Together Apart Page 3

  Pulling away from the main house, I next explored the attached, one-story building. Like a ghost, I entered through a wall. The inside was bare. I added roosts and a dozen fat laying hens but removed them when a cocky rooster began his wake-the-whole-town crow. Next I nailed shelves to the walls. In a blink, I lined the shelves with dry goods; bolts of muslin and colorful calicos, skeins of yarn, shoes in every style and size, and rocking chairs pulled up to a potbelly stove. Then, quite uninvited, the grumpy clerk from Fowlers Emporium swept in and carted away all my lovely merchandise, leaving behind only the rocking chairs and stove. I imagined myself holding a cup of mint tea, sat down, and rocked—back and forth, the rhythm and creak of the chair like a lullaby. That's when the answer to Eliza's question began to take shape, slowly, like bread rising. I finally fell asleep.

  ***

  I awoke to the scent of bacon and, to my horror, quite alone in the bed. I moved aside the bed sheet that curtained our corner of the soddie from the rest and shot a glance at the mantel clock. It read nearly six-thirty. Even if I chose to be unladylike and run half the way to town, I'd be late.

  Mama came in from outside just then, carrying the morning's collection of cream. Needle-sharp jabs pricked my heart. Separating the cream from freshly drawn milk by straining it through a square of muslin had been one of my chores. Mama didn't look at me, not even when I dashed across the room and gathered up the clothes I'd hung to dry the night before. I'd planned to press these things, but it would take too long to heat and reheat the irons on the stove, so I ducked back behind the curtain and quickly dressed myself in wrinkles.

  I was standing at the mirror, brushing out my hair, when the bed sheet fluttered in the draft of the door opening. "I didn't break a one," Joey said.

  "How many eggs today?" Mama asked.

  "Two hands plus these many fingers."

  "That's one more than Megan gathered yesterday. Is Megan nearly finished feeding and watering the chickens?"

  "Lila had to help her carry the bucket."

  I was almost surprised to see my reflection in the mirror. To Mama I was already gone.

  ***

  "I'll be home in time for church on Sunday," I said, lifting the door latch.

  "Not so quick," Mama said.

  I dared not turn to face her.

  "If you must go, then at least make yourself presentable." She pinned a hat on my head. I knew the hat without looking. It was Mama's going-to-town hat, the navy one with the floppy silk rose.

  "Mind you don't lose my hat," Mama called after me as I set off down the trail toward town.

  Papa, Jake, and James were already working in the fields: Papa behind the breaking plow, busting sod like he'd done every day, save for Sundays, since the spring thaw. James was cutting and burning last year's corn stalks, and Jake was sowing timothy grass. Three sets of strong, hard-working hands. Joey would add his hands to the farm work one day, but Papa would forever be four hands short.

  When out of sight of the farm, I hiked my skirts and began to run. I'd been wearing long skirts only since turning fourteen and hadn't yet gotten used to the bother they caused in all but the most mannered of movements. Fine for town living, maybe, but not for getting oneself there.

  I made it nearly as far as the schoolhouse before I slowed to a walk. This was partly because I'd winded myself, partly because of a team and wagon stopped in the trail. At first I saw no one about. Then Mr. Richards, Isaac Bradshaw's stepfather, showed himself in the schoolhouse doorway. I hoped he wouldn't see me, but he did. "Wait up," he shouted, then started toward me.

  Mr. Richards was not well liked in our district. More than once I'd overheard Papa speak of Mr. Richards's underhanded dealings. A healthy calf offered in trade, then replaced by a sickly one.

  "If you've come here to consort with my good-for-nothing stepson, you're wasting your time." His breath reeked of corn liquor.

  I took a step back.

  "Ungrateful boy robbed me blind before he ran off. Went looking for my woodworking tools this morning and couldn't find hide nor hair of them. You tell him for me that I've just reported him to Sheriff Tulley. Better yet, you're going to tell me where he's hiding out, and I'll make him wish the sheriff got to him first."

  I hiccupped, then said, "I'm sorry, sir, but I've not spoken with Isaac in several months. Now you will have to excuse me, for I have pressing business in town."

  "That's a likely story," he spat.

