Remembering how silly that fight had been, Ellen turned her face back to the mountains. She could see the dark places where the clouds made shadows on the slopes, the horses running in the meadow, the snow in the crevices that had been there as long as she had lived on the ranch. “I’m a lucky woman,” she told her granddaughter.
“I just want to know that fifty years from now, I made the right choice for my life, like you did. I don’t want to end up sour like some of Mom’s friends, sorry I ever let Dave pressure me into getting married.”
Ellen studied the girl for a moment. “So you’ve run away, have you? That’s why you came here.”
June looked at her grandmother in surprise. “How did you know?”
“I just did.”
June put her hands over her face. “It’s awful of me, isn’t it? After all the work Mom’s put into making everything just right.”
“Does she know you’re here?”
“No.” June brushed the tears off her cheeks. She’d called her parents in Chicago when she knew they wouldn’t be home and left a message with the maid, saying that she didn’t believe she could go through with the wedding, that she needed time to think things over and was going away. “I said I’d call later and explain things when I’d made a decision. I just couldn’t talk to her then. How could I after everything she’s done, all the work she’s put in? I think Dad will be okay with it, but Mom will be furious.”
“Oh, not so furious. Disappointed maybe.”
“You won’t tell her I’m here, will you? She might tell Dave.”
“I won’t lie to her if she asks, but no, I won’t volunteer the information.” Then Ellen asked about Dave.
June studied her hands for a moment. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”
“Did you tell him you were running away?”
“Well, sure, I couldn’t just leave him hanging, could I?” June stood and went to the edge of the porch and looked out. “I did it the coward’s way, though. I didn’t want to talk to him, so I left a letter at his place on the way to the airport, dropped it off when I knew he wouldn’t be there. He’ll have read it by now. I told him I just couldn’t go through with the wedding. He’ll be terribly hurt, won’t he?”
“Probably.” Ellen got up and stood beside her granddaughter, her arm around the girl’s waist. “It’s quite a view, isn’t it? Those mountains soothe me when I’m troubled. They’re so grand that they make what’s bothering me seem small. They’ve been there for millions of years and make me realize my problems are temporary. Of course, they’re my troubles, so they seem awful important.” She squeezed June’s waist. “I’m glad you came. This is the right place for you to think things through.”
“Dave doesn’t know I’m here either. Mom might guess, but I don’t think Dave will. If he did, he’d show up on your doorstep. I don’t want him to. I can’t talk to him.”
“You should.”
“I know. It isn’t fair to him.”
“Do you want to tell me why you ran away?”
June turned and sat down on the porch swing, while Ellen returned to her stitching. “We had the worst fight, Granny.” Getting married right away had been Dave’s idea. She had wanted to wait. The night before June left, Dave had told her she’d be the perfect army wife. He’d said she’d be in a coffee klatch with the other wives and maybe do some kind of volunteer work at the base. “He went on and on, and I realized that as long as we were married, I wouldn’t be me. I’d be a wife,” June said. She had spent four years in college and wanted to do something with her life. That was why she had majored in business. She’d even been offered a job in a training program at a bank in Colorado Springs, an hour south of Denver, but of course, she’d turned it down since she was getting married. With Dave in the military, she couldn’t count on staying in Colorado. “What Dave said made me look past the wedding. I’d feel buried. I wouldn’t even have a name. I’d always be Mrs. David Proctor, an army wife. He referred to me as the little missus, and I just blew up. I told him I’d never settle for that. We were both so angry. I said he wanted to smother me, and he told me I didn’t love him. Maybe I don’t.”
“It wouldn’t be forever,” Ellen said. “Dave will be discharged in a couple of years.”
“That’s just it. It will be forever. David plans to have a career in the military, like his father and his grandfather. Did you know he went to West Point? I should have thought this all through a long time ago.”
“He could always change his mind,” Ellen suggested.
June shook her head. “If he did, he’d resent me for it. The military’s the only career he ever wanted. He’d blame me if he didn’t stay in the army. That’s not a very good basis for a marriage.”
“So you ran away.”
