Citizens Creek (36 page)

Gramma Amy came to fetch her at the end of her thirty-day trial with the Pennymans, and they returned to the ranch together to collect the rest of her things. Unlike the trip from the ranch to the Pennymans, Rose talked almost without pause on the way back, eager to impress Gramma Amy with all of her newfound knowledge. She’d been surprised by the deep satisfaction that came with running her own kitchen. They’d agreed already that Rose would return to Okmulgee and the Pennymans in three days.

“I made us dog heads for our trip,” Rose said. “Wait until you taste, corn and beans wrapped in husks, with butter. They’re better when they’re hot, but fine cold. It’s Cherokee, not Creek, but I bet you like them. Mrs. Pennyman learned how to make them from her grandmother.”

“I see,” said Gramma Amy, and Rose thought she saw a small smile. “Always more to learn, eh?”

From the moment Rose recognized the landmark cattle pen in the north field of their ranch, she realized she was viewing her home through different eyes, as if a mist had thinned. Only thirty days, and the ranch seemed somehow smaller, as if it had shrunk in her absence. She was both drawn to and repelled by the familiar. Her first thought was to go to Twin, to share her ponderings with him, but Gramma Amy headed straight for the main house.

They arrived back at the ranch house just before supper. Rose stepped into the kitchen, still flush from the long trip and trading recipes with Gramma Amy. Ma’am, caught up in the preparation of the meal, was the first to see her. Her mother was in charge, pointing and directing, but she stopped, wiping her hands on her apron, and stood straighter.

“Welcome back,” Ma’am said to Rose. “You visiting or staying?”

“I’m come to get my things, then back to Okmulgee in a couple days.”

“Too good for your own family, I guess,” said Ma’am.

Rose felt the lightness of the last few hours leave her. “No, Ma’am. I have a job.”

“Plenty to do around here.”

Elizabeth came into the room just then, her arms full of firewood. “Rose,” Elizabeth squealed, and threw the logs down near the fireplace. She propelled herself onto Rose, throwing her arms around her older sister.

“Enough,” Ma’am said to Elizabeth. “Go look after the bread. See it doesn’t burn.”

“We’re just all glad to have Rose home for a few days,” said Gramma Amy. “Why don’t you set the table, Rose? We’ll visit over supper.”

Rose grabbed an apron and made herself useful. The stew was soon ready, and dished up, and though it felt good to sit around the table with family, Rose was restless, as if unsure now where she fit.

Later that night, after the dishes were scrubbed and they’d sat with their needlework long enough to signal bedtime, she and Elizabeth were finally alone in their own room.

“Please don’t leave me again, Rose,” Elizabeth said. “Please. It’s harder without you here.”

Elizabeth began to cry, and Rose gathered her up and rested her little sister’s head on her chest, as she hadn’t done for years.

“Don’t waste what time we have,” said Rose, but the girl’s tears began to loosen her resolve to go back to the Pennymans. Still, she kept firm. “I’ll come visit, but tomorrow, you’ll help me pack up. I’ve only a few days before I have to go back to Okmulgee.”

“But you don’t have to,” Elizabeth insisted. “You can stay here, like always. Ma’am says you’re just a cook for a family of rich Creeks. What do they have that we don’t?”

Rose felt the years between them, a girl’s perspective versus a
young woman’s. She wanted to try to make Elizabeth understand.

“It was impossible here after Grampa died. I was drowning. They’re not my family, the Pennymans, but there’s a place for me there. A simple place, without weight, without secrets, where I can breathe again.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “What secrets?”

“Not secrets.” Rose tried to laugh off her blunder. Her promise to Grampa Cow Tom needed to remain safe. “You know how tight-lipped Ma’am and the rest are with family stories. That’s all. The point is I miss you terribly,” she said. “I think about you all the time. Okmulgee seems far, but I won’t be gone forever.”

She almost said “I promise,” but she held herself back. She wasn’t at all sure what would happen in the city, a city without her family around her. Rose remembered all of the promises she’d made to Elizabeth when they were girls and fleeing in the night to Fort Gibson, how she’d said anything that came into her mind to keep Elizabeth moving. They weren’t girls any longer, but despite the difference in age, they were connected. Elizabeth wasn’t a shadow from beyond the grave, like Twin, but Rose’s flesh-and-blood shadow in this life.

“We’ll always be sisters,” Rose said, “and I’ll always be there for you. That I can promise.”

PART III

Rose

–1880–

Chapter 50

ROSE ONLY JUST
secured the lid atop the simmering pot of beef stew on the stove when she heard the knock at the back door. Possibly a hungry ranch hand returning early for supper, or a stray cowpuncher begging scraps, or an itinerate salesman. Her employers had plenty, but they weren’t particularly generous to those they didn’t know. She’d been warned to provide something, as was the way, but not waste too much on the inevitable passerby arriving at the back door, tired from traveling the plain, eager for food, drink, and rest. But Mrs. Pennyman knew Rose as likely more begrudging with a handout than she was, and left food distribution to her cook’s discretion. Rose took the time to set the cucumbers to soak for cabbage and dried her hands on her apron before answering the knock. Whoever, it most likely meant more work for her.

