I Shall Be Near to You (2 page)

But then I think of his hand on my arm, how he stood me up, saying, ‘You go home, Rosetta,’ his blue eyes a surprise with that dark hair, and him holding out my pail with four fish back in it but cleaned and gutted too, and how I listened when he said, ‘You go home now.’

‘T
HERE
’
S MORE SEWING
and mending than Betsy and I can get to,’ Mama says, settling down Papa’s plate of eggs.

Papa looks up at Mama ’cause he knows I want no part in a sewing circle, but she has already turned back to the popping eggs. Then he looks at me. I shake my head, begging him to take me with him. There has always been Mama’s world inside, and Papa’s world out there, and me toeing the path between.

He shrugs, telling me he ain’t up for a fight. ‘Course,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to fix the North gate, since that fool horse kicked through it. But I suppose I can get it hung without my farmhand.’

‘Well,’ Mama says, sliding my plate in front of me, ‘I would be grateful for the help.’

After breakfast, Mama sets me to peeling and chopping potatoes for the supper soup, and when that is done we all sit down around the woodstove with the sewing. Mama is still trying to teach me about being a good farm wife and Winter is the best time for women’s work, but that don’t mean I want to be kept inside with her and Betsy, pricking my fingers and drawing beads of blood.

All Summer Jeremiah helped us bring our hay in, telling Papa he knew farmhands were scarce, and I thought it was a good thing, him seeing me be Papa’s right hand, him knowing I could do what needs doing. But now I am stuck inside mending and he hasn’t come and I ain’t so sure.

The skirt I am holding slips down to the floor and I can’t sit another second. I stab my needle into the pincushion and stand up. Betsy giggles when Mama asks me, ‘What is in your bonnet?’ but I just let her question fall like the curtain I keep pulling back and make for the door, banging on the way out.

I am off the stoop and across the yard, moving fast as I can through the snow, glad to escape Mama and Betsy. Chickens flap and squawk out of my way because they know better. At the barn, my hand stops on the rough cold metal handle of its sliding door. I can’t believe the voices coming from inside.

‘It’s good wages, Sir,’ Jeremiah says, and my hand won’t move on the handle, not for all the world, no matter how fast my heart pounds, not before I know why he’s come. ‘A hundred and fifty dollars for joining plus regular pay after.’

‘Seems to me there’s a damn sight more important things than money,’ Papa says, high and mighty like he knows best.

‘Well, Sir’—Jeremiah uses his polite voice—‘a man can’t live without money. I aim to buy us a farm, supposing you agree. The Army’s paying.’

I want to laugh to hear him say
us
after waiting two days. After I’ve been convincing myself I was wrongheaded for all my wishes about Jeremiah.

‘I’m sure Rosetta’ll have something to say about that,’ Papa says. ‘She knows every farm in this valley.’

‘We’ve got ideas, Sir. Rosetta’s the only girl I ever met who cares about farming the same as me.’

It’s like Papa don’t hear Jeremiah talking proud about me. He asks, ‘You ain’t got the money to support a wife, why you aiming to get yourself one?’

There’s a funny strangling sound before Jeremiah says, ‘It was mostly Rosetta’s idea, Sir, getting married now. Before—’

Whatever tool Papa’s working on fixing clatters to the ground. He’s laughing. ‘Well, don’t she just beat all. Been near to the death of her Mama, but that girl’s the best farmhand I ever had. Can’t imagine hiring a better one, but I suppose if it’s her idea I can’t say no.’

‘Thank you, Sir.’

Hearing how Jeremiah has spoken for me, I lose track of my feet and slip right there on the icy snow, clutching at the barn door handle to keep from falling.

There’s footsteps in the hay and I scramble, running to look like I’ve
come straight from the house, throwing off my dirty apron and shoving it beneath the lilacs that are no more than sticks jutting straight up out of the snow.

I skid on the stoop’s frosted planks as the barn door opens. Out walks Papa, clapping his hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. Jeremiah is taller than Papa and his legs don’t look so spindly no more. He is wearing his Sunday best to come calling, nicer than anything my Papa has ever worn, but it don’t hide how his arms are thicker than Papa’s.

‘Rosetta,’ Papa calls when he sees me shivering. ‘Looks like you got yourself a nice young man here, says you’re after marrying him and now he’s trying to make it right by asking my permission.’

