Allie’s Moon
by
Alexis Harrington
Copyright © by Alexis Harrington, 2000
www.alexisharrington.com
Smashwords Edition
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CHAPTER ONE
Decker Prairie, Oregon
May 1880
Althea Ford needed a man and she’d walked all the way to town to find one.
His looks didn’t matter and neither did his age. But he’d better be good with his hands and possess physical stamina because she planned to keep him busy from early morning until sundown.
Coming to town—that was something she tried to avoid. Decker Prairie was a quiet, slow-moving place. That tended to give its residents long memories for the rare sensational event, and curiosity that bordered on rudeness. To hide her feelings of self-consciousness, she moved along the sidewalk with a purposeful stride, looking neither right or left. But she was aware of people staring at her as she passed, and whispering behind their hands. She knew they had forgotten nothing about the Ford family.
Worse than being the subject of scrutiny and gossip was the errand that brought her here today. It wasn’t one that she looked forward to. In fact, only desperation drove her to it. It seemed a crime to ruin such a beautiful spring afternoon with a disagreeable task.
As she rounded the corner, the Liberal Saloon came into view. Even from here she could smell the warm, yeasty scent of beer and stale cigar smoke. That a man should waste his time in a place like that, she thought with her lips pursed. She lifted her nose a notch. Why, there was one now, just hanging around outside the door, and a pitiful-looking specimen he was too, with his slouched shoulders and dog-eared appearance. He probably smelled as bad as he looked.
Just as she came abreast of him and was about to step off the sidewalk to give him a wide berth, the man looked up at her. Their eyes met for breathless instant, and Althea’s train of thought jumped the track. Leaning against the door jamb that way, he seemed familiar but she couldn’t place him. Wasn’t he—she thought he rather resembled Decker Prairie’s former sheriff. But this couldn’t be him. She swallowed. Surely she would remember a man with eyes that color—green, like fields of ripe corn stalks. Intensity burned in them, as if trouble and danger were his intimates. His gaze swept over her, searching, speculative, but what he sought she couldn’t guess. It wasn’t like the rude, furtive looks she got from other people. In fact, he gave no indication of recognizing her. No man had ever looked at her that way. For a moment, she thought he might even speak to her, but he didn’t. An odd thrill of fear and curiosity rushed through her, stiffening her spine and hurrying her steps. After she passed him, an irresistible urge made her glance back at him over her shoulder. But he was no longer watching her, and she felt an unbelievable twinge of disappointment.
Whatever was she thinking of? she wondered. With all the trouble she had facing her, why on earth was she curious about that dirty, ill-kempt man?
Althea tightened her shawl around her shoulders and sped on to Kincade’s Livery. It was with a different sort of trepidation that she approached. Stepping from bright sunlight into large, gloomy enclosures like stables and barns always made her hands feel a little clammy.
And Cooper Matthews was a man of such low degree and reputation, some might say that no decent woman should have any dealings with him. But necessity left her with no choice.
She lingered in the big doorway, hoping to spot him without having to actually go in search of him. Without having to go into this dark, cavernous building. Cooper did odd jobs around the livery to earn his keep, and this was where he ought to be. She knew that he lived in a shack behind the stables, but it would hardly be proper—or safe, in her opinion—to look for him back there.
Though her trips to Decker Prairie were rare, Althea had been privy to enough gossip to know that with the possible exception of his crony Floyd Endicott, no one in town really liked Cooper. The boy who delivered groceries out to the Ford place was a busybody who’d told Althea that Cooper was a bully who drank too much, and that since his youth his cruel streak had shown itself time and again. Pulling the wings off flies and making fun of others’ debilities or differences were great sport to him.
For women, Cooper reputedly had no respect at all.
Taking one step inside the stables, Althea peered into the dim interior. The pungent smells of horses and hay struck her, along with the faint musty odor that seemed to lurk in all barns. She swallowed and closed her hands into fists, pressing them to her chest.
“Mr. Matthews?” she called. “Mr. Matthews are you here?”
Only soft nickering answered her.
She took another careful step deeper into the stables. A glance at the rafters overhead made her heart beat heavily, and she immediately dropped her gaze to the hard-packed dirt floor. After having worked up the courage and determination to come in search of him, Althea didn’t know if she could bring herself to return later if he wasn’t here now. She backed up and looked over her shoulder to see if he was in the corral. “Mr. Matth—”
“Quit your yellin’, lady. I ain’t deef.”
Althea jumped and turned her head so quickly, a joint in her neck made a soft popping sound. A wiry man of medium height emerged from the shadows of the back stalls. He walked with a cocky nonchalance that made her wish again for some other option. But there was none.
“Mr. Matthews,” she repeated. Although his battered hat hid part of his features, she recognized him.
“Yeah, that’s me. What do you want?”
She felt slightly winded, as if she needed to take a breath between each word. “I’m Althea Ford. I live on the north edge of town.”
“So? Got a horse you want tended or what?” His voice had a coarse, nasal quality. Bib overalls hung like a grimy bag on his frame, as though they were never taken off, never washed. The undershirt beneath might have been white at one time. Now it was various shades of sweat-stained ecru. In all, he was filthy and unpleasant and dangerous, even more so than the man outside the saloon.
