Laurie Alice Eakes - [Midwives 03]

by Choices of the Heart

  She hesitated, glanced past him toward her cabin, toward the woods beyond the fence. For a moment, he expected her to simply walk around him and into her room, out of his reach. Her small teeth clamped down on her lower lip a moment, then she nodded and turned toward the house without taking his hand.

  He followed her, collected his instrument from the cupboard in the parlor, and carried it onto the porch, where a fresh breeze cooled the afternoon. The rest of them joined him, arranging themselves on stools and steps or standing, Pa in the only chair, his face losing its pinched look as the music rose and swelled and echoed off the hills.

  In times like this, with the music swelling to the heavens, family discord didn’t matter, didn’t exist. God’s presence and love poured down. Even the trees seemed to lift their heads and listen, and the hens ceased their cackling.

  Sneaking glances Esther’s way, Griff caught how her head lifted, her shoulders straightened, tension ran away from her as though cleansed by a torrent as powerful as the waterfall. It sucked the breath from his lungs. He was a man drowning in the beauty of her face and form, the sound of her voice, the depth of her singing.

  His fingers faltered on the strings, and he handed the dulcimer to Ned. “You take a turn. My hands are tired.”

  “I can’t play in front of—of her,” Ned whispered, shooting a look toward Esther.

  “You can too.” Jack poked Ned in the arm. “She’s your teacher.”

  “I’ll leave.” Esther rose. “Shall I fetch everyone some water?”

  “We should be getting dinner going anyway. You menfolk take to your lessons.” Momma led a procession of females into the house.

  “Whew.” Ned heaved a sigh, then began to strum and sing in his high, sweet voice.

  Jack followed, Pa listening intently, nodding his approval, even smiling once or twice. Yes, for peaceful afternoons like this with his family gathered, Griff would sacrifice a great deal.

  Then everyone scattered after dinner, the women to clean up, the men to their evening chores that even Sunday couldn’t stop on a farm. Cows needed milking, eggs needed gathering, all the animals needed feeding. By the time everyone finished, Momma had put the children to bed—Brenna insisting she wasn’t a child, Liza wanting to finish a bit of needlework on her dress for the Independence Day celebration. Bethann had disappeared, a cup of something sweet and pungent in her hand.

  Irresolute, Griff stood on the back stoop, gazing across the kitchen garden to the cabin where he had been born and lived until the past two years, when his family got the foundation and walls of the house up. Esther crouched on the side not quite out of sight, no doubt feeding those useless cats. He could approach her, ask her if she truly wanted to learn to play the dulcimer, offer to teach her. His feet refused to move. His heart raced forward like Ned after a bird, but his feet had grown roots to his doorstep.

  Momma’s hand, almost as big and calloused as his own, landed on his shoulder. She smelled of yeast dough and whey, sun-bleached homespun and lye soap—scents as familiar as the pine trees around him. “Why are you hesitating, Son?”

  “I promised her to Zach. And I—” He shrugged. “Momma, she’s scared of something.”

  “This place is new to her.”

  “No, I don’t mean the mountain lions and bears, or even the chance of real fighting between our families. I’m talking about something she’s running from.”

  “You mean that note?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, she won’t be the first person who’s come to these mountains to escape their past, and she won’t be the last. It ain’t none of our business if she don’t want to tell us.”

  “It is if it puts us in harm’s way.”

  Momma stepped outside beside him. “You think so little of her you think she’d risk us thatta way?”

  “Well, no.” He bowed his head. “I don’t think little of her at all.”

  “I’m thinking you don’t.” Momma laughed. “Maybe you’re thinking too much of her. And that’s all right. Likely all she’s running from is a broken heart. Some reason why a pretty girl like her ain’t married yet.”

  “Yes, but why the note here?”

  “Dunno. But she’ll tell us when she’s ready and not before.” Momma pointed up to the ridge, where the Brooks land began. “And if your cousin Zach can’t win her and you can, it’s no reason for feuding.”

