The Patchwork Bride

by Sandra Dallas

  “Will Grandpa Ben be back in time to eat with us?” June asked.

  “He won’t be back till late afternoon. I imagine he’ll have his dinner in Durango. He should be home by suppertime.” Ellen hoped so, at any rate. Ben was liable to start jawing with the vet about horses and bulls that were long dead and lose track of the time. He could be stubborn when Wesley insisted he get back into the truck. “Who works for who?” he’d asked more than once. That was why Ellen generally took her husband into town on errands. She could argue him down.

  “Well, good, because that gives you time to tell me about the two other weddings your friend ran away from.”

  Ellen started to pick up the tray, but Maria elbowed her aside and said, “My job. Too heavy for you, old woman.”

  “I’m no older than you,” Ellen replied, although Maria was twenty-five years younger. Still, she let Maria carry the tray. The doctor had told her not to lift heavy things. She smiled at the housekeeper, who had been with her for more than twenty years.

  Ben had found Maria hiding in the barn with a young boy. They were illegals and scared to death, he’d told Ellen. “She asked could they sleep in the hay, but it isn’t right when we have a place inside where she can sleep.”

  No, Ellen agreed that it wouldn’t be right. She remembered a neighbor who had found Mexicans hiding in one of his sheds and had driven them out with a pitchfork.

  “I told her they could stay the night in the foreman’s cabin, since it’s empty.”

  “The night?” Ellen asked.

  “Maybe a little longer.”

  Ellen was sure it would be a lot longer. Ben was softhearted. He’d never been able to shoot a horse with a broken leg, and one of the hands had had to do it for him. He was always bringing home stray puppies and kittens. Maria and her son were more than homeless animals. So Ellen and Ben made the two feel at home, and before long, Ellen knew they would be a part of the ranch as long as they wanted to. Two years ago, the boy had been drafted into the army, but he’d promised to come back when he was mustered out and work as a cowhand. At least he would if Ben and Ellen still owned the ranch. Ellen wondered what Maria would do if they sold the place. They wouldn’t have room for a cook and housekeeper in an apartment. And what about Wesley and Durrell, the other cowboy, who’d been with them for decades? They were getting along in years, too, and with mechanization, there wasn’t so much employment for ranch hands, not the way it used to be when cowboys drifted from ranch to ranch, always looking for better jobs. Where would Wesley and Durrell go?

  June and her grandmother followed the cook outside. As Maria set the food on the table, June snatched away the quilt. “Just what we need, spilling chili on this.” She brushed yellow cottonwood leaves off a chair and set Ellen’s stitching on it.

  “I wonder if Nell ever forgot Buddy,” June said after Maria went inside.

  Ellen shook her head. “I wouldn’t think so. You never forget first love.” She glanced at her granddaughter, who was looking off toward the barn, thinking.

  “Maybe I’ve done a stupid thing,” June mused. “I should have stayed and talked to Dave after we both calmed down. Running off like that was foolish, wasn’t it? It seems like I was just as impulsive as your friend Nell. But Dave is always so sure of himself. He’d have tried to convince me I was wrong. I didn’t want him making the decision for me, Granny. I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t. Do you think I was wrong?”

  “There’s not a right or wrong to it.”

  “If I don’t marry him, do you think I’ll regret it later?”

  “Sometimes. If you marry him, you’ll always wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t. And if you don’t marry him, you’ll still have what-ifs … Nell had a lot of what-ifs … Three of them. Remember, she ran away three times. The second man was James.”

  “And he tried to tell her what to do, too?”

  “Not exactly. She left him for an entirely different reason. And it didn’t have a thing to do with stubbornness.”

  “What happened with him?”

  Ellen sat back on the bench and pushed away her bowl. Then she picked up a fork and took a bite of the Mexican chocolate cake that Maria had made. The icing was as thick as the cake. The doctor had told Ellen to watch her diet, but she didn’t. Why deprive herself if she was going to die anyway? she’d asked him. He hadn’t had an answer. “James Hamilton was the second man Nell was engaged to, and oh my, was he a looker.”

  “Was he like Buddy?”

