Authors: Ellen O'Connell
“Tell me about the buildings that burned. What was there? How did it happen?”
So he wasn’t going to tell her where they were going. She studied his profile. He’d shaved before bed last night. She liked the feel of his smooth skin rubbing across hers as much as the feel of the bristles the night before. Very different. Very nice.
She put a hand on his thigh again and saw a trace of a smile. “Don’t change the subject,” he said. “How did the fires start?”
“You’re the one who changed the subject, but all right, coal oil splashed all over that’s how. Even days afterward you could smell it under the smoke.”
“Everything went up at once?”
“As far as we could tell. By the time we got out, all the buildings were burning.”
“So everybody got out safe.”
“Everybody was just me and Joe. It was summer, so the horses were out. We got the pig out, but we lost most of the chickens. After we butchered the hog that year we never had much fresh meat again. Joe hated losing the house and moving to the soddy, but for me it wasn’t the house. It was — everything.”
“We can’t have livestock until the trouble is over, but we can have fresh meat. I’ve seen enough rabbits to keep meat on the table for a year.”
“Fresh meat, but not beef,” Norah said, giving him a sharp look.
“Not beef.” He hesitated a second then amended, “At least not often.”
“Caleb....”
“You want me to lie?”
She pulled her hand away and kept it in her lap the rest of the way.
Soon after turning off the main road onto an overgrown track, Norah saw the charred remains of what had once been a house and barns. The resemblance to the blackened hulks on her own property was eerie.
Caleb circled the team around the barn, then backed them until the wagon touched the fallen wall.
“Come on. I’ll show you what we’re here for.”
Norah followed him to the edge of the burned out building, where he crouched and looked under a section of fallen roof.
She stooped to look too. A plow. “You aren’t going to take that out of there.”
“It would be dangerous by myself. That’s why you’re here, partner.”
“I’m not helping you steal a plow.”
“We aren’t stealing it. Look around. It’s abandoned.”
“Someone owns it, and taking it would be stealing.”
He stood and headed back out to the wagon. “Fine. I’m stealing it. You’re my wife, and you’re going to do what I tell you because you promised to obey.”
“That’s not what obey means, and you know it,” she yelled at his back, scrambling after him, catching her hem on a loose board and yanking it free without looking.
When she caught up, he had the rope out of the wagon and draped in a coil over his shoulder.
“I won’t help you steal.”
His face had closed against her again, and for a moment she thought he was going to brush by her without a word, but he leaned back against the wagon, crossed his arms, and admitted she was right.
“All right. Van Cleve owns it. He burned out whoever lived here, and he owns it now. All he wants it for is grazing and to boast of a bigger empire, so he’ll let all this rot. We can use the plow and a lot of this lumber. There may be other good equipment under there.”
Norah set her jaw. Hating a man didn’t give you the right to steal from him, did it?
“He owes you, Norah. He killed your husband and took everything so you’d have to sell or starve, and you damn near did starve. He gave Preston a wink and a nod to go out there and make you sell. The way you felt then you thought what they were going to do to you wouldn’t make much difference, but it would. Whether you died an hour or a lifetime after they were through with you, you’d never be the same.”
“And what does he owe you?”
“Nothing. I don’t like him, and I don’t have your problem with stealing from people I don’t like.”
“You said you couldn’t do it by yourself.”
“Maybe I can.”
“And maybe those beams will fall on you.”
He shrugged. “You know where the money belt is.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Most things aren’t.”
She wanted to hit him. She wanted to walk away and not look back. “You’re as bad as Mr. Van Cleve.”
“Worse probably. I do my own stealing and killing.”
“All right. Show me what to do.”
He showed her how to stand in front of the horses, hold the reins close to their bits, and lead them forward as he directed by shouting from the barn.
“I can’t do that,” she said, horrified. “I’ve hardly ever held the reins in the wagon. They won’t listen to me, and what if they spook and take off?”
