by Pamela Morsi
"If my mama had found out about that," she told him, "there wouldn't have been a switch left on a tree in this town."
She shook her head.
"And all that drama, telling me that you were running away to join up the regiment. Asking me how I could send you off to fight to the death without allowing you a kiss from my lips. Do you remember that?"
Her laughter was warm and heartfelt.
"You do remember how I slapped your roguish face good and proper," she said. "Your ears are probably still ringing."
He pulled the back of her hand to his face and closed his eyes as he rubbed the smoothness of it against his cheek. A tear escaped from the corner of his eye and dampened her own flesh.
Henrietta closed her own eyes to the sight for a long moment, savoring the tenderness of the gesture. Then she guarded her heart against the longing that swelled up in her. And she grinned at him.
“That's a rough old jawline, you've got there, Peer Chavis," she said. "I guess you're trying to tell me how much you need a shave."
She hurried to her feet, attempting to pull away from him.
"It's washday, and I'm going to get you all cleaned up and these linens changed," she told him.
His weak, trembling hand held hers firmly.
"You'd best let me go. I've got a world of work waiting."
Their eyes met, and his gaze restrained her even more securely than his grasp.
The look that passed between them didn't require words, but Henrietta spoke them anyway.
"I know that you love me, Peer Chavis," she said to him quietly. "I know you would have married me years ago if you could have. Change may be inevitable, but the things we want changed often remain the same."
It was true. So very true.
"I love you, now more than ever," she admitted. "And I have loved you ever."
He relaxed his grip as if breathing a sigh of relief.
She touched his wrinkled brow as if to erase the lines of worry and pain. It was almost more than she could bear, seeing him this way. But bear it she must because she would not be any other place than at his side.
"You're in danger of having to make an honest woman of me," she said, putting her hand on her hip and shaking a threatening finger at him.
"Just a few years away from a brand new century. It’s not like divorce is completely unheard of. I know I've always said that it would create too big of a scandal," she said. "But it seems my reputation is already in shreds."
His eyes widened slightly in surprise.
"It's true," Henrietta assured him. "My own niece told me so."
Peer's expression turned curious.
"Imagine that," she told him. "A right-living maiden lady of my advanced years creating a scandal in Chavistown."
Henrietta chuckled and shook her head.
"I wonder what wicked deeds the gossipmongers have conjured up for me to be doing in this room all day?" she asked. "Maybe they think I'm having my way with you, taking advantage of your weakened condition."
That statement brought a lopsided grin to the old man's face.
"Or more likely they just think I'm making a fool of myself," Henrietta said.
She hesitated at the foot of his bed for a long moment. The tone of her words became soft and sweet with memory. "I suppose it’s not the first time I've made a fool of myself over you."
Chapter Nine
Gidry's return from downtown led him unerringly not to the doorstep of his father's manse, but to the tiny vine covered gate of Aunt Hen's garden. He entered with some hesitation. In the Chavistown he had always known, any victory, no matter how big or small, would have to be immediately shared with Pru. His acceptance today by the men of the Commercial Club was nothing short of a spectacular victory.
Certainly they needed his money. They would have done a requisite amount of bowing and begging to get it. But they were proud, practical men. They would never have recognized him as their leader had they not thought him up to the task.
Gidry wanted to talk about it, revel in it, re-live it in the eyes of someone who had not been there. He wanted to confide it to Pru.
She was on her hands and knees in the far northwest corner of the garden within the shade of a huge old elm.
"Hello!" he called out a bit tentatively, unsure of his welcome.
She looked up. Once more she was clad in work clothes, but these at least were neither threadbare or overlarge.
"Hello ... ah, hello, Mr. Chavis," she answered.
He was a little put off by her choice of address. Mr. Chavis had always been his father. Somehow it seemed very wrong for this woman, the person who had perhaps known him better than any other in the world, not to refer to him as Gidry. Had she called him that yesterday? He had been so surprised to see her, he couldn't remember. But he knew he didn't like it. It made him uncomfortable, as if he were some stranger. Perhaps they were strangers to each other after all these years.
"My aunt isn't here," Pru volunteered. "Are you home for luncheon?"
Gidry shrugged.
"Yes, it's about that time," he explained. "But I came to see you, actually."
Pru looked straight at him, but her expression was one with which he was completely unfamiliar. It was masked and guarded.
"I don't mean to disturb you if you're busy," he said.
"I'm planting purlane," she told him. "Nothing else will grow very well in the shade of these old trees."
Gidry looked up at the grand stately tree that had probably been here before his grandfather was.
"I'm surprised that anything will grow beneath it at all," he admitted.
"Purlane will," she assured him. "And it will come back every year and be the prettiest pink you've ever seen in your life."
Momentarily Gidry thought to compare it to the blush in her cheeks.
"Of course, this year it won't come up at all," she said. "I should have planted it in the spring. But somehow I just didn't get around to it back then."
"Sometimes that happens," Gidry said.
"Gardening involves lots of planning for the future," she said. "But sometimes it’s hard to realize how much you are going to miss something in bloom until you see it's not there."