  “Not in the least. In fact, he looked just like that young actor we saw in the movie in Durango when you and Dave were here last summer, Van Johnson. He was blond and freckle-faced. He was the picture of the all-American boy. You could have put his face on a Saturday Evening Post cover.” Ellen used the tines of her fork to catch the cake crumbs on her plate, thinking she’d like a second piece. “Maybe Nell was attracted to him because he didn’t seem at all like Buddy. And he seemed like prime marriage material. Don’t forget, she was still looking for a husband. She was a lot more serious about it this time.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nell cried all the way home on the train. She cried for weeks, months really. Her heart was broken. It was almost as if she were a Spanish-American War widow instead of a girl who had run away on the eve of her wedding. She grieved for Buddy, and at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she sat by the window in the moonlight, the pieces of her wedding dress in her hands, weeping. The dress had been in one of the flour sacks she’d used to pack her clothes, and she had taken it with her when she fled. Some nights, she didn’t sleep at all but lay in bed, shivering under the red-and-gray Indian rug. She didn’t know why she had snatched it up when she left, but she was glad. It was the only thing that kept her warm. She tried to find solace in her Bible, but when she opened it, she discovered the chamisa flower Buddy had picked for her on the way to the Mackintosh house, and she cried again.

  There were times when Nell was tempted to write to Buddy in care of the Rockin’ A. But she knew that their marriage would have been a disaster. They were both too strong-willed to make it work. They had said too many cruel things to each other. Besides, he had married Alice and moved away to his ranch. Nell didn’t even know where it was.

  She missed New Mexico, the dry air of the High Plains, the long vistas, the clang of the dinner bell sounding across the prairie. And the people. She felt guilty about leaving so abruptly and wondered what the cowboys thought of her. They had been nice to her; Lucy and Mr. Archer had been grand. She had let them all down, hadn’t even said good-bye. So she couldn’t go back even if she’d wanted to. She didn’t want to, however. Her New Mexico days were over.

  The farm in Harveyville was comforting. Nell loved working in her grandmother’s kitchen garden, picking beans and eating tomatoes still warm from the sun. The two of them worked together, putting up the blackberries that grew beside the barn, the brambles home to chiggers that caused them to scratch their arms and legs for days. They made apple jelly, putting the mash into a sugar sack and letting it run through into a kettle. In the afternoons, they snapped wax beans in an old yellow earthenware dish and wilted lettuce by salting it and dousing it with vinegar and bacon grease in the blue feather-edge bowl.

  Nell took over the hen house, feeding the chickens and collecting eggs. She was fascinated with the chickens, their beady little eyes and their iridescent feathers. She loved the way the hens cocked their heads when they looked up at her, and she found their clucking soothing. Each hen had her own personality. Nell called them “the girls,” and it saddened her when she had to stretch the neck of one on the chopping block. Each time she did that she remembered the old rooster at the Rockin’ A, and she grieved over Buddy.

  She quilted with her grandmother, the two of them sitting side by side in the shade of the trumpet vine on the porch, cutting out squares and rectangles and piecing them together. Nell even quilted with her grandmother’s stitching group. They called themselves the Pic
kles, after a paisley fabric one of the members had acquired. Often, before the hot of a summer day came on, she walked barefooted down the country road to town for a spool of thread or a quarter of a yard of new fabric, pinching the stuff between her fingers to make sure the quality was good, wondering what had happened to the quilt top she had started for Buddy as a wedding gift. She had left it behind.

  On winter mornings, when the frost etched patterns on the windowpanes and snow sifted through cracks in the walls onto the quilts on her bed, she crept into the kitchen, where her grandmother already had a fire going in the cookstove. She poured herself coffee, hopping from one foot to the other on the cold linoleum because she had forgotten her slippers.