When he climbs the steps, I tell him what I told Jeremiah, the thing he will understand most, not all the things I’m feeling.

‘I don’t want to be no spinster, Papa. And if he goes off—’

Papa squints. Then his hand is on my head, messing my hair, and he says, ‘Then I guess we might as well tell your Mama, ease her mind on one account anyway.’ He points at Jeremiah, opening the kitchen workroom door. ‘You stay for dinner.’

It is warm inside and we three squeeze in among the butter churn and the washtub and Mama’s spinning wheel. Jeremiah’s heat is behind me and I turn to smile at him, his ears looking wind-chapped when he says he’ll stay.

‘I imagine you two got things to be discussing, now you’re fixed on each other,’ Papa says. He sits down on the bench and pulls off his work boots, the soles almost worn through. ‘How about I’ll head in, get Mama working on another plate for supper, and you two can sit right here until it’s ready?’

I nod. Right before he goes in the door, he turns back and adds, with a shrug and a glint in his eye, ‘But then, you can’t be upset if it turns out I can’t keep the news to myself.’

After Papa goes, we stand as close as we can get, looking everywhere but each other, like we are strangers, like there must be some new way of talking now everything is settled between us but we don’t have the knack
of it yet. When Papa’s voice comes through the wall, rumbling too low to make out the words, Mama trills back like a bird and I don’t need to hear what she’s saying.

‘She’s pleased,’ I say, and look at Jeremiah full on.

‘And what about you?’ he asks, a smile starting. ‘You pleased too?’

I throw my arms right around him then, squeezing tight.

‘What took you so long?’ I ask, my ear to his chest, his heart pounding as loud as mine.

‘That’s all you got to say?’ he says, and cocks his head to look down at me, the smile gone.

‘I thought you weren’t coming! I been waiting for near on three days now and—’

‘You counting Sunday?’

I draw back. ‘Course I’m counting Sunday. You didn’t ask my Papa on Sunday, did you? Made me wait most the day Sunday, all day Monday, and now it’s supper on Tuesday. That seems like something close to three days from my way of thinking.’ Without my telling it, my hand has pulled free and got itself on my hip.

‘It ain’t so simple as just asking, Rosetta.’ He reaches out, tickling at my hip, working to gather my hand back into his.

‘No?’ I say, and let him pry my fingers loose, closing them in his warm ones.

‘No. There’s arrangements that have got to be made. Like where we’re going to live. How soon we can be living there. Getting Pastor Bowers’ permission. I’ve been making arrangements these past two days.’

I ain’t really thought about a thing except what I want, but it ain’t for him to know that.

‘So when are we getting married?’

‘Unh-uh.’ He shakes his head. ‘You ain’t answered my question, I ain’t answering yours.’

‘What question?’

‘I asked if you was pleased.’

‘Course I’m pleased! You think I’d be mad if I wasn’t pleased?’

‘You don’t make a lick of sense,’ he says, but he is smiling now and he takes a step closer to me.

I move into the circle his arms make. ‘You ain’t told me how soon we’re getting married.’

‘Pastor Bowers said he could marry us the Sunday after next,’ he says into my hair.

‘And where are we going to live?’

‘On my family’s farm,’ he says. ‘We’ve got my Ma and Pa’s Little House, the one Pa built first.’

‘We get our own place?’

‘Course. I ain’t bringing no new wife into my parents’ house.’

‘But—even when you’re—’ I can’t finish saying it.

‘Even when I’m away. You can live there. It’s ours. ’Til we get our own farm,’ he whispers, and kisses my forehead. It is a different kiss altogether from the one at the creek, ’til he cups my cheek in his hand and I raise my mouth to his. Only then Betsy bangs through the door and yells for supper like we ain’t standing right in front of her.

L
ATER, AT SUPPER
, after Mama apologizes for not having something more special than beef soup and bread, she tells how Papa, only he was the farmhand then, showed up, knocking on Granpappy’s door. How she pretended not to take notice of him, but she remembers him turning his hat round and round like a wagon wheel in his hand.

‘Oh, but he was funny looking!’ Mama laughs, running her hand down the back of Papa’s head, smoothing his hair. ‘Those raggedy clothes and his hair sticking every which way! Looked more like a scarecrow than a man. And him telling Granpappy what a good worker he was!’

Mama don’t spy it, but Papa looks up from his bowl to shake his head.