  I didn't reply, just spun away, hiccupped, and began again to walk toward town.

  "You tell him to return my woodworking tools today or else," Mr. Richards shouted after me.

  Moments later I heard the crack of Mr. Richards's whip and the hoof beats of his team pulling away. I tried to put Mr. Richards out of my mind but couldn't. I was glad Isaac had run away, glad he'd taken the tools. Mr. Richards's anger worried me, though. I vowed then and there that, if ever I saw Isaac again, I'd go against Papa's wishes and warn him.

  Just then there were more hoof beats, coming on, not going away. I chanced a peek over my shoulder and was relieved to see that it was old Mr. Zeller.

  He whoaed his team and asked, "Need a lift?"

  "I surely do," I answered in my loudest voice, then climbed up and onto the seat next to him. I leaned close to his nearly deaf ear and asked, "How are you faring today?"

  "Can't complain," he answered, and that was all the conversation he required.

  Issac

  SLEEPING ON THE COT IN THE ROOM ABOVE THE STABLE HAD been like sleeping on milkweed fluff. No crackle of corn-shucks, no stepbrothers' snores, no bony jabs to my ribs. I slept so good that first night that the sun was already hard at work when my eyes finally pried themselves open. I didn't need to take the time to pull on my trousers because I'd slept in them.

  Eliza wasn't in the kitchen and didn't answer when I called her name, so I headed for the print shop. Eliza hadn't been in a mood to discuss the particulars of my job the evening before, or much of anything else for that matter, but she had cursed the press as a "maniacal, mechanical beast."

  I approached the press as if it were an unbroken colt—stout-heartedly but with a heap of respect. The press stood twelve hands high and an arms-spread in length. There was a large, chin-high wheel, square plates, one of which held the type, a foot pedal of some sort, and a confusing snarl of gears and arms. At the top was a disk-shaped metal piece, whose purpose I couldn't put a saddle on.

  I walked circles around the thing, trying to make sense of its mechanics. If it'd been made of wood, nose to tail, the press might have explained itself, but the forged metal wasn't talking. I snatched a blank sheet of paper from a nearby table, then laid this paper where I thought it might go and gave the wheel a turn. The jaws of the thing clamped shut—quick, like a coyote's fangs sinking into a jackrabbit. I turned some more, and the jaws parted.

  The page had printing on only the bottom half. The ink was faint, hard to read; so I walked it over to the window, squinted, and made out one word, Women, and part of another, Suff—. Suff—? Suffer? I hightailed it back to the kitchen, where I built a fire in the cookstove. When the kindling blazed, I flung the paper and its "not meant for a fellows eyes" words into the firebox. It caught, flamed, and turned to smoke.

  The charred chicken I'd pieced on the night before hadn't set too well, so I had a bad case of hungries. I snooped in Eliza's pantry and happened across a sack of buckwheat flour. I'd learned a thing or two about cooking in my fifteen years. Had to, what with Ma's sick spells. Flapjacks were my specialty. Mr. Richards, who thought himself and his boys too good for kitchen work, wolfed down platefuls without so much as a howdy-do.

  When I opened the icebox, looking for milk, I noticed that the ice block had melted down near to nothing. As I saw it, this was one of the differences between living in town and in the country. On the farm there wasn't a need for fancy iceboxes. You wanted milk; you put your hands to work under a cow. You wanted eggs; you gathered them. You wanted a chicken for s
upper; you chased one until you caught it.

  The eggs looked none too fresh when I cracked them, one-handed, into the crockery bowl. They didn't smell of rot, but I added an extra shake of sugar to the mound of buckwheat flour to be on the safe side. I cooked the same way I worked with wood, by eye. A dollop of this, a pinch of that, a muscled stir.

  I wasn't sure if the stove was flapjack hot, so I spat on it. My spit sizzled, did a jig, then disappeared. Excelsior! Then I spooned a puddle of batter into an iron skillet.

  "Smells wonderful," Eliza said just as I flipped the half-cooked flapjack in the air. I caught it, returned the skillet to the stove, and then glanced over my shoulder. Elizas eyes were puffy, her hair was like a haystack, and her dress was about as wrinkled as my trousers. She must have slept in her clothes, too.

