The Patchwork Bride

by Sandra Dallas

  The farm was comforting, just as it always had been, a place of refuge. Through the fall and early winter, she resumed her old routine of working in the garden, and cooking and sewing with her grandmother. Still, she knew, she couldn’t get too comfortable. The longer she stayed, the harder it would be to leave.

  Then Claire, a college friend who was a teacher in Kansas City, wrote that a colleague had taken sick, and the school was desperate for someone to replace her. The school year was more than half over, and there were no teachers available. The position was Nell’s if she wanted it.

  Nell sat in her grandmother’s rocker next to the cookstove, the letter in her hand, as she considered the opening. She had soured on waitress work, and she had left Harveyville for New Mexico partly because she hadn’t much liked teaching. But she couldn’t be choosey anymore. The position would get her away from the farm. Besides, a school sounded safe, and after Emily, as well as the man who had accosted her when she first arrived in Denver, she needed to feel safe. If she didn’t like the job, she could leave after school ended in the spring.

  Besides, Kansas City must have plenty of unmarried young men. The idea of finding another man scared her, but she needed a husband, and the longer she waited, the harder it would be to force herself to meet men. For a moment, she considered remaining on the farm, giving up altogether, but her grandmother encouraged her, even insisted that she leave, saying life wasn’t meant to be lived alone. “You’ll be so much happier married, and it’s not likely you’ll meet anyone here,” she said. “You must try again.”

  Nell knew her grandmother was right. What if she ended up with no one? Could she live the rest of her life alone? She felt a pain in her heart at the idea. So Nell applied for the teaching job and was accepted. Her grandparents drove her into Topeka in the farm wagon, where she caught the train to Kansas City, to teach and to live with Claire.

  “It’s best you’re going. If this doesn’t work out, then you come back to the farm for good,” Nell’s grandmother said. “You need to try one more time—for your sake, for everyone’s sake.”

  As they waited for the train, Nell’s grandfather took her arm. “There’s a young fellow you ought to meet. He used to work as a hired man for us. Saved up his money and went off to Kansas City.”

  “That was more than twenty years ago. He’s not such a young fellow anymore,” her grandmother put in. “But he’s a good man, trustworthy.”

  “Last I heard he was married and had a girl,” the grandfather said. “But might be he could introduce you to somebody. He’s a fine fellow.”

  “You must have forgot,” Nell’s grandmother said. “His wife and daughter died. I remember there was a typhoid epidemic. Poor fellow. He didn’t deserve that. You be sure and give him a holler, Nell. Wade Moran his name is.”

  Nell wondered if her grandparents had rehearsed the conversation and were trying to set her up with the man. Her grandmother pressed Wade Moran’s address into her hand as she climbed onto the train. She might meet him to please her grandparents, but she didn’t hold out much hope for someone that much older. She put the paper into her pocketbook and never gave it another thought.

  * * *

  As it turned out, Wade Moran looked up Nell, but not until she had lived in Kansas City for months and had agreed to stay on and teach the following year. To her surprise, Nell found that she liked teaching again. Both she and Claire taught in an elementary school, and each morning, they packed lunches and rode the streetcar to work. They spent their evenings grading papers and planning lessons.

  On the weekends, they explored Kansas City. The city was filled with lawns and gardens, and when the weather was good, they took picnics to Roanoke Park or Hyde Park and roamed along the lanes, then spread a cloth under a tree and ate their lunch.

  Sometimes they took the streetcar to Armour Boulevard or to Millionaire’s Row and walked along the shady streets, staring at the mansions’ towers and turrets and porte cocheres. “They say they are built to last a century,” Claire said as she stopped, awestruck, in front of a massive stone castle on Troost Street.

  “I’m afraid we won’t be around to find out,” Nell said.