‘Woman! I don’t know what you see in this story. There ain’t nothing to it. The trick to winning a woman’s love,’ he says, looking at Jeremiah, ‘is to work for it.’ And then he laughs and reaches his arm to hook round Mama’s waist from where he sits next to her.

She swats at him but he don’t care because she is smiling.

He puts his hands out and says, ‘Girls, don’t ever settle for a man who won’t labor for love.’

‘B
ETSY, YOU FETCH
the double wedding ring quilt.’

‘But Mama!’ Betsy whines, like she’s been counting things as hers and thinking on what might be going in her own hope chest someday.

‘You hush now. Soon as we get Rosetta’s chest filled, we can start working on another quilt for yours. Lord knows there’s scraps of fabric waiting, and now you can have some of Rosetta’s wedding fabric pieced in.’

Betsy pouts, but she brings the quilt from our room and then sits herself down. I ain’t had much use for Betsy since she started promenading with Carrie Jewett and all the other town girls. The giggling when Carrie told Betsy she’d better not let any more of me rub off on her was worse than anything Eli Snyder ever done. Betsy used to hold my hand walking to school, used to call me her best friend besides Tillie Nilsson. She ain’t bad, my sister, she just aims to please folks in a way I’ve never seen the sense in doing.

I reach for a pillow slip, but Betsy gets it first.

‘Rosetta ain’t filling my hope chest,’ she says, staring down at the hem, but Mama pretends she don’t hear.

Mama has my wedding dress on her lap, hiding the new knot of thread in the lining, careful with even the smallest thing.

She says, ‘This can be your something blue. And besides, you always look prettiest when you wear this shade,’ and I almost jump at how warm her words are.

Papa shoulders his way through the door, his arms full of wood. After he builds up the fire, he sets the lantern on the table between his and Mama’s chairs.

‘And what shall I read tonight, my ladies?’ Papa winks at Mama before taking the Bible from the mantel to read Scriptures for her like he always does.

Mama pauses and then says, ‘The Book of Ruth, I think.’

‘The Book of Ruth? You aiming to teach our girls about getting widowed?’

‘Of course not!’ Mama’s sharp voice comes back, and then she looks at me and her face softens. ‘But Ruth tells us how a marriage makes new bonds, don’t you think?’

‘Making new bonds doesn’t mean you have to break the old ones,’ Papa says, his eyes on me. He looks back at Mama. ‘Seems if you’re looking for marriage advice from the Lord, other books got more instruction than Ruth.’

‘Just read Ruth,’ Mama says, poking her needle into the fabric.

Papa sighs and thumbs to the right place. ‘Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem went to sojourn in the country …’

Hearing Papa’s molasses voice fill the room, I almost start missing home already, until Betsy reaches across me for more thread and ain’t careful about her elbow in my side.

CHAPTER
2

FEBRUARY 3, 1862

Bundled up in the wagon, Betsy chatters on about how she wouldn’t want a Winter wedding, how she would want wildflowers for her bouquet and a picnic on the church grass. I never cared to think on such things, not before now. I am about to tell her how Winter is best for a farm wedding when she says, ‘After seeing how pretty you look, ain’t nobody can ever get married in blue in Flat Creek again!’ and Mama turns to smile at the both of us, the same smile as when she saw my reflection in her looking glass, tears brimming to see me looking how she’s always said I ought, almost handsome with my hair still fresh-washed, the freckles from Summer almost faded.

It is too cold in the churchyard to be milling with folks waiting for the start of Sunday services, and anyway we ain’t got time for socializing. Papa keeps hold of my arm and Mama and Betsy lead the way, walking up the steps to the church door. I don’t like feeling as if people are seeing good in me for the first time now I’ve got my fancy dress the color of bluebells and my hair done up in twists at the back and curls hanging down at the sides.

Inside it is quiet and white, the Winter sun beaming in long shafts through the windows, lighting the walnut pews. We walk right to the front and Mama slides into the first one. I don’t dare look for Jeremiah, not with the whole congregation watching. Preacher Bowers takes the pulpit and I ain’t ever been keen on his sermons before, but with all those eyes on me for once I am glad for anything to keep my mind busy.

‘At this time of great discord in our nation,’ he says, his voice grave and slow, ‘when so many of our men are battling so far away from their earthly homes, we can draw wisdom and comfort from remembering Eden and Heaven, our first and last homes, the purest examples of harmony and perfection …’