"No, I suppose he can't," she said, trying to keep the smile from her face. She liked Neil, liked the way he looked at Spencer as if the man had the sun and the moon on the end of a harness.
"He doesn't know a cock from a hen, but I gotta say he's trying."
She positioned herself in front of the mirror where she could unfasten her hair and still watch Spencer's face at the same time. "No one's got your head under the oxen's hoof, Spence. You don't have to say anything nice about the boy."
"You gonna get ready for bed now?" he asked her, shifting his weight to get a clearer view of her face. At least she thought it was her face, but his eyes could surely be roving lower than that.
"Thought I'd just put on my nightclothes before I checked on the children one last time." She took a brush to her hair and watched his eyes follow it hungrily as it smoothed her curls.
"Who was it decided that women ought to put their hair up in those tight little buns?" he asked.
"You want to brush it?" she asked, extending the brush toward Spencer. He backed away as if she were the serpent and her hairbrush the apple of knowledge. He was nearly against the door before he spoke.
"I think I'll check on the children, Olivia. You go on and get into bed."
So he was anxious, too. Relief flooded her.
"Don't expect much from Louisa. Just make sure the lamps are out and josie has enough blankets. She kicks them off if you don't tuck them in."
"All right," he said, still watching her bedtime preparations, the hair over her shoulder, which she decided at that moment to leave unbraided.
"And take my pillow and give it to Neil. I don't expect that couch is all that comfortable after all these years." Her hair was fully brushed and untangled, but while she had her husband mesmerized, she wouldn't stop.
"I'll be a while," he said finally, turning away from her and putting a hand on the latch. "Don't wait up."
"I'm not that tired," she said. "If you want to . . . talk."
His, head came slowly over his shoulder as if he didn't really want to take another look at her but couldn't help himself. She opened the shirt button at her neck and then the one just under it.
"I'm real tired, Liv," he said. She opened a third button and he groaned. "Tireder than you know."
Since the night she had admitted enjoying their time together he had avoided her like a thornbush in bloom, but tonight he was losing the battle with whatever it was that was keeping him away. She slipped behind the screen and eased one arm out of her sleeve. She put the naked arm on the edge of the screen for balance, then dipped her head around the blind to look at her husband.
His suspenders were hanging limply at his hips. The collar to his workshirt lay open, the top two buttons undone. Maybe if he wasn't so swooning handsome, she thought. Maybe if the curls of hair on his chest didn't catch the light and glisten. Maybe if there wasn't a sadness that clouded his face and begged for her to kiss it away. Maybe then her chest wouldn't tighten at the very sight of him and she wouldn't want to lay beneath him again.
And maybe pigs were growing wings and flying south for the winter, Livvy girl.
She licked her lips and tried to think of just the right words to say, words that would let him know that she wanted him just the way he wanted her. Words that would convince him that he should hurry back to her arms.
His hand was on the latch, but his eyes were on her naked shoulder. "Go to sleep, Liv," he said with a heavy sigh as he reached for a pillow from their bed. "I want to talk to Louisa anyway."
He was flat out telling her he wasn't interested. Blinking back tears, she slid behind the screen, ashamed and embarrassed for flaunting herself in front of him.
"Good night, then," he said huskily, clearing his throat after pushing out the words.
"Mm," she agreed, finding the same trouble forcing any words past the lump in her throat.
He shut the door behind him and leaned against it, his heart beating so strongly he was afraid she would hear it knocking right through the wood. Even with his eyes closed he could see her bare shoulder, chestnut hair teasing it, the lamplight dancing on it, and he ached to run a finger against its softness. But one finger would never be enough, and her shoulder would only be the beginning of things he had sworn would never happen again.
"Aunt Liv asleep?" the boy asked from his makeshift bed on the sofa, startling Spencer and yanking him back from a precipice that threatened to send him to his ruin.
"Yeah, boy, she's going to bed. Didn't I work you hard enough for you to be driving your pigs to market?"
"Yes, sir," he said, obviously unsure what the expression meant, but willing to oblige with the answer he thought Spencer wanted to hear.
"Snoring, boy," Spencer explained. "What's the matter? Can't sleep?'' He didn't know about the boy, but he knew that despite the hard day in the field it would be a long time before he himself found any rest. He wasn't even in the same room as Livvy, couldn't even see her silky hair or smell her lilac scent, and his blood was simmering and on the way to a quick boil. He looked around for something to do. "It's hot in here. You want me to open a window?"
The boy shook his head. "I was just wondering," he said softly, picking at his blanket, "how'd you know that it was gonna rain this morning? I mean, last night when you made me get the windows all shut and take the lid off the rain barrel . . . how'd you know by this morning it would be raining pitchforks?"