  They prowled around Westport, looking for traces of the pioneers who had crossed the Missouri River there on their way to the goldfields. Once they visited the stockyards, where Nell watched the cattle mill around the pens, but Claire complained of the smell, and they did not go back. When summer came, they attended an outdoor concert of ragtime music, then talked about buying a phonograph so they could play records. They took the trolley to Electric Park and rode the Mystic Chute. The amusement park was connected to a brewery, and they finished up in the beer garden, laughing at the thought that they could be fired if a member of the school board caught them drinking beer.

  On occasion, Nell went on dates. She went to the pictures with a male teacher from school. He had been silly and told too many jokes, and when Nell didn’t appreciate them, he told her she ought to lighten up, that she was too serious. Claire introduced her to a former beau. She hadn’t cared for him, but Nell might like him. He turned out to be too fresh and put his arm around Nell and tried to kiss her. When Nell resisted, he told her she was as cold as Claire, which, he added, was very cold indeed.

  “My fault, I should have warned you,” Claire said. “I thought he’d be better behaved with you.” Claire, too, wanted to get married.

  Neither man had invited Nell out on a second date, which was fine with her, because neither was suitable for a husband.

  One evening in late summer, not long before the fall school term began, Nell came home from grocery shopping to find a man waiting in front of the screened-in porch of the little house that she and Claire rented. Claire had mentioned she’d met a new fellow, and Nell assumed the man on the steps was the one.

  “Hi, I’m Nell,” she said. “You can wait inside if you want to. Claire’s still at the market. She’ll be along any minute.”

  The man frowned. “Who’s Claire?”

  “Oh,” Nell said, thinking how foolish she’d been to assume the man was Claire’s new beau. She had just invited a perfect stranger to go into the house with her, and for all she knew, he was a masher, maybe just like the one who’d attacked her in Buck & Betty’s. After Denver, she should have known better. Nell chided herself for being careless, as she looked the man up and down. He was medium height with dark brown hair slicked back, and he wore a fine black suit. He had a kind expression on his face, but what would that tell her? James had appeared nice, and look what he had turned out to be. “Who are you? Why did you want to come inside?”

  “I didn’t,” he replied.

  “Then what are you doing on our steps?”

  The man had taken off his hat when Nell approached him, and now he placed it back on his head. “Perhaps I made a mistake coming here. I was looking for you, not Claire.”

  “What do you want?” Nell clutched her purse. Perhaps the man was a thief, although he didn’t look like one. But then, what did a thief look like? And how would he know her name?

  “Your grandmother wrote to me and asked me to call on you, but I can see she might have been mistaken. She said she had given you my name, but you hadn’t looked me up, so she wrote to me. I’m Wade Moran. I was a hired hand on your grandfather’s farm.”

  Nell had forgotten all about him and was embarrassed. “Oh, of course. I’m so sorry. She told me about you when I left Harveyville. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m just suspicious.” She wondered if she would always be so. She’d changed because of both James and the man who had attacked her, just as she’d changed after she left Buddy. She smiled, as if to make up for her rudeness. “My grandparents told me to look you up, but I hadn’t got around to it.”

  “Didn’t want to, most likely,” he said, smiling.

  “How did you know?”

  He tapped his forehead. “I might have had the same reaction if someone had asked me to meet up with a hired girl from twenty ye
ars back.”

  “I guess we’re both snobs, then.”

  “You see, we have one thing in common.”

  “More than that. I really was a hired girl once.”

  “Then we’ve both come up in the world.”

  He’d taken off his hat again and held it in his hands, and Nell invited him inside. She thought to offer him whiskey—she and Claire kept a bottle in the broom closet—but decided against it. “I can make tea. Or coffee.”

  “I thought perhaps you’d like to have a soda. I saw a drugstore just down the block.”

  “I would like that,” Nell said. Eating ice cream seemed like such an innocent thing to do. Besides, she was curious about the man. He was too finely dressed to be a farm worker—better dressed than she was. Nell thought of changing out of her wrinkled dress, but she didn’t want to place too much importance on stepping out with this man. He’d worked for her grandparents probably before she was born, and while he didn’t look it, he was nearly twice her age. She unlocked the door and once again invited Wade inside while she set down her groceries and combed her hair. But perhaps mindful of their conversation, he said he would wait on the porch.