June gave a little smile. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“Oh yes.” Ellen ran her hand across the quilt top, then folded it and set it on a chair. There was coffee in the kitchen, she said. Maria, the cook and housekeeper, kept it on the stove in case Ben or one of the hands came in. She suggested June fetch coffee and Maria’s bread, along with the apple butter the cook had made the day before. Then they could talk. “I’d like an excuse to do nothing but sit here in the sun,” Ellen lied. The truth was, she didn’t want to sit in the sun at all. She’d rather be on a horse, showing June the improvements she and Ben had made on the ranch since the last time June was there. But her riding days were over.
June got up and went inside, the screen door slamming behind her. Ellen watched her granddaughter disappear, then turned to study the horses as they raced across the meadow, the stallion in the lead. The sun shone on him, making his light brown coat appear almost white against the green mountains. He was descended from the stallion Ben had purchased years before. She was glad Ben had bought him, although she’d been angry enough at the time. She had wanted to remodel the kitchen, get rid of the old wooden Hoosier cupboard and put in cabinets, and they had quarreled. Then, perhaps remembering her defiance of a few years before when Ellen had spent their money on bathroom fixtures, Ben had gone ahead and bought the horse without her knowledge. She’d given him hell, but Ben hadn’t backed down. The next year, however, he’d told her they ought to fix up the kitchen. He’d even insisted she get a gas range to replace the cookstove.
Ellen watched the horse as his tail swung in the sunlight. She loved the vista, had designed the porch for that side of the house so that they could sit there in the evening and watch the sun slip behind the San Juans. The mountains gave her a sense of calm, of peacefulness. She liked a God who had created mountains—and a husband who had given her a life among them. Of course, there would still be the mountains if they moved to Durango. They just wouldn’t be at their doorstep, and there wouldn’t be the ranch. No, by God, she’d have to find a way to stay here a little longer.
The screen’s hinges squeaked again, and June set down a tray with slices of homemade bread, a crock of apple butter, and the coffee. The cups and saucers and plates were brown with ranch brands around the edges. The china had been manufactured after the Second World War, and everyone in the valley had it. Like Ellen, her neighbors had survived the bad years, the Depression and the war, and now that livestock was bringing good prices, the women felt entitled to splurge a little. June handed her grandmother a spoon and an opened can of PET milk.
Ellen poured milk into her coffee and stirred it, then sipped. She’d developed the habit of adding canned milk to her coffee years before, when the only coffee you could buy in cattle country was Arbuckle’s and the only milk came in a can. She and Ben both preferred it to fresh milk. “What’s your dress like?” she asked her granddaughter.
“White, of course. Silk with a chiffon train that’s about as long as this porch. It would break Mom’s heart if I didn’t wear it. What do you do with a wedding dress if you don’t wear it?”
“You could make it into a quilt. A Crazy Quilt.”
June laughed. “That
would be tragic, wouldn’t it, cutting up all that expensive silk.”
“Better than letting it rot away in a box.”
“It would make a pretty quilt, at that.” June reached over and picked up her grandmother’s quilt and ran her hand over the patches. “A quilt like this.”
Ellen nodded. “That’s what it is. That patch there is from your great-grandmother’s wedding gown.”
“You cut it up?”
“There are several wedding dresses in here.”
“Is one yours?”
Ellen nodded and pointed to the piece of white she had added to the edge just that morning.
June set aside the quilt and gave a brittle laugh. “Maybe you can cut up my wedding dress. That way, you at least will get some use out of it.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I guess I’m a freak, aren’t I?”
“No,” Ellen replied as she traced one of the brands on her cup with her finger. “I know of a woman fifty years ago who ran away. She ran away three different times. The first was in 1898.”
“Three times! From the same man?”
“No, three different men. Three different reasons. Do you want to hear her story?”
“I love your stories, Granny. If I were a writer I would put them into a book.” June settled into the chair. It was her grandfather’s chair, with a tattered old Indian rug for a cushion. “Were they good reasons?”
“Yes.”
“You think she did the right thing?”
“She thought so at the time.” Ellen shrugged. “But you tell me.”