  “As if these families need reasons much.” Griff’s mouth tightened. “The mine just might make it worse, you know. Kill off all the Tollivers and you got yourself a lot of money.”

  “Griffin Tolliver, that ain’t charitable thinking.”

  “Naw. It’s just honest. Goes t’other way too. It’s not just our money; we got all those cousins who want their share.”

  “We can only do our part, Griff, and leave the rest to God.”

  “Who Pa thinks is on our side.” He realized his hands had curled into fists at his sides and relaxed them. “Sorry, Momma. I’m being disrespectful.”

  “Did you ask Miss Esther to the celebration?”

  Despite the abrupt shift in subject, Griff understood why—not asking Esther would have shown Momma disrespect.

  “I asked. She turned me down. She turned Zach down too. She says she’ll go with the children.”

  “And they’ll leave early.” Momma grinned and gave him a little push. “Go talk to her. She’s gotta be lonely.”

  And for the first time since he could remember, so was he.

  As he tramped across the yard, his footfalls sounding like rock slides compared to the stillness of the evening, the lack of trustworthy companionship weighed on his shoulders like a cliff side’s worth of boulders. Zach was his friend, but their work kept them apart more days than not, and always the barrier of their families’ hostility toward one another rose as immovable as the rocky ridge between their lands. When any other two men wanted to court the same girl, they took their chances with pleasing her more than the other. With Zach and him, one had to sacrifice for the sake of peace. He wouldn’t court her, and keeping away from her . . .

  That would be her decision.

  She must have noticed him coming, as though she couldn’t help but hear his footfalls. Two cats wound around her legs, their purrs like distant thunder, their glances upward adoring.

  She looked down and laughed. “I like animals.”

  “I never think much about them. Horses are to ride. Cows to milk and eat. Same with pigs and chickens—they’re for eating. Cats keep the varmints away and dogs can protect.”

  “But you don’t have any dogs.”

  “We used to.” A sharp pang hit him. “They got dead.”

  “They got dead?” She stared at him. “Old age? Disease? Bearing puppies?”

  “One shot, one poisoned. By Brookses or Gosnolls.” He tried not to show any emotion, as he tried not to feel emotion.

  She pressed one hand to her lips. “And did you all . . . retaliate?”

  “I didn’t. Pa didn’t. I don’t know if anyone else did.”

  “Why? How?” The words shot from her in explosive bursts. “What can be so awful that it is worth killing a human or an innocent animal?”

  “Family honor. At least that’s what I’m told. My sister was dishonored by one of their family. Forever we must seek revenge until they confess and repent.”

  “Because you’re God?” Her spine bowed as she drew away from him without moving her feet.

  He shoved his thumbs into his waistband to stop himself from reaching out to her. “It’s not my fight. I’ve never harmed a soul or even an animal except to put food on my table, and sometimes a body feels bad about that. But I can’t stop my father. It just gets worse, Esther. One man is killed, and that means another one must pay. One man’s injured, and so it goes. Endless. It’s gone on amongst the clans in Scotland and Ireland and probably other places for centuries. Just continues here, I s’pose. All I can do is pray and do my best to make peace.”

  Like not
try to win her to him for Zach’s sake. Zach, so shy and awkward with females despite the fact they looked at him and threatened to swoon, judging by their behavior.

  “And in the name of peace, I wanted to know if you want a lesson,” he finished with less passion.

  “I’d like that.”

  Not speaking, dusk settling around them with a tang of rain in the soft air, they strolled around the house and onto the porch. Griff retrieved his dulcimer once again and motioned for Esther to sit.

  “You hold this across your lap flat like this.” He demonstrated, setting the slant-sided instrument onto the skirt of her dress, then crouched before her. “You make the notes by holding your fingers over different frets—these things.” He indicated the raised bars that ran all the way down the neck and across the body. “To make chords, you hold several fingers down. We’ll start with this one.”

  He took her left hand in his. She felt as stiff as a statue.

  “You need to be able to move quickly, not stiff,” he admonished her. “Flexible?”

