Together Apart Page 9

  "Purple periwinkle?"

  "It was the first thing that came to mind. But tell me, what might your papa think if you brought Rusty Farley home for Sunday dinner?"

  "Dru!"

  "Okay, I'll button my lip." And she did button it, for about five seconds. "Oh, did you get a look at the new doctor, the one who just last week hung out his shingle here in town? His office is three blocks closer than the one of old Doc Forbes, so I asked him to come instead. He's so handsome, and young, near the same age as Eliza. Do you suppose he and Eliza might hit it off?"

  "Dru, you've been reading too many novels."

  Eliza came in my room just then, carrying an armload of Isaac's things. "Good news. Doctor Goodman believes Carlos, if his wound is kept clean and he's given at least a month's rest, will recover. With the Tinkas in the room above the stable, Isaac will have to bunk in one of the empty rooms up here. You don't mind, do you, Hannah?"

  "Wouldn't the Tinkas be more comfortable up here, with beds enough to go around? I ... I could sleep on the cot in the resting room."

  "Their ways are different from ours. That's why I didn't have them bring Carlos up here when they first arrived. In the stable they'll have their privacy, and their wagon home will be close by."

  Then Eliza turned to Dru. "I can't thank you enough, Dru, for fetching Doctor Goodman. He used the most modern of medical methods and was a model of efficiency."

  "And handsome?" Dru asked.

  "Is he? I didn't notice."

  I tugged Dru into the hall.

  "And a bachelor, quite eligible," Dru said over her shoulder.

  I jabbed my elbow into her ribs and, like schoolgirls, we broke out in giggles. Dru, who could turn around the most horrid of days. Dru, who could turn despair into giggles. Dru, my bosom friend.

  ***

  I began work on the play later that evening. Not writing it, just jotting words and phrases on my paper. I propped myself against the headboard of my bed, stuffed a pillow at the small of my back, and drained my mind, which wasn't hard—the happenings of the day had made me like a leaky bucket. One word that didn't drain was "wind" so I wrote it down, and the second was "evil." Evil wind? Yes, I thought, the blizzard wind had been evil. Then, through the wall separating Isaac's room from mine, came a quiet cough, and I wrote "good wind." Good and evil—could the wind be both? Thinking to save that question for another time when I wasn't worn so thin, I wrote "school," which led to "teacher," which led to "students," which led to "recess," which led to "Fox and Geese," which led to "crafty like a fox," which led back to "wind." Evil wind, crafty wind, good wind?

  It went on like that, one word leading to another. Some word strings even made me laugh, like "snow—drift—shoes—wet socks—Isaac." Others caused shivers, like "haystack—hide—safety—secret—shame." Sometimes the appearance of a word at the end of my pencil jolted me. "Anger" was one of these words. And sometimes I crossed out a word as soon as I'd written it, like "Papa." When I finally laid my pencil aside, leaned back, and squinted, the paper looked like tracks a confused and dizzy chicken had traced across snow. It wasn't much, but it was a beginning, like collecting ingredients for a cake or setting type for the gazette and skipping nine letters out of every ten. In the weeks to come, I'd stir those words up, fill in the empty spaces.

  PART III

  Late August, 1888

  Issac

  I'D BEEN LIVING HIGH ON THE HOG, SLEEPING IN A SLEIGH BED. Built of the finest mahogany, the bed's headboard and footboard topped off in a curlicue. Eliza had offered the bed to Hannah when she'd first come to live in the house. Hannah had picked a different room, and I knew why. For Hannah the sleigh bed had been too hard a reminder of the blizzard. But I'd managed just fine. August had been sweltering hot, so thoughts of snow were almost welcome.

  Hannah's room was next to mine. The heads of our beds shared the same wall, so our pillows were only a lathe and plaster width apart. Sometimes at night I'd be lying there, trying to catch Hannah's thoughts. I don't know if I ever did catch a real thought, but I did have some mighty sweet dreams.