Althea did her best to look him in the face while she spoke, but it was difficult. She saw a cold, intimidating appraisal in his dark eyes that made her chest feel tight. “I have a house—” She drew another breath. “That is, I need a lot of work done around my house. The roof leaks and my kitchen garden hasn’t been planted yet. The gutters are overflowing and the whole place needs painting. I hoped you might—I was wondering if you’d be interested in the job.”
He scrutinized her with a suspicious gaze. “Yeah? How much are you payin’?”
“I’ll give you good wages if the work is completed to my satisfaction.”
Finally a glimmer of recognition crossed his long face, and he hooked his thumbs in the suspenders of his overalls. “Oh, yeah, I heard about you. You’re one of them crazy Ford women, ain’tcha? Your mama strung herself up.”
Althea swallowed against the lump beginning to form in her throat but said nothing.
“You’ve been goin’ around town, beggin’ to hire someone. Since you’re here, I guess you ain’t found any takers. Huh, nobody wants to work for a persnickety woman. I’d just as soon do chores for those old Pratt women.”
Decker Prairie talked as much about Mary and Louise Pratt as they did the Fords. A pair of cantankerous, demanding old crones, Mary
and Louise Pratt were sisters-in-law who lived in town and didn’t have one good word to say about anything or anyone. So disagreeable were they that children were warned the Pratts would “get them” if they misbehaved.
Begging? Persnickety! She felt her face color hotly. “If you mean that I want an honest day’s labor for the money I’m paying—”
“Sounds more like slave labor to hear tell at the Liberal Saloon. Last spring Heck Germaine had to paint your damned fence twice before you’d pay him. And Floyd Endicott had a try at it before that, and you didn’t pay him at all.”
Feeling obliged to defend herself, she replied, “I asked Hector Germaine to put two coats of paint on the fence so that it would weather well. As for Mr. Endicott, no, I would not give good money to someone who left the barn door open and spent the day napping under my pear tree.”
Cooper shook his arrow-shaped head. “I don’t like takin’ orders from a woman anytime, but a picky one—hell, lady, for all that you’re a tolerable-lookin’ female” —he leaned over slightly and shot a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt, barely missing her skirts—“you just don’t know your place. I guess you ain’t found a man willin’ to teach it to you, neither.”
Althea’s face flamed hotter. She had never suffered so many insults in the space of five minutes. She’d done nothing to warrant them, and she could not bear to stand here and take them any longer. “I see I’ve made a mistake,” she replied coolly and turned to walk away.
“Yeah, with them other boys you did,” he agreed, obviously misunderstanding her. “I’ll do the work, but we’re gonna get a few things straight.”
Astounded, she stopped in her tracks and faced him. He dragged his gray-brown sleeve across his mouth. The man’s insolent self-assurance nearly took her breath. But the malevolence she saw in his face made her bite back the hot reply that sprang to her mind. Oh, what a stupid thing to do, coming here to talk to him. Stupid. She felt defenseless and knew that he sensed it, the way a vicious dog smelled fear.
“No, thank you, Mr. Matthews. I’m no longer interested.”
He raked her with those cold narrow eyes again, considering her slender form in a way that was both profane and derisive at the same time. Finally, a cruel smirk split his face, revealing oddly tiny, tobacco-stained teeth. “Y’ain’t, huh? Are you gonna climb up to the roof to patch it? Steer the plow yourself?”
Althea took a deep breath and forced back the tears she felt gathering under her eyelids. How could this obnoxious, rude man who smelled of stale beer, horse manure, and old sweat make her cry? He was no one to her. Less than no one.
But he was right about one thing—over the past few weeks she had asked every available man in town before she’d come here. And she’d heard as many excuses as a dog had fleas why they couldn’t do the job. Though no one had come out and said so, their meaning was plain enough: they didn’t want to work for her. And her advertisements at Wickwire’s General Merchandise and the Decker Prairie Grange had gone unanswered. Despite that, she would walk away from Cooper Matthews this minute if she could.
Then in her memory rose the picture of all the basins and pans she’d had to put out during the winter and spring rains to catch the drips. Night and day, the steady plink-plink could be heard throughout the house.
The roof had to be fixed this year. It leaked over almost every room, and mildew was sure to follow. The gutters were sprouting weeds. The paint was peeling off the house in blistered sheets. The garden had to be planted. She might be able to do that much if she had just a little help. But there was no one.
“All right, then, Mr. Matthews,” she resolved, regaining control of herself and, she hoped, the situation. “I’ll pay you ten cents an hour plus the cost of supplies. I’d like you to get started after lunch.”
He rubbed his stubbled jaw with a dirty hand and grinned again. “We’ll see about all that too, now, won’t we?”
~~*~*~*~~
In the end, the handyman had demanded and gotten the outrageous wage of thirteen cents an hour, plus his meals. He also announced that he would start in the morning, not that afternoon. There was no point in protesting—he had Althea over a barrel and he knew it.
