Rose (8 page)

“What for? The house is a near ruin. The land has been fought over until I doubt there’s a barn, fence, or tree left standing. This is our home now. You have to learn to accept that.”

“I can’t.”

“You give yourself too many battles to fight, Jeff. Come on. Rose is waiting for the water.”

“I’m going to need someone to help me with the heavy work around here,” Rose announced. The men were almost through with breakfast. They were full of ham and gravy and grits and milk. Too contented to get upset. Yet.

“What work?” Zac asked, his black eyes apprehensive.

“Someone needs to build a coop for the chickens. I’m surprised the coyotes haven’t gotten them all.”

“Would have if the dogs didn’t keep them off,” Monty said.

“I need a garden dug,” Rose continued. “There’s plenty of time to plant corn, potatoes, beans, peas, squash, strawberries—”

“I hate squash,” Zac informed her.

“—tomatoes, and pumpkins. I’d also like some fruit, nuts,
and berries if there are any trees around here. I can make jam.”

“We have berries along the creeks,” Monty said. “Pecan trees, too.”

“Zac and Tyler can help with that,” George said.

“I don’t see why I have to go berry hunting,” Tyler objected.

“What about meat?” Rose asked. “Do you buy it, grow it, or kill it yourselves?”

“Why don’t you stay home today?” Monty suggested to George. “That’ll give you plenty of time to discuss all the things she wants done.”

“You’re just trying to get out of doing it yourself,” George said.

“Sure he is,” Hen said, “but it’s a good suggestion anyway. We can’t get much done over the breakfast table. And we’re too tired at night.”

“Okay, but I mean to give you two all the worst chores.”

“Can’t,” Monty said with his most irresistible smile. “I can’t use an ax without cutting myself, and I can’t use a hammer without hitting my thumb.”

“You can milk the cow,” Zac suggested. “She don’t care how clumsy you are.”

Zac dived behind George when Monty made a grab for him.

“I’ll be expecting roast turkey tonight,” Monty reminded Rose as he and Hen got ready to leave. “I like it with stuffing and lots of gravy.”

“You’ll get what I can fix,” Rose informed him.

“See if you can find me some eggs,” she told Zac when he tried to leave with the twins.

“I don’t collect the eggs until near ’bout dinner,” he informed her.

“I used all the eggs I had for breakfast, and I need more for the stuffing. I have to start the turkeys early.”

“Those stupid old hens ain’t laid anything yet,” he protested.

“Haven’t,”
George corrected him, “and you’ll never know until you look. Now get going.”

“When I get big, I ain’t never going to look for eggs,” he swore.

“I don’t blame you,” George commiserated. “Now I’m going to heat water to scald the turkeys. I want you back with those eggs before we finish plucking them.”

Pretending to look for the egg basket, Zac hung back after George left. “I’m going to New Orleans when I grow up,” he announced in a whisper, as though he were telling Rose an important secret.

“My father used to tell me it was the most beautiful city he’d ever visited,” she said. “If you want to help George pluck the turkeys, I’ll look for the eggs.”

“I’m the only one who knows where they hide their nests,” he said, not without an element of pride.

“I can learn.”

“A girl can’t go all those places. You’d get dirty.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Yes, you would. Girls hate dirt worse than anything.”

“I hope you won’t leave for New Orleans before I learn where all the nests are.”

“You done told George you wanted a chicken coop. All you’ll have to do is look inside.”

“I guess I forgot. You’d better get the eggs quick before I forget what I wanted them for.”

“You didn’t forget nothing,” Zac said. “You’re just trying to make me feel better about being little and having everybody tell me what to do. George does it, too.”

“I think that’s nice, don’t you?”

“I suppose so, but I don’t need no special looking after. I’m going to tell him to stop.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why?”

“Well, big brothers like to have somebody to take care of. You’d take away all his fun if you didn’t let him look after you.”

“Monty and Hen don’t do it. Neither does Jeff.”

“Of course not. Middle brothers are supposed to plague you. Your biggest brother protects you. It’s written in the big-brother book they give little boys when they’re born.”

