Seduced (11 page)

For wanting you.

“I could say the same. What are you two up to?”

“Our seeds and plants,” she said. “We’re seeing what’s still alive.”

He stepped forward, intrigued.

“The roses are dead,” Melody said.

“They’re just sleeping,” Cole said. “You can wake them up.”

“You’re a gardener and a musician?” Melody asked.

And a soldier and murderer…I’m all of these things at the same time and it is tearing me apart.

“We owned an orchard. A large one. I used to know something about making things grow.”

“Used to?” she teased.

His skin grew hot under his collar. Melody’s eyes, surrounded by that yellowing bruise, looked right into him. Right through him.

When he’d crossed the Mississippi, he’d gotten sick in the waves, and his stomach had rushed to his brains and then sunk down to his feet. Only to return, unable to make up its mind. This feeling he got when she looked at him was similar.

Perhaps because he was so unsure of what she was seeing. How ridiculous it would be to ask,
When you look at me, what do you see?

“Cole?” Annie asked, diverting his attention. “What do you recommend we do with the roses?”

Right. Roses.

He glanced back down at the tangled root. One was drier than the other; it might not survive planting, but he had seen worse.

“You need to plant them,” he said. “You won’t be able to keep them alive like that much longer.”

Annie and Melody shared a sad look before Melody said, “Then you will have something to remember us by, come summer. They were our mother’s joy.”

Oh, Christ, why did that make him feel like weeping? He had not wept since word had reached him that Lee had surrendered. But since being in this clearing he'd felt the burn of tears with surprising regularity.

“We will be honored,” he told them.

“Not if they're dead,” Melody said.

“The key,” he said with a sudden smile, “is manure. And lots of water.”

“Finally, we are lucky in our horse shit,” Melody muttered, dry as a bone.

Annie smacked her sister’s arm but he laughed. And between the lack of laughter in his life and her surprising sense of humor, he was helpless and he laughed until tears formed in his eyes.

“Pick out a place,” he said and went into the barn for his own broad shovel and Steven's smaller spade, and then he went around to the far side of the barn, near the rocky outcropping where Steven had started the manure pile.

He scooped up a shovelful and took it out to the women, who had selected spots on either side of the rough porch, near the stone foundation.

“Good choice,” he said.

“We thought in the summer it would smell good,” Melody said. “As well as be beautiful.”

“I think you're right.” With the spade he dug two holes in the turned earth and mixed in the manure. He poured half a bucket of water into each of the holes and waited while Annie and Melody unwrapped all of the burlap that they’d obviously tried to keep damp as they traveled and placed the root balls into the holes.

He covered them up with soil and manure and put more water over them. From the earth came the dark, loamy scent of his childhood and it set loose a hundred memories of walking the orchard with his father. Duke, his dog, at his side.

There were more. Thousands more. Countless.

The drone of bees feasting on the rotting fallen apples, the way they buzzed drunk against his face and hands.

The smell of the flowers at first bloom and Father taking some to tuck in Mother’s steel-gray hair.

The shoulder-breaking work of harvest, Steven complaining all the while.

Samantha with the water bucket and dipper, trying to be a part of the work. Angry when mother kept her away.

“There,” Melody said, coming to her feet. “Thank you very much—”

“What else is in that bag?” he asked. “Your seeds.”

“Beans, corn, strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins—”

“I’ll buy them.”

Melody blinked at him and he supposed he was being slightly alarming. But he was suddenly thinking of Father, and Duke the dog, and the smell of the fog burning off the fields in the morning. And he realized in a terrible, awful rush that the dream he’d thought was dead still had life.

These memories had broken down the doors he tried to keep them behind.

He wanted something to grow and care for and leave behind for the future. And he wanted it ferociously, like a starving man in front of a plate of food.

Hope had returned to him. Because what was planting but the very embodiment of hope? Of faith. Of belief. A shiver ran over his body.

“Not all of them—you will want to have some for your own home. But I will buy some.”

“How many of the seeds do you want?”