CHAPTER TWO
He called her Nellie Blue-Eyes, and she called him Buddy. Buddy wasn’t his real name. But by the time Nell found that out, the name was so fixed in her mind that she wouldn’t call him anything else.
Lucy had come outside to throw the dishwater on the flowers and said, “Why, I believe that’s Buddy over there.”
Nell stared at the cowboy as he dismounted and touched his hat to Lucy. He didn’t pay attention to Nell until Lucy said, “This here’s Nell. She’s the new biscuit-shooter. She’ll help with the cooking and so forth.” Nell stepped out onto the warm stones of the portico, her hands wrapped in her apron.
“Ma’am,” he said and touched the brim of his hat again. The thumb of his other hand was hooked in his belt. He smiled, and Nell could see he had all his teeth. Several of the cowboys didn’t. He was tall and nice-looking and slightly bow-legged, and his eyes, well, they were the soft brown velvet of a doe’s. “There’s coffee,” she said, thinking she wouldn’t mind a bit if he came into the kitchen and bothered her. She expected him to since the other cowboys had done just that. They’d found excuses to go to the house, telling Lucy they had a terrible pain in their gullets or a hurting in their heads and needed to get out of the hot New Mexico sun.
“You got a pain, all right, and you want to give it to me, right where I sit down. Now go on with you,” Lucy would tell them. “You’ll meet the new girl soon enough, although I don’t know why she’d want to meet you.”
The new cowboy took off his hat, which had once been white but now was brown with the dust of the High Plains, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. His face was tanned, although his forehead was pale where the brim of his hat had shaded it from the sun. The sun was so hot now that Nell reached up with the dish towel she was holding and dabbed at her face, embarrassed at its dampness.
“No thank you, Miss Nell,” the cowboy said in reply to her offer of coffee, and she was surprised, disappointed. He was the only one of the hands who had turned her down. He was the only one she wished would accept.
“You have a good time up north, did you?” Lucy asked. She explained to Nell, “He was off to pick up a colt Mr. Archer’s bought, been away two, three weeks, long enough for the colt to turn into a full-fledged mare.”
“I was looking around some.”
Lucy snorted. “Out looking at the world, I expect,” she said.
“You were traveling?” Nell asked, hoping again that the man would stay. The screen door squeaked, and Lucy went back inside.
“Maybe,” he replied, and she thought she had overstepped. It wasn’t any of her business what he did. She didn’t want him to think she was nosy.
“Well, welcome back home,” she said, putting one bare foot on the other. Her shoes were in the house, beside the door.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he replied, stepping past strings of bloodred chili peppers that hung from the vigas and pausing a moment in the shadow of the portico. He wiped his brow again with the sleeve of a shirt that had once been indigo but was now faded to the blue of the late-afternoon sky. “So long,” he said. His fine eyes crinkled as he gathered the reins of his cow pony and turned around. He didn’t jump onto the horse from behind or perform any of the tricks the other cowboys had done to impress Nell. He didn’t even gallop off in a cloud of dust. He merely took the reins and walked his horse toward the corral.
“I thought he’d want a cup of coffee,” Nell said after she went inside. She’d turned to watch the cowboy through the screen door.
“Oh, he’s not like the others. He might look like the hottest thing since Texas chili, but he’s awful high and mighty. Too much ambition for a cowboy. He reads books, that one. He’s a knowin’ man. Don’t mind him.”
“He can read?” Nell asked. Two of the cowboys had brought her their mail and asked her to read it to them. She hadn’t been sure if they were illiterate or just wanted to spend a little time with her. This one, well, she hardly cared if he could read and write. She just wanted to sit and talk to him.
“He’s had him some education,” Lucy said by way of reply. “Some ambition, too.”
Lucy left the kitchen door and went to check on her bread dough. “It’s raised,” she said, punching down the dough. “You watch out for him. He seems square enough, but he’s the worst practical joker on the place.” That was saying something, since Nell already had learned how the other cowboys liked to play pranks.
“One time, he tied a string around the neck of a dead rattlesnake and coiled it up by the supper table. There was a new girl, and when she stepped beside him, he yanked on the string, and that head rose up, and the girl must have jumped ten feet and run out the door like the devil himself was chasing her. She was so mad, she quit the next day.”