“I didn’t get no book.”

“Little brothers don’t get one.”

“I think that’s rotten.”

“Girls don’t get one either.”

“I think that’s rotten, too.”

“So do I, but that’s how things are. Now I have to help George with the turkeys, so you’d better look for those eggs. I bet I’ll have the dressing ready before you get back.”

“No, you won’t,” Zac said, and raced from the room.

“He’s a scamp,” Rose remarked to George as she came out of the house.

“He’s the only one Pa and the war didn’t ruin,” George said. “At least I don’t think he’s ruined.”

“I don’t understand,” Rose said.

“Never mind. The water’s hot. Want to hand me one of those turkeys?”

“Do the boys bring home wild game often?” Rose asked. She took the turkeys down from the hook, weighing each carefully with her eye and the pull on her hand.

“I don’t really know. It probably depended on what Tyler could do with the meat. We could try to get more if you like.”

“It would help. A diet of bacon and dried beef can get monotonous.”

George dipped the turkey in the pot long enough for the scalding water to loosen the feathers. Then he handed the dripping bird to Rose. He dipped a second bird, then tackled it himself.

“I want to save everything but the wing and tail feathers,” Rose said, pointing to a woven basket she had brought with her from the kitchen. “I plan to make some more pillows.”

“Are you always thinking about something practical?” George asked.

“That’s what you pay me for.”

“I thought women liked to dream.”

“Some might, but I hate dreaming about things I can’t have. It makes me irritable.”

“But don’t you think about them in spite of knowing better?”

“Of course,” Rose said. She tossed a handful of wet feathers into the bucket with a little more energy than necessary. “But as soon as that happens, I make myself concentrate on something else until I forget.”

“How old are you?”

“You didn’t ask that before you hired me. Why do you want to know now?”

“Curiosity, I guess. I’d say you were twenty, still young enough to indulge in all sorts of dreams. And pretty enough to have a hope they might come true.”

Rose tugged at a handful of stubborn wing feathers. They held tight. She was forced to pull them out one at a time. Even then she had to pull hard.

“I used to daydream,” Rose admitted, “before the war. The men looked so handsome in their uniforms it was hard not to make up stories about them. But all that ended when my father decided to fight for the Union.”

Rose remembered with painful vividness how she felt when her father told her of his decision. It had destroyed her world. She respected his allegiance to the army which had given him his career, as well as his belief that the Union should never be divided, but he couldn’t seem to appreciate that it would alienate her from the people she had grown up with.

He never understood her feeling for Texas. She guessed he was too much a son of New England for that.

He had been so certain he would be able to set everything aright after the war. Well, he wasn’t around to see what happened or to fix it.

But then he’d never been around.

“The good people of Austin soon made it clear that neither they nor their sons would be part of my dreams.”

She finished plucking her turkey. Holding it by its neck and feet, she held it over the low flames to singe the hairs. Then dipping it into a bucket of clean water, she began to scrape the skin clean.

“As things got worse, I found myself having nightmares about the terrible things that could happen to me.”

“Didn’t you ever dream of some young soldier coming to save you?”

“Of course I did. My mother once read me a story about an English knight who slew a terrible dragon to save a princess. Of course I knew it was all make-believe, but when things were at their worst, I would imagine him coming to save me.” She paused in her work and looked at George. “The knight was named St. George. You can’t imagine what a shock it gave me, after you’d beaten up Luke, to learn your name was George.”

George laughed. “St. George rescuing Princess Rose.”

Rose smiled a little sheepishly. “Something like that.”

George handed her his plucked turkey to singe and clean. He dipped the last turkey into the still scalding water and started to remove the feathers.

“Is that why you accepted this job, to get away from Austin?”

“Yes.” Rose didn’t tell him that was only part of the reason.

“Weren’t you worried about what might happen after you got here? I did say seven men.”

“I knew you’d protect me.”

“How could you know that?” George asked, surprised.

“I could tell the minute you stepped into the Bon Ton.”