  "Are you feeling some better this morning?" I asked.

  "Much better, thank you. And I'm so sorry about last night; sorry you had to see me like that. I should explain."

  I didn't need an explanation because my ma had suffered from spells of the blues, too.

  "Hungry?" I asked.

  "Starved," Eliza answered.

  "This one's almost done."

  Soon we were both belly-up to the table, each with a flapjack the size of our plates. "To the success of our partnership," Eliza said, waving her first bite, dripping with butter and maple syrup, like a flag at the end of her fork. I was about to dig in when somebody knocked on the door.

  Eliza pushed away from the table.

  "You eat," I said, then took my first bite of real food in days. Still chewing, I got up and headed for the door, the one leading outside.

  Standing on the other side of the glass was Hannah. I opened the door so fast it sucked wind. I tried to swallow but couldn't. My eyes were fixed on Hannah's, and hers on mine.

  "Is that Hannah?" Eliza called from the table.

  The bite of flapjack was still stuck in my gullet.

  Eliza was behind me then. "Please do come in, Hannah."

  Eliza pulled out a chair and asked Hannah to sit. Hannah sat, removed the pin from the funny little hat she was wearing, then removed the hat.

  Eliza then asked Hannah if she'd eaten breakfast. Hannah, not taking her eyes off me, answered that she hadn't. The bite of flapjack finally slid down, and straightaway I spooned more batter into the skillet.

  Eliza, after fetching another plate, asked, "Do you know one another?"

  "Yes, ma'am. We both went to Harmony School," I answered.

  Eliza thought a little, then asked, "You're not sweet on each other, are you?"

  I kept my mouth shut because I was as anxious to hear Hannah's answer as Eliza was.

  "Oh, no, ma'am. If you've heard that, it's not true."

  Much as I wished Hannah had said something else, she was mostly right. We'd never been sweethearts, never had the chance to be sweethearts, though rumors to the contrary had been galloping around. Before the blizzard we hadn't even been what one might call friends. Hannah had never been mean to me like the other kids at school. She'd never teased me about my worn-out shoes or being the only fifteen-year-old boy still coming to school. But she'd obeyed her papa like everybody else—"Stay away from that Richards bunch. They're nothing but trouble."

  As for me, I'd been sweet on Hannah for as long as I'd been old enough to work a plow. One day, catching a blur off to my right, I'd looked up from the furrow to see Hannah making her way through the knee-high grass. I whoaed the team and gawked. The easy way she moved, the way the wind played in her long, black hair, the way she'd slow and raise her hand to her brow every now again, as if searching for some shining thing in the distance, was music. Hannah music. I scanned the horizon for her whenever I was in the fields. When I didn't see her, the days were mighty long. When luck was on my side, I pulled my harmonica from my pocket and played, softly and matching my notes to the melody of the way she moved.

  That's where we'd both been the afternoon the blizzard struck. Mr. Richards had sent me out to round up some cattle that'd busted through the corral fence, and I was about a quarter mile from Harmony School when I saw Hannah. Her head was thrown back as if she were trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. There was no place for me to hide, what with the dried prairie grass having been laid flat by earlier snows. But she was too busy catching those flakes she didn't see. Then came the clang of the after-lunch school bell. I was sure Hannah would turn and hurry toward the school, spying me, but instead she started walking south. Her eyes were cast down, as if she were following wild critter tracks. I fell in about fifty paces behind her, fitting my feet in her footprints. I stopped when Hannah stopped, walked when she walked, for maybe another quarter-mile.

  If we'd had eyes in the back of our heads, we might have seen the storm sneaking up on us and taking aim. As it was, my first clue that something wasn't right was a sparkiness in the air, like a too-close-for-comfort lightning strike but without the jagged white bolt, without the thunder. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the wall of boiling black clouds. "Storm's coming," I shouted. Hannah turned, saw for herself, and then picked up her skirts and began running toward the school. I fell in beside her. We hadn't run far when the wind's fist hit us. Icy, snow-choked wind. Blinding, biting wind. Wind that built a new ankle drift each time we managed a forward step. I was the first to fall. Hannah reached down, found my hand, and pulled me up. "Walk backwards," she shouted close to my ear. That helped some, at least it kept the wind from packing snow in our eyes and up our noses.