“They’ll listen fine. Just stay calm. If they take off, hold on tight so you don’t fall under them. They have to stop eventually.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. Just hang on.”
When they were done, his dark eyes glowed with pleasure over the free plow. Norah shook from head to toe and feared she might vomit.
He finally noticed, guided her around to the back of the wagon, and lifted her onto the gate. “Sit there a minute. I’m going to load up as much of the good lumber as I can.”
She leaned over and put her head in her hands, the rosy visions of the morning overlaid with ugly reality. Magical nights would only be a small part of marriage to Caleb Sutton, and they would never make up for days like this.
N
ORAH WANTED TO
be so angry with him she could hold herself apart, but it didn’t work. It didn’t work because she was honest enough to admit she’d married him because actions other men wouldn’t conceive of to start with or carry out to finish with were ordinary for Caleb. So far as she could tell, he considered stealing plows and lumber from someone he didn’t like a personally beneficial expression of disdain.
Not that she had ever wanted or needed a husband who would steal without compunction, but she wanted that toughness, that hard-eyed indifference to what anyone else thought — to danger. She had wanted a man who could stand up to Asa Preston and half a dozen like him and make them back down, and that’s what she had.
In spite of the other emotions he evoked, Caleb made her feel safe. Day after day he rousted her from the household chores she wanted to do and dragged her to one deserted farmstead after another salvaging (his word), or stealing (her word) anything and everything he considered useful, and she never worried about what would happen if Mr. Van Cleve’s men found them.
The problem was he also made her feel complicit. The last time she’d struggled so hard with her own concepts of right and wrong had been the first time she’d seen Caleb, the night her life had changed.
After a week of it, she no longer tried to resist when he parked the wagon in front of the house and came to get her an hour after breakfast. She suspected he calculated carefully so that she had enough time to wash dishes and clean up and not enough time to start a project like laundry.
Sooner or later he’d have to give her time for necessities like that, but today when he came for her, she put on Joe’s old coat and wrapped the red scarf around her head and neck, ready to follow him into the cold February morning.
“When are you going to have a decent coat to wear?”
“When you stop dragging me off to help you steal, and I have time to make it.”
No wagon waited outside the door. “Where are we going?” she said, certain she wouldn’t like the answer.
“You want to know plans. Let’s make plans. Come on.”
They walked to the site of the burned out house and outbuildings. Caleb had stripped everything of use out of here during the weeks he’d lived in the house alone, and she knew he hadn’t found much.
“What was it like?” he asked now.
“A lot like what Carburys have. The house was two stories, a parlor, dining room, kitchen, and one bedroom downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. You can imagine what it was like for us in the soddy when we first got here. My brothers slept outside in good weather, but that winter we were like logs one beside the other across the floor. So Papa spent a good part of the cash money he had to build the house and a barn and storage sheds the very next summer.”
“And you didn’t approve.”
“I don’t remember how I felt at the time, but later I realized if he hadn’t spent that money on the house, he would have had it later and maybe he wouldn’t have failed.”
She stared at the ruins. “Probably he would have anyway. It would have taken a little longer is all. He wasn’t much of a farmer. I think he really believed what the land agents said, that you could just sprinkle seeds on the ground, sit back and watch things grow. He never admitted it, but I think he came to hate it. Every year he put things off longer, did them with less heart. I think he was glad when Mr. Van Cleve gave him an excuse to sell and leave.”
“But your husband was good at it.”
“Better. Papa had a small inheritance from his grandfather and came out here with enough money for a good start and wasted it. Joe’s father was a farmer, and Joe was the third son. Farming was all he knew, and he homesteaded south of here. We lived there for the first two years we were married, but this is better land and there’s more of it. When Mr. Van Cleve started trying to buy everyone along the creek out, well, you know how Joe got the place. Sometimes I thought....”
She stopped, unsure whether she wanted to admit the truth to him. “He never said it, but I think you aren’t the first man who married me for this land.”
“He didn’t get it by marrying you.”
