A Time for Everything (12 page)

“
Sweet Jesus!” Bessie
pushed away from the table, jumped to her feet and backed toward
the door leading outside. “What do you think you’re doing, bringing
that thing in here? Tryin’ to scare me to death?”

Portia shut the lid gently, being
careful not to hurt the little snake. She looked directly at
Jonathan. “I found it in my bed this morning. Care to
explain?”

He flicked his eyes from Bessie to
Portia and shook his head frantically.

“
Jonny?” Bessie said, with
a note of warning in her voice. “Did you put a snake in Mrs.
McAllister’s bed? You best tell the truth or you’ll get a good
whippin’.”

He glanced at Portia and lowered his
eyes to the table. Biting his lip, he finally nodded.

Bessie pointed toward the dining room
door. “You get upstairs to your room and don’t you come out ’til I
tell you!”

“
Wait,” Portia said, as an
idea sprang to mind. Jonathan paused at the threshold. “I think we
can come up with something much more productive.”

Bessie looked at her with one dark,
skeptical brow lifted high.

“
It’s a nice day out. I
say we skip lessons and put this boy to work. He’s plenty old
enough to carry his weight around here, and I have yet to see him
do any chores.”

Jonathan’s shoulders drooped, and he
gave her a look that suggested a good whipping would be the better
punishment.

“
We don’t work him real
hard, not since he stopped talking.” Pity coated Bessie’s words,
and she looked at him as though he might soon be on his
deathbed.

Nonsense.
This ‘condition’ of his weighed down the whole
household. The child was healthy and shouldn’t be coddled into
idleness that fostered disrespect and mischief. “His arms and legs
are completely functional. He doesn’t need to talk to be able to
work.”

With her lips skewed to one side,
Bessie regarded him for a moment. “All right. What you got in
mind?”

“
What’s on your chore list
for the day?”

“
Weedin’, prunin’,
plantin’ potatoes and beets…”

“
Then we’ll help you,
won’t we, Jonny?”

His breath came out in a dreadful sigh
as he stomped toward the back door.

“
No, not yet.”

He paused, looking puzzled.

Portia handed him the basket. “First
you’ll return this little fellow to where you found
him.”

He wrinkled his nose and narrowed his
eyes at her but trudged out the door with the basket, heading
toward the garden.

“
I don’t know what’s
gotten into that boy. He never did this kind of thing when his mama
was alive,” Bessie said.

“
It’s understandable. His
whole world has changed, and he feels helpless. Putting a snake in
my bed is something he can control. At least it wasn’t a
copperhead.”

Bessie looked at her for a
moment, her eyes softer than usual. “Maybe you’re right about that.
What are
you
gonna do all day?”

“
I’ll be working outside,
same as you.” She rolled up her sleeves and smiled.

Eyes wide with surprise, Bessie said,
“All right, then. Gardenin’ shed’s right out there. You can start
by pruning the rosebushes. I’ll clean up the breakfast dishes and
be out shortly.”

Portia found Jonathan by the shed, now
with an empty knitting basket. She gathered pruning shears and some
gloves. At the front corner of the house near the parlor, they
found the first unruly rosebush. He crossed his arms and scowled
the whole time, but he watched closely as she showed him how to cut
a few dead and damaged stems.

Then it was his turn, so she handed
him the gloves and pruners. He swallowed hard and stared at the
bush like it might grab him with its thorny arms and never let
go.

“
You can do it. See these
thin, twiggy stems? Cut those out,” she said.

With his tongue poking from the corner
of his mouth, he obeyed, holding the pruners awkwardly at first.
His confidence grew with every snip.

She knew he would feel satisfaction in
a job well done, so she continued to instruct and encourage, using
the calm, patient voice she had employed in the schoolroom. “And
these here that are crossing each other — cut one of those back.
Pinch off the suckers next. Perfect!”

When he finished, he lowered the
pruners and stood back, eyeing the rosebush with a “that’s not too
shabby” frown. Portia helped Jonny prune the other rosebushes next
to the porch and the garden. By the time they were done, he had
worked up a good sweat and had earned a few battle scars on his
arms from the thorns. But he wore a relaxed smile of pure
accomplishment.

“
Now that the sun’s had
time to dry the dirt, let’s go help Bessie plant the potatoes and
beets,” Portia said.

When they arrived back at the garden,
Bessie was hard at work on evenly spaced potato hills. Portia
fetched a hoe and showed Jonny how to dig a nice, straight row. She
handed him the hoe, and he did his best. His row looked more like
one side of a parenthesis, but it would suffice.

Portia followed along, dropping seeds
into the furrow. When he reached the end of the row, he came back
behind her, covering the seeds and gently tamping down the dirt
with the bottom of the hoe. Finally the last few beet seeds were
safely under the soil. Jonathan stood up straight and arched his
back to stretch his strained muscles. He brushed the dirt off his
hands and scowled.

“
What’s wrong?” Portia
figured he would show her blisters on his palms or a rock in his
boot.

“
I hate beets.”

He said it in such a clear,
matter-of-fact voice that no one would have guessed he hadn’t
spoken in nearly a year. He walked to the shed, put the hoe away,
and went back inside the house.

Portia’s jaw dropped. “Did you hear
that? He hates beets.”

“
He always
has.
”
Bessie
stared at the back door and wiped the sweat from her forehead with
the back of her hand. “You did it. You got him to
speak.”

“
No, he did it,” Portia
said, leaning on her hoe. “All he needed was enough work to
distract him from keeping his voice to himself.”

“
If I’d known that, I
would have had him workin’ from sunup to sundown.” She pursed her
lips into an impressed smile. “We should tell Beau.”