  The Tinkas were still on board, and Carlos was on the mend. They weren't overly talkative types, so the story of how Carlos had been shot dribbled out only in bits and pieces. Pasted together, the pieces added up to this: The Tinkas had camped for the night on the banks of Lincoln Creek, three miles to the north of Prairie Hill. In the morning, Mr. Tinka had gone off to hunt jackrabbits. Mrs. Tinka, having asked Rosa to keep an eye on the young ones, was doing up the wash down by the creek. Rosa was sitting near the morning fire, braiding her sister's hair, when a shot rang out from inside the wagon. When Carlos recovered enough to tell his side of the story, he said that he'd been mad at his pa for not asking him to tag along on the hunt and had taken the key to his pa's pistol case from its hiding place. He hadn't remembered much after that, only that he'd been turning the gun over and over in his hands.

  Rosa blamed herself, but not for long. Her pa helped her see that it wasn't her fault. I'd been there in the stable that night. I couldn't make out a one of Mr. Tinka's foreign words, but his meaning was spelled out as if in bolded printer's type. He stood in front of Rosa, his finger jabbing at his own chest, not hers. Rosa's eyes were as wide as tomorrow. When Mr. Tinka was done jabbing, he threw his arms around Rosa and held her for longer than I stayed to watch. One man ought not have another fellow watch him cry. Hannah, who'd been standing beside me, didn't budge. It was like she was frozen there.

  Some fewer visitors had come to the resting room after the Tinkas set up housekeeping in the stable, one member of the Advisory Council among them, a Mrs. Hadley. After hearing the news, which spread about as fast as a prairie wildfire, she'd shown herself one last time. The way Eliza told it, Mrs. Hadley, nostrils flaring, had demanded, "Those dirty people must be asked to leave at once." Eliza didn't argue, only walked over to the list of "courtesies" that was posted on the wall and pointed to the first—"Every woman, regardless of family circumstance, nationality, or creed, will be welcomed and shown the highest and equal regard."

  The Tinkas were anything but dirty. They took great pains when washing up their dishes and clothes. Spoons and plates, one for each Tinka, weren't washed together in the same tub of water, but separately. They did the same thing when they washed their clothes. Where my ma had always divided her wash by color—whites first, in the hottest and cleanest of water—the Tinka women divided their wash by who wore it or what it was used for. Mr. Tinka's drawers never went into the same wash water as his wife's underthings—the tea towels never into the same water as the drawers. And, instead of pegging one wet thing to the other like a mouthful of good teeth, the Tinka women left big gaps on the line when they hung their wash out to dry, which made it look like some of the teeth had fallen out.

  Mrs. Hadley hadn't been the only one to hurl rocks at the Tinkas' character. The Reverend Cobb had paid Eliza one of his not-so-social calls. Eliza and I were in the print shop, printing up the latest edition of the gazette when Dru came in saying that the Reverend Cobb wanted a word with Eliza. Eliza rolled her eyes, wiped her inky hands on her apron, and marched out.

  I carried a chair to the door, stood on it, and peeked through the transom Mr. Tinka had helped me build into the wall above the door. This transom didn't have frosted window glass like the transoms above all the doors in the main house. Instead it was inset with finely woven black netting that allowed me to see out without easily being seen. The transom was to be my window on the working girls' play, but I'd begun to use it as my window on the world.

  The Reverend Cobb tugged at his white-banded collar like it was choking his words. He kept his voice low, likely so as not to be heard by the women in the resting room or, when I lip-read the word "heathens," by God himself. Eliza, chewing her bottom lip, held her tongue until the reverend ran out of word-rocks to throw. Then she let go of her lip and let loose a rock of her own: "And you preach of Christian charity." She nearly knocked me off my chair in her
rush to get back into the print shop.

  The Reverend Cobb's wife showed up not an hour after the Reverend left. Again Eliza rolled her eyes. Again I climbed on my chair and spied. But there wasn't anything to hear, nothing to see, except for Mrs. Cobb leaning into Eliza's ear and Eliza shaking her head.

  Eliza was still shaking her head when she returned to the print shop. "What did she want?" I asked.

  "Mrs. Cobb wrongly assumed that Mrs. Tinka was a fortuneteller, wanted her future read, though I wasn't to breathe a word of it to the reverend. So I asked her, 'Does every blind person carry a tin cup?'"

  "And?"

  "She didn't make the connection. Narrow thinking, that's what's wrong with the world today. Lumping people together like so many stamped-tin soldiers. That's ridiculous. No two of us are exactly alike, no matter what language we speak, what clothes we wear, where we lay our heads down to sleep at night."

