In Need of a Good Wife (27 page)

Bill stood up and rushed across the tavern toward the door. “You saw what he did to Mr. Drake,” he shouted, pointing at the other customers as he went out. “You all saw it.”

Mr. Cartwright straightened his jacket, then pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, removed his hat, and mopped his forehead. “Mrs. Healy,” he said. “I am so sorry for making a mess.”

She laughed. “You cleaned up a bigger mess, as far as I’m concerned.” She bent down to pick up the broken glass.

The mayor wouldn’t look at Clara. A moment passed and she touched his elbow. “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice breaking before the words could make it out.

He nodded once, cleared his throat. “Come on, Sergeant,” he said, whistling for the dog. “Let’s get you a drink.”

After eleven Clara climbed the stairs to her room, but she was restless and not ready to sleep. There was an hour left in this wretched day and still George was nowhere to be seen. She straightened the bedclothes and stacked the mugs next to the stove. Out of habit, Clara checked the teacup that held the Bixby fortune, as she had come, wryly, to think of it. All the money was still there; in fact, there seemed to be a little more than last time. George was to be counted on after all.

Speaking of George, his aroma was strong off the shirt he had worn to work the previous day. Clara took it, along with a stiff set of his underclothes and her own spare shift, down to the tavern kitchen to soak them while she prepared a cup of tea. She boiled the tub of water, then shook each article out before plunging it in with the dissolving flakes of soap. She grasped George’s shirt, but something hard in the breast pocket stopped her from dunking it in the tub. She felt around the object with her fingers, then slid them inside the pocket to retrieve it and stared, openmouthed, at what she found.

The queen of diamonds stared back at Clara. So the sheriff’s visit, or Jeremiah Drake’s bullying, was not to be the worst news of the day. For at least in the matter of this investigation and trial, there was hope, however small, that things would turn out all right. In the matter of George’s gambling, however, Clara knew with absolute certainty that he would ruin them. Where he had gone to find a game was anyone’s guess; he couldn’t have done it right under her nose at Mrs. Healy’s, but there were always other towns, other taverns. The extra money in the teacup showed that he had won a hand or two—cheated, it seemed, from the card hidden in his shirt—but eventually he would lose. And then he would go on losing. Just like before.

Four days after he first introduced himself to Rowena, Tomas arrived back at the soddy with another man and a wagon full of wood. Rowena heard their conversation and laughter as they came up the path. Daniel tipped his hat to them as he left for the shop. The children scurried ahead of him on their way to school.

Daniel’s words about how the people in Destination had broken from the constraints of New York society had struck a chord with her. Rowena could see that, for someone like her, Nebraska really did offer the chance to forge her own path, to leave behind the failures and embarrassments of the past. The last few years clawing to keep her head above water with Eliza Rourke and her ilk had been exhausting. What was it all for, really? Rowena decided she would talk to Daniel soon about bringing her father west to live with them. If only she could have him near and care for him in his final years, she thought maybe she could be happy here.

Rowena felt her heart was tenderer toward Tomas too, now that she knew they both belonged to the same mournful club. She was determined to begin again with him.

But Tomas did not knock on the door. He and the man went to the spot behind the house that Rowena had shown him and began work. She watched from the window over the sink, careful to stand back far enough from the curtain to be invisible in the dim light of the room. Tomas wore the same clothes as the day they met but removed his jacket as he began and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. The boots still gleamed. His companion wore a worker’s rough clothing, which emphasized just what Tomas had hoped to communicate, that he was bound for greater things than this labor, that he was a man of authority and position. Not once did he glance up at the kitchen window.

By afternoon they had completed the two sets of walls, filled the space between them with straw, and begun construction on the roof. Rowena heaped two plates with chicken and potatoes and poured two mugs full of cool tea from the pitcher she kept under the sink. She waited as long as she could stand it, hoping that Tomas would be the one to ask first for food so that she did not have to lose the upper hand, but he did not stop his work until the sun was well west of the peak of the sky. When she worried, finally, that they would work themselves sick, she opened the kitchen door and called to them.