“Five dollars’ worth—”

“For seeds?” Melody laughed.

For your future
, he thought.
For mine
.
Is that the price of a soul? Because I’ll pay whatever you want for the damn seeds.

She looked over his head toward the mountains behind him for a long time and he wondered what she was thinking. What were the scales in her head and how did they work?

“How do I even know you have all this money you’ve promised us?” she asked.

“You don’t believe me?”

“It is not personal.” She tugged down her sleeves, as if she were merchant behind her counter. It was . . . attractive, the way she fought for herself. “But I would like this money in advance.”

He nodded, admiring her.

Inside the house, he pulled out his saddlebags and handed her five silver one-dollar coins. It took some effort to pretend he didn’t see her hands shaking as she tucked them into her own bags, but he wanted to give her the privacy of her pride.

They negotiated over the seeds for most of the morning. Annie grew tired of it and left to check on Steven, leaving Melody and Cole to haggle over the tree stump.

“I don’t know that the pumpkins will grow in this soil,” she said.

“I would still like to try.”

“Seems a waste to sell you a seed we both know won’t grow.”

A strand of hair fell across her cheek and he wanted to brush it back.

“Have a little faith,” he whispered.

She shot him an arch look and then looked quickly back down at the seeds. “That, I’m afraid, is a rarer commodity than your brother’s oil.”

“Your family were not farmers?”

“My family might have been, I certainly wasn’t. We had cotton and hay, but Father was a doctor and we raised horses. We had a kitchen garden, but until the war the slaves took care of it. When they left, we did what we could.”

He made a low sound in his throat. “Farming is faith and foresight. And luck.”
And hope. So much goddamned hope
, he thought, sorting through the bean seeds, removing the cracked ones that would not grow. It all came back to him, the routines and rituals. His father had not just been a farmer; he’d been a steward of the land. A caretaker. And he’d passed that on to Cole. “It is faith in the soil, in the weather, in the seed.”

“I would not make a good farmer,” she said, and their eyes caught and he felt a lightning strike of lust. The color on her cheeks indicated she was not immune to it either. “I’m decidedly out of faith.”

“You were the woman who lay down in flowers.”

“The head injury, remember?”

He smiled at her gruff efforts at self-preservation because he understood them so well.

“You can do your part,” he said, and took one of the linen strips that she and Annie had used to bandage Steven and spread it out over a stump. “Prepare the soil. The seed. It feels less like chance when you do that.”

He placed his seeds there, separated into the different fruits and vegetables, and then folded the linen over it before pouring water over the whole thing.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Preparing the seeds,” he said. “Getting them ready.”
Trying to rebuild my faith. Perhaps yours, too
.
If you can lie down in flowers, weep at harmonica music, laugh over honey...then maybe I can hope again.

“I won't be here,” she said. “To see any of this bloom.”

Some inner voice whispered that wasn't true, but he did not know how to listen to it.

“You will have a garden in Denver,” he said.

“We don't have enough money for a tent, much less a house with a garden.” She laughed, but he could see the worry she was trying so hard to banish staining the edges of her smile.

“Do you think we won't help?” he asked, catching her eye. “We will get you a house. Plant you a garden.”

It was a promise, and after a long moment she nodded as if she understood.

“What happens next?” she asked.

And Cole, breathing deep, breathing all the way down into the crippled and withered edges of his lungs for the first time in years, answered, “We wait.”

FOR THE REST of the week they waited. Cole checked his seeds every day, and every day Melody pretended not to be interested, claiming her faith was all gone, but he could see her curiosity for what it was.

“Today?” she asked.

“Not today,” he said.

ENOUGH TIME PASSED and the skin on many of the seeds had lost their wrinkles. The seeds themselves had swollen and split, revealing the tender white flesh of a sprout.

“Today,” he said when he caught her eye. “But first I’m going to prepare the soil.”

He went outside and after a while she followed, with a full rag bag and the beginnings of a rug.

