. When she looked up, Sarah was just pulling the gown over her head. Sarah let down her hair, and it fell to the middle of her back in gentle waves. Her breasts were full, firm, and she was slender and lithe.
Evelyn quickly shifted her eyes away and lay back on the bed, her body sinking into the softness beneath her. She was exactly where she wanted to be—home. She knew every inch of the house—which floorboards creaked, on which ceiling rafters the spiders liked to weave their webs. Home.
“Oh my,” she said aloud. “Compared to that bunk…the bunkhouse…”
“I’m amazed you could actually sleep in that madness,” Sarah said.
Chapter Ten
Evelyn’s pent-up exhaustion could not compare to the exhilaration she felt from being home, and she woke the next morning before dawn, just as the day was being ushered in by crowing roosters. Her body ached from the previous months of labor, but she was so thrilled to be back on the farm that it seemed only a minor inconvenience. A slight breeze was rattling the windows, and she sat up in bed and stretched. She nearly gasped as her hand brushed against Sarah. She had almost forgotten that she was beside her. Evelyn gazed at her for a moment. She looked peaceful, despite all the turmoil that Evelyn knew she was feeling. She quietly got out of bed, dressed, and left the room, gently shutting the door behind her. The noise of the children getting up would wake Sarah soon enough.
She went downstairs and smiled. The embers in the fireplace softly lit the two rooms. She added some wood to the kitchen stove and the fire sparked. She reached for a cast iron pan and a baking sheet. She had waited for this moment for months—a breakfast of eggs, biscuits, and ham. She could already taste it. She glanced out the window. The sun was beginning to push above the tree line, spreading a silky sheen over the farmland. She pulled on her coat and went outside, trampling through snow to the chicken coop. She opened the creaking door and stepped in, rousing the birds as she searched for eggs. She gathered them into a basket as she found them—a total of thirteen. She put out some feed and headed back to the house. She was greeted by the nutty smell of coffee boiling on the stove.
“You’re up,” she said to Helen.
“I heard you coming down,” Helen said.
“I’ll get the breakfast started,” Evelyn said.
“I can’t wait to tell Will that you have returned,” Helen said. “He’ll be relieved.”
Evelyn smiled.
“I’m sure he had his worries, just as you did. Ask him if he can come by sometime this week with the wagon to take Sarah home. We might need two wagons. I want her to be able to salvage as many of her belongings as she can before Sam returns. We can store some things in the barn if we need to.”
“She has decided to stay?” Helen asked.
Evelyn nodded.
“For the time being,” she said.
“I feel sorry for her,” Helen said. “She’s displaced now. The only home she knew is unsafe, and with no other family… You did the right thing bringing her here.”
“I could never have left her there,” Evelyn said. “She wouldn’t have been safe, and our friendship has grown in the past few months.”
Helen glanced at her.
“How do you think she’ll fare here?”
Evelyn shrugged.
“All I can do is make her as welcome as possible. Maybe one day she can think of the farm as…home. Maybe she’ll find another place to settle. I know she was used to a different kind of life before the camp, before this.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Helen said. “The farm has its appeal, and so does this house. You know I love spending time here.”
“I know that, but you, at least, have a reference point to farm living,” Evelyn said. “That’s how we grew up. This life takes adapting to.”
Helen nodded. Evelyn cracked eggs into the hot skillet, and by the time the whites were spitting and setting, she could hear the children upstairs, scrambling to pull on clothes and boots. She knew they were as thrilled as she was to have everything back to normal.
* * *
For the first time in months, Sarah woke to sunshine instead of darkness. She felt the cushiony bed beneath her and for a moment was disoriented. She scanned the room—Evelyn’s. She was with Evelyn. She sat up on the side of the bed. Look at me, from a logging camp to a farm. Who would have thought my life could have changed so drastically in so little time? She wanted nothing more than to curl up in a cocoon, stay hidden away from the world, but she heard scrambling down the stairs and rose to get dressed. Ten minutes later, she joined everyone, and Evelyn glanced at her and laughed.
“I know you’ll be happy when you can put on some of your own clothes,” she said. “You’re certainly drowning in mine.”
Sarah smiled.
“I’ve got no complaints,” she said.
They all gathered around the table before steaming plates of food.
“Do you hear that?” Evelyn asked Sarah.
Peter looked from Evelyn to Sarah.
“Hear what?” he asked.
“The quiet,” Evelyn said. “Up at the camp, meal times were the loudest times, with more than fifty loggers crammed into a room not much larger than this.”
“What else was it like up there, Ma?” Peter asked.
“Well, I felt like I never did get warm up there,” Evelyn said. “And like here, the work was never done. We were up before the sun rose and down not long after it set.”