  Nell went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face, staring at herself in the mirror. Four years had passed since she’d gone to New Mexico, and she had changed. Her figure, she knew, was fuller, but then she had been too slender when she’d worked at the Rockin’ A. There was a tiny scar on her cheek where one of the wild cats at the ranch had scraped its claw on her and a burn on her hand from where she’d touched the stove at Buck & Betty’s. Fine wrinkles radiated out from her eyes and mouth, and her chin was not as taut as it once was. As she used a hairpin to sweep up strands of hair that had fallen from her pompadour, Nell spotted a white hair among the brown, but when she went to pluck it, she couldn’t find it. Probably the light, she told herself. Nonetheless, she wasn’t a girl anymore. In those last few years, she had become a woman.

  As she patted her hair in place, she thought about the man waiting for her outside. Was she really ready to meet someone new? Of course she was. It had been a year since she had left Denver, although she had not forgotten James. She thought sometimes about what their life would have been if he hadn’t had other wives. What if he had never been married? Would they have had a happy life in that little house? She remembered the painting of the orange violets. She hadn’t thought about it since she left Denver and wondered if it was still there. Maybe James had given it to Emily or one of his other wives. Or perhaps he’d thrown it away. She hoped he was disappointed that Nell hadn’t taken it with her. But she wouldn’t have. It wasn’t like the Indian rug Buddy had given her that brought back bittersweet memories. The painting would have been a reminder of falseness, of betrayal.

  As they went along the sidewalk, Wade slipped behind Nell so that he walked on the street side—like a gentleman, she thought—and then she remembered that James had done just that, and he had turned out to be anything but a gentlemen. The thought of James intruding just then made her angry. They could have had a wonderful marriage if only … She shook away the idea. Time had passed, and the memory of him had begun to fade. She would have to force him out of her mind, just as she had Buddy. But when she thought of Buddy now, she remembered his smile, his good humor, the way he made her feel when he touched her. No matter how much time passed, she would never think of James that way.

  Wade commented on the asters blooming in the yards, and the patches of corn, and Nell asked if he was still a farmer.

  “Oh, no. Farming’s too hard, sheer drudgery sometimes. That’s why I went to college. I don’t mind working, but with farming, no matter how hard you work, you never seem to get ahead. Look at your grandfather, up at dawn, work in the fields till dark, and then a hailstorm comes along and wipes out his crops. Where does that leave him?”

  “But there are good times. I like farming.”

  “I do, too. I like being outside in the sun and watching things grow. They grow because of your hands.” He held out hands that might have been hard and calloused at one time but now were soft, the nails neatly trimmed. “I miss the miracle of the harvest, the cycles of the earth, what the Bible says is a time to reap and a time to sow. I just don’t want to depend on a farm to make my living.”

  “I’d miss the chickens if I didn’t live on a farm,” Nell said.

  “You like chickens? So do I. In fact, I have a coop in my backyard. I’ll bring you some eggs.”

  “We already have chickens.”

  “That’s the second thing we have in common. We may become friends yet.”

  “I think we already are,” Nell said. Friends, she thought. He was far too old to be a husband, but she liked the idea they would be friends. She needed them.

  “Then you must call me Wade, and may I call you Nell—or is it Nellie?”

  “Yes, Nell. No one calls me Nellie—anymore.”

  At the drugstore, Wade took her arm and steered her past the cigar counter and the various goods on display—perfumes and soaps, hairpins and straight razors, trusses and bedpans—to one of the small tables, where they ordered sodas. “So what do you do if you’re not a farmer?” Nell asked.

  “Your grandmother didn’t tell you?”

  Nell shook her head.

  Wade grinned. “I’d rather not say, then.”