“Gentlemen, I have some dinner for you.” She held up the plates so they could see them. Tomas braced his weight against his knee and sawed into a piece of wood. The other carpenter threw down his hammer and jogged for the door. Rowena had intended for them to come inside and sit at the table, but the man reached out to take the plates from her.

“Don’t you want to get out of the heat for a while?”

He glanced back at Tomas. “He will not.”

“Well, why ever not?” Rowena called to him. “Mr. Skala? Please come inside.”

Tomas continued sawing. “I not hungry.”

Rowena shook her head, then looked back at the other carpenter, whose eyes were on the plate. “Well, you’re very welcome, if you want to eat.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He followed her inside and sat down at the table, taking off his hat and placing it on the seat of the chair beside him. He wiped his brow with his sleeve, then picked up one of the mugs of tea and drained it in a single gulp.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Radek.”

“Well, Mr. Radek,” she said. “Would you like to wash up first?”

He colored. “Ah, please forgive.” He pushed back his chair and came to the sink, where he lathered his hands and used the cloth to wipe his face and neck with water from the bowl she reserved it in to wash the dishes. The water turned redbrown from the prairie dust. Radek was taller and broader than Tomas, and coarse the way she imagined most Bohemians must be. She suspected he was a young man, but his skin was leathery from so much time outdoors.

As he sat back down at the table and began to bolt the food, Rowena busied herself at the sink. An awkward silence filled the room and she couldn’t bear it. She tried to make conversation.

“Have you known Mr. Skala a long time?” she asked.

Radek nodded, though he could not speak with his mouth full of potatoes. His fork scraped the first plate clean and he pulled Tomas’s plate toward him and started in on it. “My sister being his wife,” he said, then searched for the word. “
Was
being.”

Rowena turned to face him. “My husband told me what happened to Mrs. Skala and Mr. Skala’s parents. I am so sorry to hear of it.”

Radek nodded. “I thank you.”

She hesitated, not sure what she meant to ask. She supposed she felt a little troubled that Tomas didn’t seem bereaved in the way she thought he should, or must. “Mr. Skala seems to be bearing up under it all right.”

Radek nodded. “I guess his thinking being that life is for the living.”

After Radek finished eating he went back outside and took up his tools. The men finished hammering the wood frame as the children, filthy from hours playing in the dusty fields behind the church, rumbled into the house, shoving and shouting and asking for their supper. Tomas and Radek threw all their tools and the leftover wood in the cart and began their slow amble home.

Rowena stood at the front door watching them go. The sun was low and intensely orange, like the round head of a marigold. It seemed almost scented with a marigold’s perfume, though nothing was blooming in this dry place. Tomas squinted into the sun and dust, his posture weary but relaxed. He seemed to know something that Rowena has been trying for years to find out, but she feared he wouldn’t tell her, even if she asked. She wanted to call out
Thank you
or
Good afternoon
, but her voice stuck in her throat like a thorn.

* * *

When Daniel and the children left after breakfast the next day, the house was finally quiet again. Rowena moved through her morning routine in a steady, deliberate way. She washed each dish carefully and lined them up to drain next to the sink. She opened the small window that looked out on the lane, then closed it again when a cloud of dust coughed into the room. It was even hotter today than it had been the day before, and the sky was clear and pale, a bleached-out blue, not a drop of rain in sight.

When she had done everything she could possibly do to pass the time, Rowena sat down, restless and irritable. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning. When the image of Clara Bixby appeared in her mind, Rowena tried not to panic. She let the apparition stand there, Miss Bixby in that drab suit she seemed to think was flattering, leaning against the post on the tavern porch. In the vision she seemed fine. Rowena tried to let her imagination convince her that nothing she had said to Mr. Albright had come to anything. Rowena even felt a little relief, though deep down she knew she had no right to it.