“Were the lumberjacks nice?” Karl asked.
Evelyn’s eyes met Sarah’s for a moment.
“Some,” Evelyn said. “My bunkmate was a man named Whiskey Jack. He was a decent fellow.”
“Did he drink whiskey?” Peter asked.
“No drinking at camp,” Evelyn said. “He must have gotten that name before he started working there.”
“How many trees did you cut down?” Karl asked.
“More than I can count,” Evelyn said. “That’s the only thing we did all day, until we started to move the lumber to the riverbank.”
“Did you cut down trees?” Peter asked Sarah.
“Oh, no,” Sarah said. “Your mother had the stamina for that, but I worked in the cook shanty. I helped feed the jacks.”
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“Even that work was endless,” Evelyn said. “Now, enough with the questions. We’ve got a full day ahead, and we need to show Sarah around the farm.”
“How long is she staying?” Peter asked with a scowl on his face.
Silence filled the room for a moment, and Evelyn watched as a light blush crawled over Sarah’s face.
“Sarah is welcome here for as long as she wants to stay,” she said. “She might take a liking to the farm life.”
“When does Daddy come?” Louise asked.
The room fell quiet as the boys’ heads dropped. Evelyn pulled Louise onto her lap and wrapped her arms around her. She rested a hand on Louise’s chest, over her heart.
“He’s in a better place now, honey,” she said. “But as long as you keep him here, in your heart, he’ll always be with you. Isn’t that right, boys?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said halfheartedly.
Evelyn studied them, then said, “But I’m here, and I’ll never leave again. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the children said in unison.
“All right,” Evelyn said. “Let’s get started.”
* * *
After Helen left and the kitchen had been tidied up, Evelyn sent the boys out to milk the cows. She took Louise upstairs to get her dressed and returned to find Sarah gazing out the window.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“The farm is bigger than I could have imagined,” Sarah said. “I could barely make it out last night.”
Evelyn joined her by the window.
“Ah,” she sighed. “It’s a beautiful day. That sun ought to do a good job of melting some more of the snow today. Spring’s right around the corner. When the Chinook winds start to blow in from the southeast, they’ll melt what remains. Are you ready for a tour?”
“Of course,” Sarah said.
“Grab your coat and I’ll give you a pair of galoshes to wear. We’ll be traipsing through a good bit of mud.”
When they stepped outside, Evelyn paused on the porch and took a deep breath. The sky was a clear, deep indigo, and the harsh call from a blue jay cut through the morning silence, accompanied by the distant drumming of woodpeckers hammering on dead trees and the chirping of sparrows on the roof of the house and in the nearby bushes.
“First things first,” Evelyn said as she gestured toward the pile of her and Sarah’s camp clothes. “I’ll get a fire going in the pit over there so we can burn those.”
She grabbed a few logs and some kindling from the pile that was stacked on the porch, and Sarah scooped up the pile of clothing. She followed Evelyn to the fire pit, with Louise humming happily between them, one hand clutching Evelyn’s pant leg. Evelyn started the fire, and when it finally caught, they added the clothing, one piece at a time.
“Good riddance to these,” Evelyn said happily.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Sarah said.
“Come on,” Evelyn said. “Let me show you around.”
She took Sarah’s hand in one hand and Louise’s in the other.
“I don’t want you slipping,” she said. “There are still some icy patches.”
Sarah immediately warmed at the feeling of Evelyn’s hand cupped over hers. Evelyn led her away from the house and stopped before they reached the barn.
“That, of course, is the barn,” she said. “The cows, horses, and pigs stay in there during the winter. The horses we use for transportation and plowing. The cows provide us with milk, butter, and an occasional batch of ice cream until we take them to the butcher, and the pigs and chickens provide most of our meat.”
She led Sarah and Louise to a fenced-in structure on the barn’s right side.
“This is the chicken coop,” she said. “We check it each morning to collect the eggs and spread the feed. They usually stay outside for a good part of the day, except for during the winter time.”
She opened the door to the coop and ushered in Sarah and Louise. A cordon of hens and roosters were gathered near the door, their white heads jauntily cocked. Others were busy eating—clucking and peeping, their heads bobbing as they eagerly picked up kernels. Sarah felt as if she was in a foreign land.
“The main concern with the coop is keeping out the foxes,” Evelyn said as they left the structure. “That’s what the fence is for, but the foxes have learned how to burrow beneath it.”
She gestured to a small building on the right side of the chicken coop.
“That’s our smokehouse. We smoke most of our meats to preserve them. Come on. I’ll show you the barn. The boys should be just about done milking.”
“I don’t think Peter is very pleased with my presence,” Sarah said.