“
It might be best to wait
a bit, see if Jonathan takes the initiative and speaks to him
without prompting. If we put too much pressure on him, he might
hold back even more.”

“
Hmm, maybe you’re
right.”

Mr. Stanford didn’t utter more than a
few words at dinner. He didn’t bring up any more serious matters as
he had on her first morning there. Harry was as chatty as he’d been
from the start, Ezra just as humorous.

The indifference didn’t hurt her so
much as she hurt from watching Jonathan trying to catch his
father’s attention. Now and then his eyes would linger on Beau, and
his mouth would twitch as though he wanted so badly to share
something with him. She was tempted to tell them about Jonathan
breaking his silence, but held her tongue. She had to let him speak
on his own terms.

But Beau never looked at him, and
Jonathan’s hopeful countenance fell. He played with his stew and
nibbled some cornbread, reclaiming the silence he had possessed
before today’s three-word marvel. Beau left the table and went to
bed without even a farewell or goodnight.

Certainly indifference was better than
the brutality she had suffered at the hands of her own father.
Still, her heart ached for Jonathan, and she didn’t know how to
make it better.

The next morning’s
lessons consisted of biology and botany. Portia
gave Jonathan the privilege of picking corresponding books that
interested him. He picked five, and three of them were books about
horse husbandry.
The Horse: With a
Treatise on Draught
,
The Complete Farrier,
and
On Horsemanship
, an
English translation of an ancient Greek historian. Though
horse-related books were in abundance, they were not the only
choices. Portia had already scanned every title on the
shelves.

“
What made you pick these
three?” Portia asked.

He shrugged and turned his head toward
the front window. Toward the horse barn.

“
I bet your father read
these to you.”

With a sad sigh, he nodded and
scratched at a spot on the desk top.

She sat down at the big
desk. The windows into Jonathan’s soul had opened a little more. He
loved his father and looked up to him. They
should
be able to connect through
all those things fathers and sons did together — reading, hunting,
fishing, and the family business. Maybe she could encourage that
somehow.

The door opened, and Bessie announced
lunch before she could form any solid plans. Jonathan sped out as
usual.

“
How’s things goin’
today?” Bessie asked.

“
Not bad.” Portia
closed
The Complete Farrier
and propped her chin on her hand. “Do you know
when Mr. Stanford and Jonathan last did something together, just
the two of them?”

Bessie lifted one shoulder and shook
her head. “There’s church, but… no, I don’t remember when just the
two of them did anything. They used to fish down at Barton Creek
all the time, and they’d go ridin’ almost every evenin’ when the
weather was good. Things is different now, and it’s a
shame.”

“
That it is.” Rubbing the
tense muscles in her neck, Portia dared to broach another subject
that weighed on her heavily. “May I ask you something?”

“
You may.”

“
My husband, Jake…” She
swallowed past the sudden dryness in her throat. “…you know which
side he fought for, and—”

“
I know what you’re
askin’,” she said, holding her palm out to stop the conversation.
“I understand you never owned slaves?”

“
That’s right.”

“
Had you the means, would
you have?”

Heat filled Portia’s cheeks. She
fidgeted with the corner of a letter to Ellen she had begun writing
that morning. She knew then that the only way to gain Bessie’s
trust, if she ever could, was to offer complete honesty.

Portia finally answered, her voice
timid and shaky, “Jake always believed that men should work for
their keep. But if we had been wealthy enough… I don’t know. Maybe
we would have.”

Bessie walked to the bookcase and,
finger on her chin, scanned some of the books. She chose one and
brought it to where Portia sat, placing it in front of
her.

Portia read the title on
the cover. “
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.”
Unsure what else to say, she raised her eyes to Bessie and
waited.

The older woman tapped the
book with one long, brown finger. “We got this book when Beau was a
young man, not much older than Jonny. We read it together, and
though Isaac and me was never slaves, Beau finally understood what
others had to endure. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’ve felt
it, too.” She pointed to the jagged scar that crossed over her
right eye. “I want you to read this, so
you’ll
understand.”

“
I will.” Rubbing her
fingers along the frayed edges of the cover, Portia swallowed hard
and forced herself to speak. “I’d very much like to be friends, if
you could find it in your heart to accept me.”

“
It’s
your
heart what matters, and I ain’t
too sure about it yet. Time will tell. Now, come eat lunch. We got
plenty of work to do this evenin’.”

~~~~

When she went
to the dining room, only Jonathan sat there,
munching hard boiled eggs, salt pork, and collard greens. Bessie
had already prepared her a plate at her newly claimed spot at the
table, so she sat down across from him.

He glanced up at her then kept eating.
Bessie emerged from the kitchen, and Portia asked, “Would you like
Jonathan and me to take some lunch to the men?”

“
They’d appreciate that,
I’m sure.”

“
All right.”

She ate everything on her plate,
though greens were admittedly not her favorite thing. When she
finished, she took her plate along with Jonathan’s to the kitchen.
He looked up at her while he packed a basket with food. She could
sense excitement from his hasty movements and bright eyes. The boy
must have longed to be with his father so much that even the
prospect of taking him lunch brought him joy.

“
How about we take the
long way around so you can show me more of the grounds?” she
asked.

He answered with his usual
shrug.

With the basket all packed, she
slipped the handle over her arm and followed Jonathan out the back
door. They crossed the backyard and walked along a path of round
stepping stones to a small herb garden. An ornate wrought iron
fence surrounded it. Though many of the plants were just barely
turning green with new growth, she imagined all the dishes she
would concoct with mint, tarragon, and thyme. Her own garden back
home had once brought such joy when she tended it.