  I said "amen" to that.

  Mrs. Tinka might not have been a fortuneteller, but she had another knack that drew the town women to the resting room. Mrs. Tinka concocted the best tasting bread. So good tasting that I'd once eaten half a loaf at a sitting. No one but the Tinka women knew what went into that bread—a secret family recipe. The crust was crispy, and the center was soft. Hannah thought there might be a touch of dill, Eliza guessed garlic, and my ma was sure she detected molasses. Mrs. Tinka started out baking five loaves for market days, then ten, then twenty, using both her oven and the one in Eliza's kitchen, and still there were women who went away empty-handed. Eliza finally had to set a limit, one loaf per customer, to keep the women from squabbling about who'd been first in line. Mrs. Tinka used the bread money to pay down the debt owed to Doc Goodman.

  Mr. Tinka, like me, dared not set foot off Eliza's property. Sheriff Tulley had been the third person to pester Eliza about the Tinkas. I didn't spy through the transom that day, didn't dare move, so I heard the story secondhand from Eliza, which was more and more the case. Life outside the print shop was becoming like a storybook—a book with many of the pages ripped out. Pages about me!

  What Eliza told me of the sheriff's visit was this—allowing that the Tinkas were guests of Eliza's and hadn't yet committed a crime, he'd look the other way until Carlos was well enough to travel, so long as Mr. Tinka stayed put. "I've heard tell that those people will stoop so low as to steal the last penny from a blind man's tin cup," the sheriff had said.

  "Some of their kind, perhaps," Eliza had replied. "As would some of our kind, but not the Tinkas. My late husband held Mr. Tinka in the highest regard, said he was a man of honor, a man to be admired for standing tall in the face of ignorant slurs against his character."

  ***

  I steered clear of Mr. Tinka those first couple of days. I was still hiding out, after all, and he'd caught me wearing a dress. And I wasn't surprised when he came to me, his face as serious as Sunday and only inches away from my own, saying that he'd string me up if I so much as looked crosswise at Rosa. Those were almost the same words Hannah's pa had spat at me the morning after the blizzard. At the rate I was going, I'd be a bachelor the rest of my life.

  I told Mr. Tinka that he didn't have a thing to worry about, that I was saving all my sweet talk for another girl. After that he befriended me, and I was mighty grateful. It'd been months since I'd so much as talked to another fellow. Evenings, after the Tinkas had eaten their supper and we'd eaten ours, he'd lend a hand to the finishing work on my boat. While we worked, he taught me a few of his foreign words. The Tinkas were "rom"; Eliza, Hannah, and I were "gajo." "Dae" was mother. "Posta" was sacrifice.

  There was another thing Mr. Tinka did that earned my thanks. To, as he put it, "scratch the moving-on itch," he mowed the grass, pruned the shrubs, and chopped the wood. The next time Rusty Farley showed up there was nothing for him to do but sit on the wagon seat the whole two hours his ma was in the resting room. Eliza invited him inside, but Rusty would have none of it. My regard for Rusty raised a notch when I heard that. No self-respecting boy his age, given a choice, would have set foot inside the resting room, broiling sun or not.

  Like me, Hannah was-but-wasn't there during those weeks of late July and early August. She did her share of the work—dusted and scrubbed, collected the monies on market days, and set type for the gazette—but she wasn't there in her thoughts. Her thoughts were tied up in the crumpled papers she carried and in the stubby pencil she wore above her ear. Whenever she found herself with a minute to spare, she wrote. And even when she wasn't writing on her paper, she was writing in her head. I'd catch her staring blank-eyed at a wall or drifting away between forkfuls of her supper.

  Hannah wouldn't tell me or anyone else for that matter what the play was about, but if one paid attention—and when it came to Hannah I always paid attention—you could figure it out. My first clue came one evening. She'd left her bedroom door ajar, and I just happened to glance in as I passed by. She was standing at the window and had twisted herself up in the long, lacy curtain. The curtain's crocheted pattern was the giveaway; the weave looked like a swirl of snowflakes.