Gidry nodded slowly, not sure what to say in response. Her words had been spoken casually, but he heard them with meaning of his own.
The silence between them lingered overlong.
"You surely must be getting hungry," Pru said.
"I don't want to trouble anyone at the house," Gidry replied without thinking.
Pru seemed momentarily taken aback. "Oh ... well, I'm sure I can scare up something in the kitchen."
"I didn't mean that I expected you to feed me," he assured her, mentally calling himself a thousand kinds of fool for his inadvertent intrusion.
She carefully set down her gardening tools and slapped the dirt from her hands.
"Do you still like turnips?" she asked.
Gidry's mouth began to water at the thought.
"I haven't had a good plate of turnips since I left town," he admitted.
"I boiled a potful this morning," she told him. "It’s funny I can't get Milt—ah ... a lot of people don't like turnips."
"That leaves more of them in the world for me," he answered.
It was a reply he'd given often before. It seemed to transport them back in an instant to the laughing young couple that they had once been. Their eyes met. And just as quickly they were returned to the uncomfortable pair of near strangers they now were.
Gidry followed her to the house. She slipped off her muddy gardening boots at the kitchen door, and motioned for him to enter. He shook his head.
"It's a beautiful day," he said. "I'll just eat here on the back step."
She nodded and left him there. Gidry sat down, eyeing for the first time with any real interest the changes around him. September wasn't the best month for flowers, yet the garden was still perfectly kept, with bright colored blossoms of varied appearance.
He didn't know very much about blooming plants, but he recognized marigolds and petunias. And there were roses, of course. There seemed to be dozens of varieties. Clearly they must be her favorite. That was something he had not known. He thought back over time, eight years past. Had the rose been her favorite flower then? Why had he not known what she liked best? She knew that he liked turnips.
Pru came out the kitchen door with a plate in each hand.
Gidry stood immediately to help her.
"It's not Sunday dinner fare," she told him. "But it will keep you from fainting during the afternoon."
Their hands touched beneath the warmth of the plate.
"Not that there was much danger in that," he said.
She seated herself beside him on the step, their shoulders almost touching. Carefully, she tucked her dress around her, perhaps a little more modestly than necessary. Her long, narrow feet, covered in black cotton stockings peeked out below the hem of her skirt. The sight caught in his chest somehow. It made her seem more a woman. She had always been just Pru to him. Warm, easygoing Pru, who induced none of the edgy, tingling emotions he associated with the female gender.
Inexplicably, Gidry's gaze was drawn to the milk shed on the northeast corner of the property. In the full light of day it looked even less a site for illicit romance than he'd imagined last night. He must have been mistaken. Pru would not be involved in such a thing. Not his Pru.
His Pru.
The thought lingered
His dinner dish was heavily laden with soft, saucy turnips, a pile of bread-and-butter pickles, and a huge hunk of corn bread.
Gidry inhaled the aroma and sighed with pleasure.
"There is nothing in the world better than Aunt Hen's turnips," he said.
"Well, these are my turnips," she corrected.
He savored the first bite.
"And they are just as good," he told her.
She waved away the compliment. "There is nothing magical about boiling turnips."
Gidry grinned at her. "Ma'am, believe me," he said. I’ve eaten my share of turnips cooked in restaurants, boardinghouses, and on the cattle trail. And never do they taste this good."
He finally managed to draw a pleased smile from her.
"It's sugar," Pru explained. "Just a smidge of sugar while they're cooking, it makes all the difference."
He nodded gravely at her, savoring another bite.
'Thank you for revealing your secret, ma'am," he said teasingly.
She blushed brightly as if she had in fact disclosed something personal.
It was a strange and somehow wonderful familiarity sitting next to her like this. There had been so many similar moments in the distant past. They had talked and teased and laughed together so easily back then. He'd have told her all his fun and foibles. She'd have listened with rapt attention and given advice if she'd thought he needed it. Then he'd have placed a chaste kiss upon her pretty lips as he took his leave.
He watched her stocking covered toes curl along the edge of the back step.
There would no longer be any kisses between them, chaste or otherwise.
"I talked to the gentlemen of the Commercial Club this morning," he told her. "The ginning should start day after tomorrow."
"That soon?"
"Yes, it seems that the farmers up on the ridge rise were able to pick a bit early this year," he said.
Pru didn't appear surprised.
'That soil up there is downright sticky with nitrogen," she said. "And the balance of sun and rain has been nearly perfect this year."
Gidry raised an eyebrow.
"I never imagined that you knew so much about farming," he said.
She shrugged carelessly, as if to suggest that it would be no surprise to anyone else.
"Farming is just gardening on a larger, more serious scale," she explained.
"Do you know anything about cotton?" Gidry asked.
She made a face that was comic with question.
"You mean that scraggly white stuff that grows in every field and unclaimed dirt plot within a hundred miles of here?" she asked him facetiously.
"Yes, that's the one," Gidry told her. "The cruelest crop they call it."
"And rightly so," she pointed out. "What do you want to know about it?"