She had come to understand over the last year or so that her temper worked on a kind of cycle, like hunger. First there was the building desire, the planning, the preparation. Then she ate the meal. And for a while she was satisfied, until the desire began again to build. So far she had been following a code that seemed, at least to her, to be consistent—she never set her anger on anyone who didn’t have it coming. Mrs. Channing, for example, really had only nefarious aims in the world. Eliza Rourke too. There was no call for guilt, even if the things Rowena said and did to them were cruel. And Rowena had never lied. Until now. This matter with Mr. Albright was new. Her conscience plucked at her.

She stood up. It was no use thinking this way. The house was too quiet—that was all. She had become accustomed to the children’s commotion. Her mind was playing a trick on her, drumming up this guilt. She had to remember what Clara had done, how she had turned Rowena’s life upside down, deceived her. That was the thing to focus on. There was no question—she had been wronged.

She sighed. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Rowena closed her eyes and tried to imagine what her life would be like if she had never come here, if Richard never had died. She reversed the events in the years since the war, as if she were flipping back the pages of a book, and took herself back to the place of waiting for him to return, back to the place where there was still hope. In her mind’s eye, she put herself in the armchair in the parlor of her father’s row house, spread Richard’s letter open in her hands. This was a day back before the point where her life diverged in such an unexpected direction, the day
before
she got the bad news. She was still Rowena Moore then, just as frivolous as she pleased, her thoughts foamy with lace and silk and perhaps, in a year or two, a nursery in the upstairs bedroom that would make her friends green with jealousy. A little blond son in her grandmother’s cradle. Oh, how delicious it would be to have a party to show him off !

Richard would come to the door, weary, filthy, missing a finger or a hand or a few teeth. Rowena felt herself nodding her head at the vision, lingering over the details to make it as real as she could. From the parlor window she spied him making his slow way up the walk. And an ache thrummed in her chest and she fell into the posture of prayer as she heard his tired feet scrape up the steps. It seemed essential that she not run to him right away but that she keep on praying,
thank you
thank you thank you thank you
crackling on her lips. If only she had been allowed to feel that gratitude, Rowena thought, she could have been so much better, could have
done
better in the world. If God had allowed Richard to come home to her, she would have been the most adoring, serene, devoted wife who ever had walked the earth. But God had not allowed it.

No
, she urged herself.
Not yet.
She couldn’t return yet to the present day, to the sod house in Nebraska. Keeping her eyes closed, Rowena pulled Richard’s letter from the top of her corset. She put her hand out in front of her and groped, blindly, across the kitchen and out the door, the sun bright against her closed lids. The hot air rasped into her lungs, the smell of iron in the dust. She had a notion of getting to the chicken house, before she unfolded the letter and opened her eyes. But she couldn’t wait. With careful fingertips she unfolded it and sat down on the ground. Finally, when she was sure the letter was the first thing she would see, she opened her eyes.

But it didn’t work. She didn’t believe the fiction in her mind. The letter was upside down, the words inverted, wrong. Richard was still dead.

She was sitting in that strange pose when Tomas walked up behind her. “Rowena, are you well?”

Her eyes darted up to him.

“Bad news?”

She shook her head. “What are you doing here?”

“I leave my saw. What is this you read, Rowena?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “
Why
won’t you call me Mrs. Gibson?”

“Ah, me,” he said. “I apologize for this, the other day.”

She shook her head.

He looked at her hands, then sat down on the ground beside her. “This is letter? Who send you?”

Rowena continued to stare at the paper. “My husband.”

Tomas raised his eyebrows and gave a surprised laugh. “He write you when you in kitchen, he at butcher shop?”

Rowena shook her head. “Not that husband. My
late
husband, the one who died in the war.”

Tomas gave her a confused look.

“My fi
rst
love. My only love.”

“But war end …” Tomas counted on his fingers. “ … two years past.”

Rowena nodded.

“And now you marry Mr. Gibson, but still your heart breaking?”