Evelyn squeezed her hand.
“Give him time,” she said. “He’s a bit more set in his ways than Karl and Louise and, being the oldest, his father’s absence has weighed on him the heaviest.”
“I can’t imagine,” Sarah said.
As they headed toward the barn, a loud, shrill, throaty jumble of sound arose. Sarah jumped slightly and looked at Evelyn, startled. Evelyn laughed.
“Those are the turkeys,” she said. “They can usually be found behind the barn, roosting in the trees. They provide a windbreak for them from the drifting snow and winter wind.”
“Do you feed them?” Sarah asked.
“We give them some grains when necessary,” Evelyn said. “In the winter they eat nuts and whatever fruits they can find. In the spring and summer, they most often feast on buds, grasses, and grasshoppers from the fields.”
Sarah looked over the vast plot of land. She had never even wondered what farm life was like before that moment, and she felt overwhelmed.
“What do you grow?” she asked. “How do you make your money?”
She felt naive, unlearned. Everything seemed so intricate and complicated.
“Our main money crop is potatoes,” Evelyn said. “They grow well in the large field in the south, where the soil is sandier. We use the two smaller fields on the north side of the land to grow corn for animal feed and wheat for our own uses. There’s also a good-sized plot on the other side of the house where we grow the garden. We’ll be planting that soon enough. We get a good supply of provisions from that, pretty much everything we need for canning—tomatoes, green beans, corn, squash, lettuce, carrots, all the basic root vegetables.”
“I’m good with gardens,” Sarah said earnestly.
She didn’t want Evelyn to think that she would be useless and more of a burden than a help, though she was unsure of how much help she could actually be, what she might have to contribute.
“Excellent,” Evelyn said, nodding. “That will be under your charge, as I’ll probably be spending most of my time in the fields with Peter. Tending to the crops was George’s primary duty.”
“Do you have any help besides the boys?” Sarah asked.
“Only during harvest season,” Evelyn said. “Until then hiring hands just isn’t cost effective. The plowing will be the most difficult part. I can always get some help from Will if I need it, but he has his own fields to tend to. I should be able to manage with Peter’s help.”
Sarah followed Evelyn across an expanse of snow to the barn, the thawing snow sinking beneath their feet. The sun was pressing higher into the sky and felt warm on her skin. Except for the occasional animal sound, the farm was quiet and peaceful, and Sarah realized how grateful she was to be away from the logging camp, Sam, and all the gregarious men and their nonstop noise. Evelyn pulled open one of the barn doors. They stepped in and were greeted by a menagerie of sounds—the horses’ whinnies; the cows’ low, melodic moos; and the pigs’ lyric sopranos and tenors. Sarah’s eyes took a moment to adjust, the lanterns only dimly lighting the monstrous structure, with slices of light breaking through some slats. The barnyard scents were strong, ripe, but they weren’t nauseating—nothing like the stench of all the jacks huddled in the cook shanty. One set of stalls housed the cows, and a stall across from them was hom
e to the horses. In the back of the barn, one large pen corralled the pigs. The sounds of the animals filled the vacuous space.
“As soon as spring arrives and the warm weather settles in, the horses and cows will be sent out to pasture for grazing. At the same time, the large pen on the west side of the barn will transform into the pigpen.”
“It’s so much to handle,” Sarah said.
She wondered if she would be able to stack up to the abundance of work.
“It all comes together somehow,” Evelyn said. “How are you boys doing?”
“Good, Ma,” Peter said. “We’ve only got three more to go.”
Both of the boys were sitting on stools, each near a cow’s left rear side, with silver buckets placed beneath the cows’ udders to catch the frothy milk. Peter moved from the cow he’d just finished milking to the next one in line.
“Have you ever seen a cow getting milked?” Evelyn asked Sarah.
“Can’t say I have,” Sarah said. “I’ve just always partaken in the outcome.”
“Peter, why don’t you show Sarah how it’s done?” Evelyn said. “She’ll probably be helping out some mornings.”
“Okay,” Peter said.
Sarah edged in cautiously. She had never even really seen a cow close up, and she thought the creature rather lovely in a docile sort of way. The eyes, more than anything, drew her in—the dark, glossy pools framed by thick curling eyelashes.
“You hold the teat like this,” Peter said.
He spoke in an authoritative tone. He wrapped the thumb and forefinger of his left hand into a circle around the base of one of the cow’s teats and gently squeezed it until a small squirt of milk was released.
“You pinch off the top of the teat with your finger and thumb,” Evelyn explained. “That traps the milk in the lower part of the teat. You squeeze that out using your other fingers. The milk will squirt out through the hole on the teat’s tip.”
“It looks a bit complicated,” Sarah said.