After a brief stop at Wickwire’s to get a little gift for Olivia, Althea trudged the mile back home, feeling like a mouse worn out by its struggle with a dirty feral cat. Her reclusive life had not prepared her to deal with men like Cooper Matthews. In fact, it hadn’t prepared her to deal with men much at all.
Although the late May afternoon was clear and bright and filled with the promise of spring, she found only worry in it as she walked along the road that led out of town. The sight of pretty wildflowers lifting their heads to the sun reminded her how ratty and overgrown her own yard was. The light, clean breeze brought to mind the peeling paint, the loose front step, the rotting roof—everything that was wrong with her house.
She glanced at a green field stretching out to her right, dotted with sheep and wobbly-limbed new lambs. Persnickety, was she? So Cooper Matthews had called her. He’d made it sound like the most loathsome of characteristics, worse than any of the seven deadly sins. She couldn’t think of anyone who would pay a man for sleeping instead of working. If that was persnickety, so be it. Was it asking so much that things be done the way she wanted? Why should she accept a fence painted once when she’d asked for two coats?
And it seemed a simple enough request that the barn door be kept closed, so that she wouldn’t have to see inside the dark, gaping maw. Wouldn’t have to see inside and remember what had happened in there. Even now, eighteen years later, it gave her shudders to think about it.
Even now.
~~*~*~*~~
“Olivia? I’m home,” Althea called from the kitchen. From the parlor she could hear the high, sweet notes of “Für Elise” and knew that her sister was in the same place she had left her. Following the sound of the melody, she saw Olivia sitting at her rosewood grand piano, the one Father had given her for her tenth birthday. The instrument nearly overpowered their small neat parlor, but when she’d expressed the desire to play, of course Amos Ford had wanted her to have the very best.
Although she had the talent to play beautifully, at that moment Olivia thumped out the Beethoven piece with more force than it called for. The notes ricocheted off the walls in a way that surely would have outraged the late maestro.
Althea sighed. Though Olivia gave no other sign of it, obviously her younger sister was still in a sulk. “Were you all right while I was gone?” she asked, trying again for a response.
Finally Olivia broke off the tortured melody and lifted her hazel eyes. Her pale blue dress was the perfect complement to her coloring. With hair the color of corn silk, and a smooth, translucent complexion like fine china, she looked as delicate and ethereal as an angel. Like their mother, or at least what Althea could remember of her. Althea had been told she herself favored a distant aunt whom she’d never met, but she thought that she resembled no one else in the family. In fact, at moments of her greatest self-doubt, when things had been the darkest, she’d wondered if Olivia had been the Fords’s only true child. Perhaps Althea had been a foundling.
“Yes, I was fine. But I still wish I could have come with you. You know I’m feeling much stronger these days.”
Althea reached up to pull the pins out of her straw hat. “I know you are and I’m glad for that. It just wasn’t a good time for you to go with me today.”
“Well, I would’ve liked to have pie and tea at Elmira’s Café.” Her sister’s soft, clear voice carried just the edge of a pout.
Althea pushed aside the lace curtain and glanced through the front door glass at the ratty yard. She thought she had explained her town trip plainly enough, but as was her way, Olivia didn’t always listen very closely. Facing her, Althea said, “I didn’t go to have pie at the café or do anything else that was fun, Olivia. I hired a man to repair the roof and plant our garden. So many things need to be fixed around here. Anyway, you
didn’t miss much. Decker Prairie doesn’t change.”
Olivia said nothing but her face betrayed a shadow of moping disbelief. Clearly she thought she’d missed having a grand time.
“I’ll fix us an early supper,” Althea said with forced brightness. “I left a kettle of soup simmering on the stove.” It was a challenge to get Olivia to do more than pick at her food, especially if it was something she didn’t care for—and that seemed to be just about everything. “Are you feeling hungry?”
She shrugged. “I guess. But pie and tea would’ve tasted better.”
“We’ll go another time.” Then remembering her stop at the general store, she tantalized, “I brought you a surprise.”
Immediately Olivia perked up, and her hazel eyes widened liked a child’s. “What?”
Sometimes it was difficult for Althea to remember that her sister was twenty years old. She seemed more like a young girl, one whose mind was incapable of a grave or dark thought. Unless a bad case of the “mopes” was upon her, of course. Then she could be downright gloomy.
Olivia rose from the bench and clasped her hands at her waist. “Oh, did you bring a music box, or maybe those garnet eardrops in the jeweler’s display window?”
“Good heavens, Olivia!” Althea said, and laughed. “Those are the kinds of gifts people give for birthdays or at Christmas. It’s just a little surprise.”
She sank back to the piano bench with a rustle of her blue skirts. “Oh. Yes, of course, you’re right.”
Althea searched her dress pocket and withdrew a pair of bone hairpins. “I got these at Wickwire’s. You’re always losing yours and I thought you could use them.”
She took them from Althea’s outstretched hand and put them on top of the piano. “Thank you.”
“Maybe we can go into town next week, after the repairs are started. We can shop and have lunch at the café,” Althea offered.
Olivia nodded, her face still reflecting her disappointment.
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