“No, but he put himself in a position to get it when Papa failed, and I think he always knew Papa would fail.”
“Maybe he just wanted the curtains.”
“He hated the soddy and everything in it. Losing this house was the worst thing that ever happened to him.” She heard the bitterness in her own voice and forced lightness instead. “Is this the plan, to rebuild the house?”
“Not for a while and barn first when we can. Let’s take a walk.”
They walked the boundaries of the land, and Norah felt ashamed of how few of his questions she could answer. Neither her father nor Joe had shared what they did with different fields with her. They most certainly never wanted to hear her opinions. Caleb did.
Before long he was pointing, telling her about different crops, different varieties of wheat he’d heard about. He spoke with enthusiasm of theories on letting fields lie fallow, cover crops grown for no reason except to enrich the land when plowed under with enthusiasm.
She listened first with surprise and then with pleasure, feeling almost like a real partner.
“When we’re through dealing with Van Cleve, we’ll get your goats,” he said, “and chickens and a pig. There’s no reason to ever starve on land like this, even in bad years. We’ll have a bigger house like Carburys’ someday, but only if you make blue curtains for it.”
He looked serious, so she didn’t laugh, but she did agree with a light heart.
On the way back to the soddy, his arm rested around her shoulders as if it belonged there, hers around his waist in the same fashion. Back inside, working on what would be a late dinner, Norah remembered that plans such as the ones he’d shared with her weren’t supposed to ever come true. Once the threat of Van Cleve was gone, Caleb would grow bored and leave. That was her plan.
If she’d been wrong and he stayed, she’d be living with a very bad man until death. She rolled out biscuit dough, cut out the rounds, and began to hum under her breath.
“
C
OME ON PARTNER,
time to plant corn.”
The first months of marriage destroyed Norah’s comfortable ideas about Caleb working the farm while she tended to familiar household chores. Today she moved along the rows of a freshly plowed field with a sack of seed corn over her shoulder, enjoying the scent of freshly turned earth and warm spring air. Plunging her planting stick into the soil up to the mark the way Caleb had demonstrated, she withdrew it, dropped a corn kernel in the hole, closed the hole with her foot, and moved on.
No matter what he had said about knowing and liking the rhythms of the land, Norah had not believed him in the beginning. More and more she understood his feelings were unlike what she’d seen from her father and Joe.
She watched him now as he dropped his own planting stick, picked up a handful of dirt and squeezed it in his fist. He spread it over his palm, poked it with one long finger, and examined it. At last he tipped his hand to one side and let it fall little by little to the ground.
He wasn’t evaluating the moisture content as another man might. He was admiring that dirt the same way he sometimes admired sprouting seeds.
“If you keep that up, I’m going to beat you to the end of this row,” she called out.
“The only way you’ll beat me is by distracting me with the way you look peeking out from under that bonnet at me like that. It’s cheating.”
“You look like a mysterious stranger under your hat brim yourself, so you’re cheating too.”
“Not me. I’m not pretty.”
No, he wasn’t. He was beautiful. Heaven help her. She had to remember he was also bad. Not evil maybe, but very bad. A liar, a thief, a killer.
He would work the land and enjoy besting Mr. Van Cleve. In a year, two at most, farming would bore him, and he would go back to his old life, and after all, that was what she wanted.
Norah left the fields first so she could have supper ready when he came in at sunset. On her way back to the house with a bucket of water from the creek, she stopped to admire her garden.
Caleb had plowed and helped her plant, but only after moving the plot from where it had always been near the house to here by the creek. Why had it never occurred to her or to Joe that taking the garden to the water made life far easier than hauling endless buckets of water to the garden?
Moving the garden was only one of his endless ideas. They’d never plant corn by hand again, he assured her. Next year they’d have a check row planter. He built shelves along the kitchen wall to replace the turned over packing crates she had used and muttered about wells and cisterns, a spring house, and an outdoor fire pit for summer cooking.