  “Yes.” Her fingers trembled in his hold, trembled like they had been exposed to cold weather. And they were cold.

  He chafed them between his. She resisted for a moment, then began to relax. Her fingers warmed, grew pliant. His heart raced. Instead of crouching before her, holding her hand, he needed to be running, pounding up the mountainside until he couldn’t breathe, until this wonderful, terrible, exciting warmth and racing heart calmed.

  He stayed where he was before her, close enough to smell the sweetness of her skin and hair, catch the way she swept her lashes down a beat before their eyes would have met. Provocative. Coy. Distracting.

  Yet she was an apt pupil. She grasped the idea of how to press on the frets with more than one finger at a time with one hand, while strumming with the other.

  “You have a good ear for the music,” he told her.

  This time she met his gaze. Her eyes shone. “I like this. It’s more personal than a pianoforte. Gentler.”

  “It’s what we got here. And we like it right well.”

  He liked her right well. Too well.

  17

  Six children perched on the benches before Esther—Ned and Jack in the front, Sam and Mattie Brooks on the second one, and Brenna and Liza on the third. The Tolliver boys gazed at her with wide-eyed anticipation. The Brooks boys kicked their feet and fidgeted with their hands, never meeting her gaze or returning her smile. In the back, Liza sat prim and proper, her back straight, her hands folded in the lap of her best dress except for the one she was saving for the celebration next month. Brenna had brought in a stick and was doing her best to gouge holes in the hard-packed dirt floor.

  After she announced the day had begun, Esther spent the first thirty seconds trying to stare Brenna into submission. All it did was make the Tolliver boys kick their feet and fidget and Liza begin an elbow-shoving match with her younger sister.

  “Begin as you intend to go on,” Momma had advised Esther to behave with expectant mothers. “You tell them, not the other way around.”

  Esther marched around the first two benches and snatched the stick from Brenna’s hand. “You bring nothing into my classroom I don’t invite you to bring, or you will leave my classroom with whatever you bring.” She then raised one foot to the bench beside Brenna and broke the stick across her thigh.

  From the corner of her eye, she noted the two youngest boys jump at the crack of splintering wood. Good. They wouldn’t be inclined to attempt any distracting actions—she hoped.

  She tossed the broken pieces of the branch into the yard, closed the door despite the warmth of the day, and returned to the front of the room. “Has anyone else brought something he would like to give me now or let me give his mother and father later?” She fixed her gaze on Sam, a golden-haired imp of nine.

  “Don’t do no lookin’ at me, ma’am.” Sam fidgeted some more, rubbing his pocket.

  That pocket moved.

  “Are you certain of that?” Esther pressed.

  “She talks right funny,” Mattie whispered. He had stopped fidgeting and tucked his hands under his legs.

  Esther laid her hand on Sam’s shoulder, thin but sturdy inside his blue-dyed shirt. “Do I need to turn you upside down to get at your pockets?”

  “I don’t got nothing.” Sam stuck out his lower lip.

  The others sat perfectly still, watching, lips sealed as though someone had glued them closed. They wouldn’t tattle on their cousin. They wanted to see what the new schoolma’am would do.

  “Then here is your first grammar lesson, Samuel Brooks and the rest of you. When you say, ‘I don’t got nothing,’ that is a double negative, and in English and arithmetic, two negatives create a positive.” Esther hauled the boy to his feet. “That means you have something. So what is it?”

  His pocket quivered.

  “I don’t understand what you just said.” Sam’s lower lip protruded further and quivered. “That’s a lot of fancy words.”

  She was tempted to give in to the plea for mercy in those pale blue eyes. He was angelic-looking, which probably meant he was a bit worse than an imp.

  “What’s in your pocket, Sam?” she asked more gently. “Shall I have your brother pull it out?”

  “Uh-huh.” He blushed.

  “Mattie?”

  Fourteen-year-old Mattie, homely face split into a grin, dove his hand into his brother’s pocket and emerged with a tiny green frog. It hopped feebly in Mattie’s hand, its eyes bulging.