  Another evening, it being my turn for kitchen duty, I was up to my elbows in dishwater when I heard Hannah humming a happy tune out in the main hall. I peeked, and there was Hannah, dancing with the dust mop. Not dancing free like she'd danced across the prairie, but swaying enough to stir her skirts. I wished later that I hadn't peeked, because when Hannah caught me grinning at her, she got that startled look of a fox caught in the hen house, stopped her dancing, and went back to hunting dust furries with her mop.

  Then there was the night of the storm. I'd been in the stable, working on my boat, when a gust of wind, the smell of rain on its breath, slammed the stable doors shut. When I opened the doors again, lightning forked white-hot against the black sky. I went looking for Hannah, upstairs and down, all the while the thunderclaps rattled the windows like cold chatters teeth. I was checking the parlor for a second time when a lightning flash lit the window to the veranda. There was Hannah. Bracing herself with her hands, she leaned out over the rail. I lost her to darkness, then another flash lit her again. The way she stood there so still, she might have been one of those carved lady figureheads that decorated the prows of the old-time ships I'd seen pictured in one of the Judge's boat-building books.

  I joined Hannah then, leaned out over the rail and tried to feel what she felt. Tried to imagine what she was imagining. All I felt was rain splatting against my face. All I imagined was Mr. Richards hollering at me, saying that I didn't have a brain enough to know when to come in out of the rain.

  After a bit Hannah turned to me and said, "I have a favor to ask."

  "Name it."

  "Teach me how to spit."

  If I hadn't been holding the rail, I might have fallen overboard. "Girls don't..." I started to say.

  "You'd better not let Eliza hear you talk like that."

  So I taught Hannah to spit, with the wind first, then into the wind, right there on the veranda, right there in the middle of that thunderstorm.

  Hannah

  JUST BEFORE DAWN ON A RAINY AUGUST MORNING, THE FLICKER of lamplight shadow-dancing across my papers, I leaned back against my pillow and laid my pencil aside. The play I'd wanted to write, needed to write, was finished. Done.

  I slipped out of bed, then padded down the stairs, careful not to disturb the sleepers. I crept past the portrait of Madeline Moore with her wise, watchful eyes. Past the hush of the fern-filled parlor, the Judge's library with its wall of books, into and through Eliza's kitchen and laundry. On reaching the resting room, I built a fire in the potbelly stove then settled into one of the rocking chairs, cradling the play in my lap. Using the fire for light, I reread the first page, with its narrator telling of children setting off for school, ankle-deep in fresh fallen snow, then, like the curtain opening, I fed the page to the fire. The edges curled, caught, burst into flames. I held my hands over the rising heat, warming them.

  Into the flames, page by page,
like curtains opening and closing, the scenes played out. Page after page until there were no pages left in my lap.

  Ash and smoke—the only possible end. I'd written my story, not the working girls' story, not the story of the people who would attend the play. No one had been spared the blizzard's fury, be they trapped outside or in. I think be fore I'd finished writing the first page I knew the play would never, could never, be performed, but once I'd begun, buried myself waist-deep in its drifts, there was no turning back.

  I told no one that I'd burned the first play, not even Isaac. It wouldn't have done for Isaac to know the whole of it because I'd written everything I remembered. About how close Isaac had held me and how warm he had made me feel. About not wanting to die. And the next morning wishing that I had.

  When anyone asked, and Dru asked every day, how the play was coming along, I smiled and said, "Nicely." This was a stretch but not a lie. Minutes after feeding the first play to the fire, I returned to my room, took up a fresh sheet of paper, and began writing the play the working girls would perform. A play that would belong to all.

  I finished the second play in little more than a week. The following Wednesday evening, the working girls pulled their chairs into the usual circle, and I handed out the typeset scripts. Then, after briefly summarizing the scenes and cast of characters, I asked for a show of hands of those interested in the two roles that would require more memorization and extra time for practice. Dru, who had been sitting on the very edge of her chair, raised her hand so fast she was soon sitting on the floor.

  "Anyone else?" I asked. I looked around the circle for volunteers. As if suddenly distracted by a piece of lint on their skirts or a creepy-crawly on the ceiling, no eyes met mine and no hands shot up, which would have been particularly hard for Imogene and Gertrude, because they were sitting on theirs. Then Clarice bent a wrist and raised a finger.