"Basically how we are supposed to make a living growing it," he said. "When the crop is ruined and there is nothing to sell, the price is high. But when you've had a good year and everybody's got cotton, it’s not worth anything."
"Gidry Chavis," Pru said, shaking her head and tutting fatalistically. "Just back in town one day and already you're quoting the farmer's eternal lament."
He nodded and scooped up another big bite of turnips before he continued.
"Even if we manage to get a really fine price above the commodity index," he said, "with the market for cotton this low, we'll still lose money."
"Then the gentlemen of the Commercial Club had best figure out another way to make what we have pay," Pru said.
"I think they are counting on me to do that," he said. "I wish you could have been at the meeting this morning. They treated me with a lot more respect than I ever deserved."
Her expression softened, as if she were proud of him. "Then you'll have to make certain that you don't let them down," she said.
He considered her words for a long moment.
"We could modernize the town," Gidry suggested. 'Try to bring in more industry, so we aren't always at the mercy of the cotton markets."
Pru nodded thoughtfully.
"But that will take years, I suppose," Gidry pointed out. "And what kind of industry would like to settle down in the middle of cotton country?"
Pru shrugged.
"With the recent panic in the currency," Gidry continued, "not a whole lot of companies are expanding or—"
"What do you do with the seed?" she asked him, interrupting.
"Huh?"
'The cottonseed?" Pru leaned an elbow on her knee and gazed at him speculatively. "What do you do with the cottonseed."
The ginning process separated the fiber from the hull, the seed was left behind as a waste product.
'The cottonseed belongs to the farmers," Gidry said. "Chavis Cotton has never kept the seed. My father always gave it back."
"And what do the farmers do with it?"
"They use it for next year's planting, I suppose," Gidry said.
"Not all of it," Pru pointed out. 'The cotton on just one small farm makes enough seed to plant the entire state of Texas."
"That's true," Gidry said, surprising himself at what he remembered. "It only takes about a half bushel of seed per acre. And there is nearly a half ton of seed for every bale."
"So what do they do with the rest?" she asked.
"I think they use most of it in feed," he said. "And the rest of it is just compost for fertilizer."
"Why don't you sell it to one of the oil mills?" Pru suggested. "I read a pamphlet just recently about all the new uses they are finding for cottonseed oil."
"I think because it was never worth the trouble," Gidry said. "It costs nearly as much to transport as it pays. It was always just easier to plow it back into the ground."
Pru was thoughtful once more.
"What if you didn't have to transport it? What if Chavis Cotton started its own cottonseed oil production right here in Chavistown."
Gidry's eyes widened with excitement and appreciation as he considered her idea.
"There isn't a cottonseed plant in the entire Black Waxy," he said, almost breathlessly. "We could buy cottonseed from the whole region for practically nothing. And these days they are making everything but mother's milk from it."
The two of them stared at each other with pent up excitement for a long moment, then burst out with delighted laughter.
"How much would a processing plant like that cost?" Pru asked.
Gidry shrugged. "Maybe a lot more than we're willing to invest. But we don't know until we check into it.
"
"I think it would be foolish if you didn't check into it," she declared.
"Yes, of course we should check into it," he agreed enthusiastically.
He just gazed at her in wonder and shook his head.
"I knew that I should come talk to you," he told her. "You're smart and capable. And you've always been the one to help me sort things through. I'm always at my best when I'm with you."
His words of compliment had completely the opposite effect of what he had intended. She looked as if he had dashed cold water upon her sunny heart.
She grabbed up his plate and rose to her feet.
"I have things to do this afternoon, Mr. Chavis," she said. "I'm sure you have your own work to attend to."
Gidry wanted to kick himself. He wasn't sure exactly what he had said, but it had clearly been the wrong thing. He was determined to make amends.
"Pru," he began lamely, "I think we need to talk about the past, to talk about what happened between us."
"Not today," she told him firmly.
"There are things that need to be said," he insisted.
"Perhaps so, but they have waited eight years, I don't think it's essential that we delve into them immediately, just because it is suddenly convenient for you."
"Pru, I—"
"I hope you enjoyed your meal, Mr. Chavis," she said. "Remember in the future, just a smidge of sugar and you can cook your own turnips for yourself."
Chapter Ten
It was unfair to wish that Gidry Chavis had never returned. His father needed him, the town needed him. Prudence Belmont, however, was determined not to need him. And she certainly didn't want him to need her.
She knelt in the hot afternoon sun and furiously attacked the crabgrass that grew unwanted along her back fence row.
I'm always at my best when I'm with you.
There was a time, long ago when she would have taken that as a compliment,but no longer.
The slats of Aunt Hen's old bonnet shaded her face, but not enough to keep the perspiration from her brow. She was damp and miserable from the heat and work, but she continued angrily to push herself.
You've always been the one to help me sort things through.
She wasn't certain at what she was most angry, the crabgrass that dared to encroach upon her carefully cultivated gardens, Gidry Chavis, who seemed completely content to pick up their friendship right where he dropped it eight years ago, or herself.