  One afternoon, she took out a handkerchief, and a dozen aspen leaves the color of gold coins spilled onto her dresser. They’d come from a branch of aspen that Buddy had given her. The leaves had dried and fallen, and Nell had scooped them up and saved them. Now she gathered the leaves, brittle as old paper, and held them in her hands remembering. She went to the window and crushed the leaves, then tossed them into the wind, watching as they were swept away. One leaf had escaped and fallen onto the floor. Nell picked it up and studied it for a moment, tracing the veins of the heart-shaped leaf with a fingertip. Then she laid the leaf in the palm of her hand and held her hand out of the window. The leaf swirled away in the wind, and Nell watched it until it was gone. She knew then, it was time to end the mourning, to stop feeling sorry for herself. She could not hide out on the farm forever. She had to take control of her life. The year after she had fled New Mexico, Nell knew it was time to move on.

  Leaving Kansas wasn’t as easy this time. There were encumbrances. It wouldn’t be as simple to go away as it had been when she left for New Mexico Territory. Still, her grandparents agreed she should leave. “You need to be out on your own again. You’re young yet, Nell, too young to be cooped up here with no chance to meet young men. And you need to find a husband,” her grandmother said. “Leave everything here and go out in the world for six months, maybe a year. Find someone you can spend your life with. You don’t want to end up by yourself like Lucy, bless her soul.”

  “Go to a big city this time,” her grandfather advised. “Find yourself a go-getter, a young fellow who’s coming up in the world.”

  Topeka was too close. So was Kansas City. So she boarded the train to Denver. It was spring, too early to find a teaching job. Besides, Nell wasn’t sure she wanted to teach again. The pay was poor, and there were too many restrictions on a female teacher. She had to be docile and respectful and live a public life, and what if someone delved into her secrets? Nell didn’t want to get turned down because somebody found out about New Mexico and decided she’d led an immoral life. Living on a ranch had made her too headstrong for all that.

  Since she had been a ranch cook, Nell looked for a job in a restaurant. If she could make three meals a day for nearly a dozen people, she surely could find a job cooking for customers. Besides, she liked cooking—the smells of bread and cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven, the challenge of making chili that was rich and hearty but not too sharp, of frying steak so it was crusty on the outside but tender within. The cowboys had said she was the best cook the Rockin’ A ever had. Cooking on a big restaurant stove would be easy after the balky wood-burning cookstove at the ranch.

  But restaurants, she discovered, didn’t want female cooks—even restaurants that served food so greasy and overcooked it was barely edible. So she applied for work at cafés and diners. She didn’t find cooking jobs there either, but at Buck & Betty’s Café, a woman said she could use a waitress who would fill in in the kitchen if needed.

  Nell figured she could take the job until she found something better and agreed. The owner, Betty, who did the cooking, was a no-nonsense woman who reminded Nell a little of Lucy. There was no Buck. “I thought it sounded better to have a man’s name on the sign. Buck’s my last name,” Betty explained.

  The café was downtown near Union Station. It was a breakfast-and-lunch counter, with a few tables over on one side, that catered to business and traveling men. “I expect you to be friendly but not too friendly, if you get my meaning. And you’ll have to watch out for some of the customers,” Betty explained. “I have a reputation to maintain, and it wouldn’t do if the customers thought they could have their way with my waitress.” Nell wouldn’t just have to deal with the flirting, but she’d have to learn how to turn down too-friendly men without insulting them. Betty wanted them to keep coming back, but she expected them to keep their hands to themselves.

  The work suited Nell. She had to be at Buck & Betty’s at five in the morning, but then, on the ranch, she’d gotten up early to start breakfast for the hands. A few customers usually were waiting when Nell opened the door at six, and after that came a rush of diners. There was no chance to flirt even if Nell had wanted to. In fact, she barely had a chance to say hello and take orders before she was called into the kitchen to deliver plates of food. The customers were steady until Buck & Betty’s closed at two thirty, although there was a lull between the breakfast and lunch crowds. The few customers who came in then ordered just coffee and doughnuts, and often the place was deserted for a half hour or so, and the two women could sit down with coffee themselves.

  The café was closed on Sundays, and that first Sunday, Betty helped Nell find a place to live. Nell had been staying in a hotel, but it was expensive. Besides, she wanted a place she could call her own. Betty knew of a rooming house near downtown that was clean and owned by a woman who insisted her roomers be respectable but was not a snoop. “Some landladies will go through your things when you’re away,” Betty warned.