  “I believe,” Esther said, “this fellow needs some water. Liza, will you please fetch a bowl?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Liza scrambled over Brenna and raced out the door.

  Esther frowned down at Sam. “You nearly killed one of God’s creatures for what reason? Trying to scare me sometime in the day?”

  “It’s just a frog.” Sam could give Brenna pouting lessons.

  “Frogs have a purpose on this earth, as does each of us.” Esther began to turn the moment into a lesson. “Frogs eat things like flies and mosquitoes.”

  “And then they get et by bigger things,” Jack pointed out.

  Esther nodded. “That’s right. Fish and snakes and other creatures that we might use for their skins, or animals we catch and eat.”

  “We don’t eat no mountain lions,” Ned said.

  “No.” Esther worked to suppress a shudder.

  That humanlike scream had disturbed her sleep again the previous night.

  “But they have a different purpose,” she continued.

  Such as?

  She didn’t know.

  “They keep the varmints like rats away,” Mattie supplied.

  Esther favored him with a brilliant smile of relief. Before she needed to continue, Liza returned with a bowl of water, and Mattie deposited the suffering amphibian into it, then carried it outside. Once he returned, Esther swept back to the front of the room and fixed each child with a stare until he or she met her gaze.

  “Next time I will take the object home with you while you explain to your parents why you needed to bring it to class. Understand?”

  “You ain’t gonna tell my momma?” Sam asked.

  Brenna curled her upper lip. “She’ll tell mine. And I was just trying to draw.”

  “We have time for drawing later, Brenna—with the appropriate implements.”

  The children gave her blank looks.

  “We’ll use chalk and slates for drawing,” she clarified. “Right now we are going to see what you can read.”

  She had created sheets of paper with various paragraphs from the simple to the more complex. Copying each by hand had been painstaking but necessary for efficiency. She passed them out and the testing began. Liza, as expected, read the best, then Jack. Ned and Mattie read poorly, and Brenna somewhere in between. Sam couldn’t sound out a single word, which reminded Esther that Zach wanted her to teach him to read. She hoped he knew more than his youngest brother. Sam would be a challenge to teac
h from the beginning.

  But not in arithmetic. He worked out the answers to her sums faster than anyone else and was accurate every time. By the time she declared the day over, he was grinning with triumph at his ability with numbers, and so was Esther.

  She was also worn to a thread and wanted nothing more than to take her own drawing materials into a quiet place and be left alone, no one talking to her, no one asking her questions, no one demanding her time. But Mrs. Tolliver wanted to know how the day had progressed, if any of the children gave her trouble, if she thought her young’uns could learn.

  “Of course they can. All of them are intelligent.”

  The truth. Whether or not they wanted to learn remained to be seen after only one day.

  It remained to be seen after two, four, five days. With a sigh of relief, Esther closed the door behind the last Tolliver on Friday afternoon. Whether it was risky or not, she intended to go for a long walk. The path up the mountain and then down again to the river was clear and well-traveled enough that she should be safe. She just must not stray off to the waterfall or any other alluring cathedral of nature. That much she had gleaned from the children and Mrs. Tolliver during the weeks she had been on Brooks Ridge. Two hours of solitude was all she asked.

  She donned her half boots, hooked the buttons up the insides of her ankles, tied a poke bonnet over her hair, and exited her cabin with her sketching materials tucked under her arm. Two of the now four cats she fed scraps to each night wound themselves around her ankles. She bent and patted them, checking for flea bites and sores. One might be expecting kittens. In a few weeks, her sides would bulge indelicately.

  “You should keep to your den soon, Momma,” she murmured to the gray-striped tabby.

  “Meow?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen that handsome tom. He’d better do right by you.” With a scratch behind the pointed ears, one a bit ragged from an old fight, Esther straightened and slipped behind her cabin and out the small back gate of the stockade fence, which was built to keep out marauding Indians that had bothered settlers to the mountains not that many decades earlier.