  “You mean you do something illegal?” Nell’s heart sank. The one decent man she’d met in Kansas City, and already there was something wrong with him. She wondered if he was a confidence man or a second-story man or even a cattle rustler.

  Wade waited while the soda jerk set down their drinks, then opened the glass container on the table to let Nell select a straw. “No, of course not. It’s just that farm people don’t always think well of my line of work.”

  Nell had put her spoon into her soda and was about to scoop out a bite of ice cream, but she stopped. “Maybe you better tell me what it is you do, then.”

  Wade stared at her a moment, then said, “I’m a banker.”

  “A banker.” She laughed. “That’s not so bad.”

  “I know your grandparents don’t think highly of bankers.”

  “They have good reason for it. When I was living in New Mexico, Grandma wrote me that some cultus banker in Topeka tried to cheat them out of their farm.”

  “Cultus?”

  “It means useless. It’s a ranch word.” Nell thought she should be more conscious of the way she spoke. Cowboy words were all right for a ranch cook—and for a waitress—but now that she was a schoolteacher again, she ought not to use slang.

  “Cultus. I like that. Yes, that man was cultus.”

  “The banker said Grandpa hadn’t paid his loan in six months, and he tried to foreclose on the farm. That wasn’t true, of course. Grandpa never missed a payment. He went in the first of every month and paid in cash. It turned out the banker had applied the money to his own mortgage, but how would Grandpa know that? The man might have got away with it if my grandparents hadn’t had a friend in Kansas City who went over the books—” Nell stopped. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Wade shrugged. “I took a look at the situation. It was pretty easy to discover what the fellow had done. He wasn’t very bright.”

  “You saved the farm for them.”

  “Anybody would have found the deception. Your grandparents just happened to ask me.” He waved his hand to dismiss the idea that he had done anything out of the ordinary.

  “That’s not the way Grandma told it.”

  Wade didn’t respond. He put a straw into his soda and sipped. “I always liked these things. I suppose I’m a little old to be drinking sodas. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “Your secret’s safe with me. Besides, I like them, too.”

  For a moment, Wade stared at his straw. Then he said, “You should know that I’m forty-four.”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “So I’m way too old for you.”

  “Not to
o old to take me to an ice cream parlor.”

  “No one’s too old for that.”

  Nell liked his grin and smiled back. “I’m awfully glad you weren’t Claire’s beau,” she said.

  “Me, too.” He stared at his straw for a moment, then looked up at Nell. “I ought to tell you about myself.”

  “This sounds serious.” Nell hoped he would stop. She wanted to enjoy herself for a little while. Besides, she was conflicted. She knew why she had gone to Kansas City, but did she really want to get serious about a man so soon? It had been a year since she’d left Denver, but even so, her emotions were still raw, and she felt drained. Maybe she shouldn’t have left the farm so quickly. She thought of the easy times she had spent with her grandmother making quilts. Then she thought of the quilt she had left behind half finished at the Rockin’ A. She had begun it as a wedding present for Buddy, had pieced it and begun the quilting. What had become of it? Had Lucy finished it before she died? Perhaps it had gone into the dog’s bed or had been cut in half and turned into a saddle blanket. Maybe one of the cowboys had taken it for a sugan. She hoped Wendell had, because she’d always liked him. She had thought to make a quilt for James, too, but he had wanted to be married right away, and with the wedding dress to complete, she hadn’t had time to piece a top. Thank goodness, she thought. She wouldn’t have wanted to keep a quilt made for James.

  Wade stared at Nell until she looked up. “It is serious. I think before we go any further, you ought to know about me.”

  “Go any further?”

  He blushed. “I suppose I’m making assumptions. It’s just that I’m so much older. If we’re to be friends…” His voice trailed off.

  “Of course,” Nell said. She tried to keep the mood light. “Are you going to tell me you’re a criminal?” She smiled, but he was serious, and Nell felt foolish. “All right, if you think you must.”