  Nell liked the house and the room that was available. The sun streaming through the window made her think of the bright days in New Mexico. There was a chicken coop out back, too. The woman offered two meals a day, but Betty negotiated a rate that included only supper, since Nell ate breakfast at the café.

  At first, the landlady, Mrs. Bonner, was skeptical because Nell was young. Her three other boarders were maiden ladies in their forties and fifties, all of them schoolteachers. But when Nell mentioned she loved to quilt and asked where the best place was to purchase needles and thread, Mrs. Bonner became almost motherly. She even offered to let Nell use her treadle sewing machine.

  “I expect you won’t be here long, a pretty young thing like you. Some young man will snatch you up.”

  “I’m not interested in getting married,” Nell protested, thinking the woman would not rent to her if she knew there might be young men coming around to court her. She was interested in getting married, however. That was why she’d come to Denver. She’d have to be discreet.

  She wouldn’t find a husband among the customers at Buck & Betty’s, Nell decided after a week or two. Most of them were male, but they weren’t the marrying type. Betty had been right about their trying to flirt with her. A good many of them, Nell figured, were already married. Betty had warned her that as traveling men, they likely had wives at home but were looking for a little fun on the side. She warned Nell to watch out for them. The worst ones, Nell decided, were older, old enough to be her father.

  “If I had a girl as pretty as you, I wouldn’t let her sling hash,” one man told her.

  “What would your granddaughter do, then?” she shot back.

  The man was startled and blushed, but then he laughed.

  Another man whispered that he was an artist and would like her to pose for him. He said he’d pay. Nell took her pencil out of her hair, which she wore in a pompadour on top of her head, and handed it to him along with a page torn from her order pad. “Help yourself, and I won’t charge you.”

  Nell didn’t find her retorts especially clever, but Betty laughed at them and told Nell she’d do. “Where’d you learn to talk back like that?” Betty asked.

  “From a bunch of cowboys,” Nell told her, and it occurred to her that maybe the practical jokes on the Rockin’ A had done her
some good. She thought of Buddy’s prank with the handkerchiefs. She had to admit that after she cooled off, she’d thought the joke was clever. She wondered if Buddy still had her handkerchief. No, Alice would have noticed Nell’s initials and thrown it out.

  Some of the customers tried to show off with their knowledge of café lingo, ordering “white wings,” which were eggs over easy, or “draw one in the dark”—black coffee. But Nell quickly caught on to the jargon. A few of the men were more forward. One or two pinched her, and another put his hand on her bottom and squeezed. Nell was so offended that she dumped a cup of hot coffee on him. He jumped up, red-eyed angry, and Betty came out from the kitchen and tried to clean him off.

  “Your girl just about killed me. I know the mayor. I ought to get you shut down,” he sputtered.

  Betty looked at Nell for an explanation, but it was another customer who spoke up. “Yeah, I seen what he did, and you ought to get the vice squad down here pretty quick, Betty. He’s a masher. He’s lucky your girl didn’t take a whole pot of coffee and dump it on his head.” Betty told the diner to get out and never come back. He was one customer she didn’t mind losing.

  The bulk of the customers actually were gentlemen, especially after the coffee incident, which someone brought up whenever a customer’s attentions to the new waitress were too obvious. “Best watch yourself, bub,” the regulars would say. “Unless you like your coffee in your lap.”

  After Nell had been there a few weeks, several customers asked her out on the town. She turned down the gasbags and the ones she suspected were married. She was lonely, however, and did go out to the flickers with two of them. They were traveling men who, as it turned out, invited her back to their hotel rooms. She knew what that meant and made it clear she was not interested.

  It would be better if she found men outside the café, she decided. But so far, she hadn’t met any, and she spent a good many evenings with her quilting. She hadn’t moved to Denver to sew, though, and she pondered how she could meet someone. Maybe she should start attending church or ask one of the schoolteachers at the boardinghouse to go with her to a dance. When she mentioned it to one of them, the teacher shook her head. Her principal wouldn’t approve, she said. In fact, the landlady looked at Nell crosswise at the suggestion of the two women going to a dance without escorts, so Nell said quickly, “Of course you’re right. I’m from New Mexico. The customs are different there.”