He brought the manure by the shovelful and dumped it over the dirt. He could no longer pretend not to be aware of what was happening to him in this clearing. Day after day, moment by moment, he was finding the man he'd been—battered, bruised, different in so many ways, but underneath the blood and the dirt, he was still recognizable to himself.

He was painfully aware of her watching him, waiting on the edges as if she didn’t know what to do. He could feel her there; her desire to work with him was palpable. Exciting.

Yes
, he thought.
Do this with me.

“I could help you,” Melody said, having abandoned the rug and picked up the spade he’d left on the stump. “If you like.”

He nodded, thrilled to his core. “Thank you.”

She used the spade to mix the manure into the dirt. It was dirty, sweaty work and she did not complain or stop. He handed her his gloves.

“I’m fine,” she said, probably by rote. But he took her bare hand in his, and the softness of it, the
foreignness
of it was like putting his hand in fire. He turned her wrist and touched each of the fingers she held in a fist. One by one, like the petals of a flower at dawn, they opened and revealed the red, raw spots on her palm.

“Please,” he said. His breath moved the hair at her temple, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d been so close to a lady. She smelled of dirt and sweat, and lavender of all things. He wanted to close his eyes and press his nose to her temple, where the sweat of her skin had run into her hair. He wanted to kiss the pale pink of her cheeks, the soft skin behind her ear. The heartbeat that pounded in her neck. He could see it. He actually lifted his hand to touch it before he stopped himself.

“Wear the gloves,” he said and stepped away.

She was beautiful and desirable and strong. He could not keep up with all the ways she was surprising him.

A few hours later, they took a break for water and side meat shoved inside split leftover biscuits. “You are a hard worker,” Cole said, resting his hands on the edge of his spade. Melody blew a long strand of blonde hair out of her face before sending him a wry look.

“Not always.” She took a piece of bacon out of the sandwich to eat separately. “I was the hottest of the hothouse flowers. As spoiled as they come.”

“Seems unlikely from where I sit.”

“Trust me, I . . . wasn’t very nice.”

“I’m not sure you are now.” He winked at her when she looked up at him, ready to be angry.

“And I suppose you used to be funny?” The teasing between them was potent, like his mother’s brandy cherries. His skin prickled with awareness, not just of her, but of himself. Of what he was doing, this careful and cautious easing out of himself. Like a hermit crab walking away from his shell.

“I used to be lighter,” he told her, spinning the shovel under his hands, just so he had something to do. “Easier, I think.” She was looking at him and so he resolutely did not look at her. “My brother would say I was always serious, but it wasn’t always so difficult to be—”
with people. In my own skin
. He stopped, unsure of what he was about to say, much less how to say it.

“I’ve never been able to understand how Annie was able to be so happy,” she said as if she knew what had been in his head. Those thoughts he’d been unable to really make sense of. Not just that she knew, but that she understood. He’d been about to say
happy
. He used to be solemn and serious and slow to joke, but he’d been
happy
.

“Even before the war,” Melody continued. “Lined up against the wall at parties, avoiding the eyes of every man in attendance, it didn’t seem to matter to her. I never understood how, when we were alone, she could laugh, she could make me laugh. She found purpose and happiness in the strangest places. Well, strange to me at the time, since I was fully invested in those parties. My worth was tied directly to my dance card. I admired that about her, how she determined her own way. Refused to be cowed when she didn’t have to be. And during the war I admired her even more. She would not let herself lose faith. Or heart. She still somehow made me laugh.” Melody's sky-blue eyes clouded over, and he knew she had a darkness, too. Inside, perhaps, where other people had happiness, or joy, or fond memories of the person they’d been—the two of them had darkness.

“Why did Jimmy call her mute?”

“When she was younger she was painfully shy. She had a stammer that was only made worse in company.”

“She doesn’t have a stammer now.”

“No. She outgrew it for the most part. Though she was still shy. Until the war, actually. Helping father, I guess, gave her confidence. But when I married Jimmy, he remembered her from before the war. He mocked her stammer, and I think . . . I think she chose not to talk to him. She let him believe whatever he wanted.”