  We never made it to the school. After what seemed like hours of trudging, my feet so numb they felt like rocks, me falling and Hannah pulling me up, me wanting to rest, Hannah tugging me along, we bumped into a haystack. It wasn't much, but it was enough to keep us alive. Surviving the blizzard, huddled together in that haystack, had turned us into friends. I couldn't ask for more from Hannah than that—for the time being, anyway.

  ***

  I served up Hannah's flapjack, and all you could hear until we finished eating were our forks click-clacking against our plates. When my plate was empty of all but a dribble of syrup, which I'd have licked clean if there hadn't been women about, I stood up and said, "If you ladies will excuse me, and if I have your permission, Eliza, I'll hitch your filly to the surrey and fetch back a block of ice from the Ice Works."

  Eliza wiped the corner of her mouth on a lacy napkin. "That's a capital idea. You'll save us the delivery charge. Take a coin from that tin on the shelf. Hannah and I will tidy up here. And, by the way, the filly's name is Persephone, for the Greek goddess of winter."

  I shook a coin from the tin, slipped it into one hip pocket, and slid my harmonica out of the other. I played my way out of the kitchen and into the stable. It was a rip-roaring tune.

  Persephone started in whinnying before I'd opened the double, cross-bucked doors. She was a beauty. Coal black and sleek. Not bulky and dull-eyed like Mr. Richards's horses or Mercy, Ma's mule. I tugged on the surrey's tongue, but it didn't budge, so I circled around back to see what the problem was. Wedged in front of the surrey's right rear wheel was an arm-long board. Next to the wheel was a whole stack of boards. And next to the stack hunkered a large lump of a thing, covered by a dust-fuzzed tarpaulin. I lifted a corner of the tarp and saw wood. With a Herculean pull, I yanked the tarp to the floor and beheld the curved wooden spine of a boat.

  I didn't stop to think just then about how a half-finished boat had found its way into Eliza's stable. Didn't stop to think why anybody would have such a thing on the Nebraska prairie or why the boat was balanced on an axle and wheels. Didn't think one thing at all, just ran my fingers over perfectly hewn wooden ribs. I guessed the boat's length at half a rod, maybe more, and the width at two people sitting side by side. Unlike the printing press, this contrivance spoke to me. Sang. I might have stayed there, chawing on the possibilities, if not for Persephone. Her whinny had turned into a horsy nag.

  I backed away but didn't take my eyes off the boat until I re
ached Persephone's stall. "Easy girl," I said, taking her halter lead.

  When I'd harnessed Persephone, I swung myself up onto the surrey's leather seat. I took up the reins, snapped my wrists with a "Gee haw," and was off. The fringe dangling from the surrey's leather roof swayed and danced as if it were keeping time. My grin was so big I figured it might be stuck that way. And it was, for a couple of hours.

  Hannah

  I WAS RINSING THE BREAKFAST DISHES, WISHING I'D WARNED Isaac about my run-in with Mr. Richards. Not knowing how much Isaac had told Eliza, I hadn't thought it wise to mention Mr. Richards in her presence. Just then, framed in the window glass, Isaac drove out of the stable in the most magnificent of buggies, the most magnificent of horses in the lead, high stepping and black as night. A winter horse, indeed. And Isaac, grinning from ear to ear, looked right at home there in the surrey. This was the life he deserved, and, much as I wanted it for myself, I wouldn't spoil it for him.

  Eliza leaned over my shoulder. "Isn't Persephone a beauty?"

  "Yes, ma'am, she surely is."

  "She's a Morgan, a gift from my late husband."

  I turned to her. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

  Tears rushed her eyes, but her smile didn't fade. "I miss Harlan terribly. I'll see a man and woman arm in arm..."

  Mid-sentence Eliza's expression soured. "My Harlan is gone. Would that I could, I cannot wish him back. But I'll not conduct myself as if I died with him. I'll not close my blinds to the sun, will not wear widow's weeds nor veil my face. Harlan would not expect it of me. He would not. And I most definitely will not marry another for convenience's sake, as some of the so-called better class of people in this town have suggested."