"You notice the sunset last night?"
Neil shook his head.
"Me neither, so it wasn't too remarkable then, was it? You notice any stars last night?''
Neil shook his head again. The boy's hair was getting long. It moved softly about his face, making him look younger than he was. Making him look maybe seven or eight.
"How about the moon? You notice a ring around it? All kind of hazy?"
Neil scratched at his head and shrugged. "Maybe," he allowed.
"Farmers have to notice these things. They're all telling signs. It's like Mother Nature has her own way of writing things, and a farmer has to learn how to read the messages she leaves on the sky and the water and the wind." Of course, it hadn't hurt that stupid old Curly George was swatting at imaginary flies and twitching his skin like it itched something awful, a sure sign of a storm.
"Is there anything you don't know about farming?" Neil asked, his eyes full of so much admiration it made Spencer uncomfortable.
"Don't know how a boy your size manages to do all his work and still have energy at the end of the day to badger me with questions. You sure you did all I told you, boy?"
"Yes, sir," Neil said, his voice quivering slightly. "I didn't mean to bother you."
"You and Ju . . . your pa—you get along all right?" he asked.
"Same as most, I guess."
"And the girls? They get along okay with your pa?"
Once again Neil was picking at the comforter that surrounded him. He shrugged. "Guess I'm tireder than I thought," he said, making a big show of yawning and covering his mouth. "Each day feels like two since I got here. One for school and one for farming."
"It's not an easy life," Spencer agreed. "But no life is these days."
"No, sir," Neil agreed, sliding down under the covers and laying his head on the pillow.
"You ever disagree with anything, boy?"
"Not anymore," he said, his big eyes staring into Spencer's.
"I see," Spencer said. So that was how it was. "Maybe someday you'll tell me what he hit you with."
The boy's eyes snapped shut and his breathing became heavy.
"Oh," Spencer said, playing along. "Well, I see you've fallen asleep." He walked over and stood above the couch looking down at the boy whose cheeks still held the pudginess of childhood, whose hair still curled around his face like a halo, and reached his hand out to smooth away the worries that drew his brows together. Inches before he came in contact with the soft skin that marked the boy's youth, he stopped.
In a few minutes, sleep would take the boy and release his cares. His head would sweat and his body would emit that warm, faintly sweet smell that Peter's always had.
Best if tomorrow Neil went back to sleeping in the barn.
Jeez. His wife in their bedroom, this boy on their couch—how much was he going to be asked to bear on top of what he had already borne?
Dread slowing his steps, he dragged himself to the girls' bedroom to turn off the lamp that still glowed from under their door. He knocked softly.
"Good night, Olivia." The words were crisp, dismissive.
"It's not your
Aunt
Olivia," Spencer said. "It's Spencer, and I'm coming in."
Chapter Seven
Josie was asleep, looking uncharacteristically angelic with her long eyelashes brushing her round cheeks and a chubby fist just inches from her bow mouth. One leg was thrown over the covers, and Spencer fought the memories that assailed him as he gently eased the little girl's bare limb under the quilt and bent to tuck the blanket tightly between the mattress and the bed frame.
She shifted in her sleep, acclimating to the new position, and made little sucking noises with her mouth that drained his heart dry until she found her thumb and quieted.
"Now," he said as he stretched to his full height and faced Louisa. "You."
Louisa clutched the neckline of her nightdress tightly together, the wide dark eyes she shared with her mother and her aunt watching his every move, and shivered.
"You cold?"
She shook her head silently.
"You could use a little more meat on your bones," he said, assessing how lost she looked amid the covers. "You might try eating your aunt's cooking, setting a good example for your sister there."
"I don't like her cooking," Louisa said, raising her chin defiantly.
"Well, I've tasted better," Spencer agreed. "But I've tasted worse, too. Your mama's venison was about the worst thing I ever ate with a fork."
Louisa looked skeptical. "You ate my mama's cooking?"
"Not enough to kill me, but darn close," he answered with a quiet laugh. Marion had tested more than one recipe on him and Remy. They both felt lucky they'd lived to tell about it.
"My mother was an excellent cook."
Spencer raised his eyebrows dubiously. They'd both eaten Marion's food. Did Louisa really think it was more than a step above palatable? "Guess you think your mama was near perfect," he said, dropping the subject of Marion's cooking.
"I don't just think it," Louisa said.
"She sew good, too? 'Cause I noticed a pile of calico in the corner of our bedroom that wasn't there a couple weeks ago. Figured it's earmarked for you and your sister."
"She wants to dress me like a little farm girl."
"She? Oh, you mean your Aunt Livvy. Well, you gotta admit that your dresses are a little fancy for feeding the chickens and raking the coop."