“I’m not afraid of snakes.”
Lucy had been cutting hunks of the dough out of the wooden dough bowl, kneading them, then slapping them into pans. She stopped and turned around. “Well, you ought to be. Get bit by a rattler, and your leg’ll turn black and swell up big as a flour barrel. It ain’t the best way to die, although I don’t know what is.”
When Nell didn’t reply, Lucy continued. “In case you’re interested, you can forget about him. He sizes up pretty good. He don’t drink, and he don’t chew, but he’s not the marrying kind, not with hired girls anyway. Some of the other girls that worked here, they already tried. So get that out of your head.”
Nell stared through the screen, although Buddy had disappeared. The fire in the cookstove made the air hotter inside the house than out. She found a clean place on the roller towel and wiped her hands, then used her sleeve to wipe her forehead, the way Buddy had. “Grandma may think I came to New Mexico Territory to get married, Aunt Lucy, but I didn’t.”
* * *
In fact, she had. That wasn’t the only reason she’d come to the ranch near Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, that year of 1897, of course. She’d never been to the state before and had already spent a year teaching in the school in Harveyville, Kansas. She had kept company with a young man there, Lane Philips, but there had never been anything worth mentioning between them. Or between her and anybody else. She’d been restless. She’d lived on her grandparents’ farm ever since her parents died when she was ten and thought she’d live in Kansas forever, although she didn’t know with whom.
Then her aunt Lucy, her father’s sister, had written from New Mexico, asking if he knew of a
girl who’d like to work on the Rockin’ A. It was a cattle spread, a big one, although not the biggest in the territory. Nell’s grandmother fretted that at twenty-two, Nell was becoming an old maid. And Nell herself had begun to worry. There ought to be plenty of eligible young men in New Mexico, the two of them agreed. And Lucy would be there to chaperone her. Besides, being on a ranch with all those cowboys might be fun.
Lucy had grown up in Kansas, too, but she’d left twenty years before, when she married a homesteader. Her husband died before he could prove up the claim, and Lucy had worked for fifteen years as a housekeeper on the Rockin’ A. The rancher, Mr. Archer, was a widower, and folks in Harveyville thought it wasn’t proper for Lucy to live in the same house with him, since he didn’t have a wife.
Perhaps that was why Nell’s grandfather wasn’t crazy about Nell moving to New Mexico. “Lucy will look out for her,” Nell’s grandmother had said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he replied.
“Who’s she going to settle down with in Kansas?” her grandmother asked. “She can do a sight better than Lane Philips. And Lucy is a decent woman.”
After she arrived in New Mexico, Nell had thought her grandmother was right about that. Lucy had her own room, and she always called her employer Mr. Archer. He in turn referred to her as Mrs. Miller. There was never so much as an improper touch or even a glance between them, as far as Nell could tell. Then one day, Nell saw the dog hide a bone under Mr. Archer’s bed, and when she pulled it out to toss into the yard, she discovered her aunt’s slippers were under there, too.
Lucy had come into the room behind her and was aware Nell had seen the house shoes. “Nights get awful cold in the winter” was all Lucy said, although it was then summer and as hot outside as the cookstove.
Nell should have been shocked, but in fact, she was glad for her aunt. She understood why Lucy didn’t want to be alone. And she understood why the woman loved the cracked earth of the High Plains with its rocky soil and sparse vegetation.
It hadn’t taken Nell long to love it, too. Maybe a week—two at the most. The dry heat wasn’t oppressive like the Kansas humidity. Nell liked looking east with nothing to block the view—she could almost see the earth curve—and west to the mountains that turned blue in the late afternoon. The big ranch house, made of mud bricks with jigsaw trim painted turquoise, kept out the summer heat, except in the kitchen when the wood-burning cookstove was fired up. The tile floors in the house were so cool that she and Lucy went about barefoot, their shoes beside the back door in case they had to go out. She loved the clouds that sent shadows a mile long across the prairie. Best of all were the sunrises and sunsets that spread from horizon to horizon with savage streaks of violet and crimson and gold. The colors seemed to fill the whole world.
The Patchwork Bride Page 2