“How?” asked George, stunned that anyone could feel they knew him so well after just one look.

“I don’t know, but a woman can always tell.”

George wasn’t sure he liked being so transparent. It was hard to defend yourself when other people could read you so easily, and he had too many secrets he wanted to keep.

“What else can a woman tell?”

“When it’s time to stop talking,” Rose said with a smile that
rocked George off balance. “I just told Zac that girls don’t get a book when they’re born, but they do. They get one about boys. And the first thing it tells you, right on the first page, is not to tell everything you know. Hand me that last turkey. If I don’t get them cleaned, I’ll never have the stuffing started before Zac gets back. And he won’t let me forget it.”

“You don’t have to spend so much time with him,” George said. “He can be an awful nuisance.”

“I don’t mind. Besides, he makes me laugh. It’s a nice break from all the fussing around here.”

Rose hadn’t meant to say that. She had made a promise to herself to stop criticizing so much.

“I’m sorry. I guess we don’t see it. You’d have to have known our father to understand. Monty’s not half so bad.”

Rose felt chastised.

It turned out to be one of the busiest days of George’s life. While Rose dressed the turkeys, prepared the giblets for gravy, and mixed the stuffing, he and Zac beat the blankets, turned the mattresses, took up the rugs, and washed the bedroom floor. Then he chose and cleared a site for the chicken coop. After that he cut four posts and set them in the ground to form the corners of the coop. Next he cut some saplings from the creek bank, dressed the trunks, and built the roosts. Then taking a pencil and making a rough sketch, he figured out how much lumber he would need for the roof and sides.

Later he and Rose walked over every foot of ground within a half mile of the house trying to decide on the best place to locate the garden. Tyler had placed his garden on top of the ridge. It was safe from floods, but the ground was hard and dry and the crops exposed to the wind. Rose meant to plant her garden in the rich soil of the creek’s floodplain.

They came upon Mrs. Randolph’s grave in a small grove of live oaks just beyond the well. Only her name and the date of her death were carved into the weathered board that marked her final resting place.

“I mean to carry her back to Virginia someday,” George said. “I think she lost her will to live when she had to come out here.”

Rose could only wonder how the mother of seven such vital, vigorous sons could give up on life. Rose would give almost anything to have such sons. And she would fight to her last breath to see them grow to manhood.

But it wasn’t fair to judge Mrs. Randolph. There was so much Rose didn’t know about the family. Besides, any woman who could inspire her children to wallpaper a log cabin deserved her respect.

By the time she and George had spent more than an hour deciding what they wanted to plant, how many rows they needed, and how many seeds they required, it was late afternoon. The sheets were dry, so George carried the mattresses inside so Rose could make up the beds. Then while Zac looked for the eggs a second time that day, George tried to milk the cow. The cow might not have minded clumsy, but she minded George. Zac finished the milking while George split wood for the stove.

“I think it would have been easier to go with the boys,” George said as he sank into his chair at the head of the table. Rose was fixing dinner. He wasn’t especially hungry, but the smell of roast turkey was enough to tempt even the most lethargic appetite.

“There are still a lot of things around here I can’t do by myself,” Rose said.

“Make a list, and we’ll start working our way through,” George told her, but without much enthusiasm.

He wasn’t thinking about chores. He was thinking about Rose. It had been years since he had been around a woman for more than a few minutes. He couldn’t remember their effect on him in any great detail, but he knew it was nothing like his reaction to Rose.

He felt no chivalrous desire to protect her from bandits or rustlers. He wanted to take her to his bed and make love to
her until he didn’t feel this burning inside his loins. He wanted to lose himself in her sweetness until he stopped having the queasy feeling all over when she brushed against him. He wanted to bury himself in her body until he was certain he would never want a woman this badly again.

He also felt desperate to break the hold she had on him.

He wanted to be free of any ties that would keep him from going where he wanted, doing what he liked, being what he wanted to be. He didn’t want to endure the same difficulties and frustrations his father had. True, his father had been weak and selfish, but George had watched unending demands wear at him until he lost his control, his dignity, his self-respect.