He sat down at the edge of his niece's bed. He was too damn tired to beat around the bush with the child, but her frightened eyes and the jerking of her legs away from his body caught him off guard.
"Hey, I'm not gonna bite you. I've been on my feet all day and I'm tired."
"Then go back to your room," Louisa said, more a plea than a suggestion.
He nodded. There was nothing he'd rather do, but some things just needed saying, and he was the one elected to say them.
"You're giving your aunt a real hard time of it, Miss Louisa. An uncalled-for hard time. I've never seen a woman work so hard to please someone with so little in return. Cooking, sewing, offering to help you with your homework, and you turning her down every chance you get."
"I don't need a woman to take care of me. I can take care of myself and of Josie and Neil, too. I have since Mama died and I can keep doing it now."
"So you think she's mothering you too much? Is that it?"
"She always there, being so nice, trying to make us like her, cooking special pies for us, kissing us good night, buying us things, trying to pretend she's our mama . . ."
"So she's too nice. Is that it?"
The girl traced the little log-cabin patterns on the patchwork quilt with her finger, silent, as if she were deciding how much to confide. "Neil likes her," she finally said. "He probably wishes she was our real mama."
"And you think it's not right, him liking her while your mama's dead and buried, huh?"
"It's like he doesn't even remember Mama." She looked over at her baby sister, sleeping peacefully a few feet away. "And she doesn't remember her. She never even knew her. There's only me."
"And your pa."
She snorted and he decided to leave Julian out of it.
"So I guess if you were to like Olivia, even just a little, it would take something away from your mama's memory, the way you see it. Is that so?"
She kept her eyes on the quilt and continued to run her fingers over all the cozy little houses, following the smoke lines out of the chimneys without answering him.
"And you think that somehow you'd be being disloyal to your mama if you enjoyed someone else's cooking, or let someone give you a kiss on the forehead before you went off to dreamland, huh?"
"I loved my mama. For me, anyway, everything was perfect until she died." She sniffed and he pulled out his hanky and handed it to her. "And I'll never love anyone else like I loved her."
"Of course not," he said. "But I don't see how letting Livvy love you is going to take away one ounce of the feeling you have for your mama." He pointed toward her chest. "You only got room enough in there to love one person?"
"In that way," she said, finally raising her eyes to her uncle's.
"Then find another way," he said, tiredness getting the best of his patience. "Find some damn other way to love her. Love her 'cause she's strong and kind, and she doesn't give up. Love her 'cause you're not going to find too many other people in the world who care so much about your being happy."
"I thought you'd understand," Louisa said. "But you're just like any grown-up. You think that it's all right for you to want to keep your precious memories, but I can't have mine. You won't even let us go up in that loft, never mind sleep in those stupid beds, so that my brother has to sleep on the sofa or in the barn when there's a perfectly good—"
"I thought it was a
stupid
bed," he corrected.
"It is. And everything else in this house is, too. And you just think it's so great because your children lived here." She narrowed her eyes and added sharply, pointing toward his chest, "You only have room to love those children in there?"
At first he didn't answer. He simply rose and walked to the door on legs hobbled from being on his niece's low bed. Once there he looked over his shoulder and stared at the face that was crumbling on the pillow and dissolving into tears. "That's what's the matter with children," he told her. "They think they know stuff they don't have any idea about. Your situation and mine don't have anything in common. But I'll tell you this—I thank the Lord that Olivia came into my life, and when Sunday comes I'll expect you to do the same."
With that he lifted the children's lamp and took it with him out of their room. He had been right to oppose these children coming to live with him. He stood in the parlor and heard Neil's soft breathing. They were everywhere.
And if three small children weren't enough, from beneath his bedroom door a soft light still glowed.
Damn
, he thought, and grabbed his jacket before heading out onto the porch to wait for Olivia to fall asleep.
She heard the front door open and close and paused in the letter she was composing to Julian. Well, he'd told her not to wait up, hadn't he? But if he was so all-fired tired, what was he doing going out at this hour?
She put down the pen and tried to see out the window. A light from the porch cast shadows on the ground. She reached for a shawl and eased her feet into her slippers, determined, at least, to speak to her husband before she went to bed.
She passed Neil's sleeping form on the couch and opened the door as quietly as she could. On the porch sat her husband, his head in his hands, his shoulders rising and falling unevenly. Sobs rode the wind back to her and she realized with a start that he was crying. Crying openly on their porch on a cool spring evening as if he were all alone in the world without a soul whose heart would gladly halve his sorrow— no, would take all that sorrow to see a genuine smile on his face again.
She sank back through the doorway into the house and closed the door soundlessly. One thing her marriage to Spencer had taught her, and taught her well. Things could be shared only when they were given, not taken. She couldn't take his sorrows, but should he want to share them, she was still there, still willing. She supposed she'd always be.
Back in the bedroom, her letter to Julian in San Francisco waited. What did a father want to hear about his children? Surely not that they were miserable, or that they were doing their best to make her as unhappy as they were. She started with Neil, knowing that it would be easiest to praise him for his helpful ways if not his real usefulness, which was doubtful.
Neil has learned so much about farming in the short time he has been helping Spencer that I fear before we know it he'll be running the farm himself. He shows an interest in all the machinery and a special fondness for the various livestock. In just the past week he has helped plow and ready the earth, cleaned the barn and slopped the pigs.
There wasn't one of those jobs that Spencer hadn't had to redo after Neil had done them, but a father ought to be able to take pride in a son, and Olivia had seen sorry little evidence of pride when Julian had been with them.
Josephina and I are beginning to warm to each other after the rocky start we got off to. She shows an avid interest in everything and fills my days with the wonderment of children.
The avid interest in everything was surely not an overstatement. Josie had emptied every drawer in the kitchen, spilled out every canister of staples, burned two fingers on the stove . . .
She learns very quickly and retains the knowledge well.
But, Livvy wanted to add, she tries first and asks questions later, when her tears have subsided. Three times she fell off the ladder to the loft over the kitchen, but each time she had managed to get one rung farther up the steps.
She is persistent, too.
And Spencer had better fix the railing that he kicked out all those years ago or remove the ladder before Josie got herself to the top.
Louisa
, Olivia continued,
is quite the little mother, as I believe you once called her. She takes such good care josie that I almost hate to push her out the door for school in the mornings.
Of course, Louisa hated it far more than Olivia, but was that something Julian really needed to know?
Though it would be hard to imagine her even more helpful, I am thinking of letting Louisa try her hand in the kitchen.
Maybe then she'll eat something. Lord knows I can't get her to eat what I cook, and if she gets any skinnier we won't see her sideways.
There's talk of a railroad spur possibly coming to Maple Stand, though I can't see why anyone has an interest in coming to a town whose only new industry in the last ten years has been a cider press. But the railroad runs both ways, and I suppose it'll aid the young folks in hightailing it to the big city the way you and Marion did.
Well, seeing as I've got my hands full with children I guess I'd better close this letter and get back to work. It surely is a busy household now.
She lifted her pen. The house was so quiet she could hear the coal shifting and Sinking in the stove in the parlor. Was it never going to warm up?
Spencer coughed somewhere, reassuring her that at least he hadn't up and gone drinking or out on the town.
Don't worry about your children. Spencer and I are looking after them as if they were our own.
And since it was hardly likely that they'd ever have any children of their own, Olivia was determined to enjoy every moment she had with Neil, Josie, and even Louisa.
Love, Olivia.
She folded the pretty paper, a gift from Bess, and slipped it into the envelope, then left it on the nightstand to remember to take with her to Zephin's. She turned the light way down, then decided that Spencer could find his way in the dark, if indeed he ever decided to come in, and put out the lamp. In the darkness she listened to the sound of her own breathing and wished Spencer was lying beside her, his heavy breathing drowning out her own, just as his sorrows overpowered hers and his life eclipsed the one she had chosen for herself.
He must have come to bed at some point, because when Olivia awoke in the morning he was lying next to her, his head propped up on his hand, watching her sleep.
"You didn't braid your hair" were the first words out of his mouth, and she saw that he was holding a lock of it in his free hand.
She didn't know how to answer him. He had seemed so fascinated by her hair that she had left it loose in the hopes that he would touch it, lose himself in it, and then touch her. That wasn't exactly something she could tell her husband. "Do you mind it loose?" she asked, sweeping it back from her face.
"Mm," he said, dropping the lock and rolling onto his back, his hands locked behind his head. "It gets all over in the night."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'll remember to braid it from now on."
"That'd be good," he said without enthusiasm.
"I'm taking Neil into town today," she said as she sat up and stretched.
"I'll need the boy," he said, springing from the bed and going to the window to check the day. "I've been waitin' all week for a full day in the field with him. Remy's bringing over his boys and we're gonna try the new hayloader, then we're all going over to Sacotte Farm."
"Can he make do with the shoes he's got?" she asked, hoping not to ruin all of the plans for the day, being the closest thing to a family outing Spencer had experienced in five years, and the first time she'd seen him excited in all that time.
"Julian was a damn fool, bringing him to work on a farm with city-slicker banker shoes. What did he think the boy was going to do here? Play hopscotch on cement? Roll a hoop on concrete?"
"Maybe if we stuffed the toes of my boots?" Livvy offered.