She found a gangling Indian man, young, hat in hand. At least she thought him Indian. By feature, he might even have been white, but her guess was mixed. He carried himself with a confidence not matching his age. Not even out of his teen years, he stared openly at her before he spoke, a look bordering on familiarity, if not insolence. The startling color of his eyes reminded her of the spindly-vined wildflower that grew in the pasture through the summer and into the fall on her grandfather’s ranch, with flamboyant blue flowers lasting only a day, petals shaped like mouse ears. His eyes held her fast, but Rose didn’t look away. He intruded on her domain, on her kitchen. More precisely, the Pennyman kitchen, but by extension of responsibility, her own as well.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “You must be Rose.”

His grin was impish, as if he knew her, both puzzling and ran
kling.

“Yes.”

She waited for him to state his business, impatient. He was a cocky one, blue eyes or no. She was probably ten years his senior, and while she didn’t expect deference, she did expect something more than this attempt at casual chumminess. He bordered on disrespectful, and made her nervous, though in the last six years, after her grandfather passed, she’d fortified herself, refusing to let anyone, family or stranger, bully her. The young man was definitely a cowpuncher. He wore the telltale high-heeled boots that kept his feet from slipping through the stirrup on a saddle, and chaps to protect his trousers, and carried the bow of leg identifying so many of the cowpunchers she served meals to since a small girl on her grandfather’s ranch or now, around the Pennyman table. He’d mixed personal touches in with the typical cowpuncher outfit—a small white feather tucked in the large brim of his high-crowned hat, a checkered, sweat-soaked handkerchief around his neck tied with a fancy double knot. He’d made an attempt to brush the trail dust off his long-sleeved shirt, heavy and bright red to shield against both sun and insects, and although Rose was sure she smelled the remains of lye soap, she also caught the deeply embedded scent of cattle dung and sweat that clung to his clothes and his dark hair.

“I heard you’re the best cook in the territory and I’m come to meet you,” he said. “My name is Jake Simmons.”

“The Pennymans sent you round?”

“No, ma’am. You underestimate your reputation. You fed a household of men from the Lazy U a couple weeks back, and when they visited my employer up in Haskell, that’s all they talked about, that amazing supper the African woman cook served at the Pennymans’. I had to see for myself.”

“This is a private home,” said Rose, “not a boardinghouse.”

Jake laughed. “Which is why I wrangled an invitation to supper here tonight through my boss,” he said. “I thought I’d introduce myself to you first so you know who I am.”

“And who are you?” asked Rose. She was confused by whatever game he played, and had too much work to do preparing the evening meal to waste time on a stranger. And yet, she found herself transfixed by those blue eyes, as if she couldn’t turn away.

Jake stepped back and looked Rose over. He cocked his head, and again produced that maddening grin. “A man come courting,” he said.

“Courting who?”

Jake went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve been on my own since twelve, and look now for a wife. My father was a white man, Scottish, adopted Cherokee, and my mother Negro and Creek. I been interested in the cattle business since a little boy, and plan to study every part before I’m through. I don’t have much interest in farming, and aim to get my own ranch soon as I can.”

Rose was a practical woman, able to tally her plusses and minuses as well as her prospects with a clear eye. She knew some called her a childless old maid, twenty-eight, unappealingly tiny and trim while other women of the tribe were large and voluptuous, and a glance in the mirror confirmed her probable future. Rose had no illusions. And yet, over the years, she’d seen other tribe women who weren’t beauties selected as wives, but those women were at ease with socializing, able to talk about small subjects, able to flatter and cajole. Not Rose, more traditionally Creek than American, like her grandfather. She’d carved a place for herself in the tribe’s busy capital town of Okmulgee, having left the family ranch to forge her own way in the world, using her culinary skills in a wealthy Indian family’s kitchen.

But neither was Rose so blinded by her shortcomings she couldn’t appreciate those things in her favor. Everyone sang the praises of her cooking, she could weave and card and sew and stand in as midwife and herbalist. She could shoot a gun, had a head for fancy figuring, and could run a ranch given the chance. Her grandmother taught Rose how to be independent even while under a man’s protection, and how to stretch a dollar, and Ma’am taught
her how to can and pickle and preserve. Gramma Amy insisted all her grandchildren get an education, and Rose, as oldest, had looked after her sister and taken her to the integrated school every day. And her ace in the hole was her grandfather. Grampa Cow Tom had given her his looks and his resourcefulness. And an inheritance. She was relatively wealthy, both in her future portion of land and the successful settlement of her grandfather’s claim with the government. She was confident that fact alone had brought Jake Simmons to her.

Rose gestured for Jake to come into the kitchen and shut the door behind him.

“Who says I’m looking for a husband?”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Then I’m not saying you’re looking. All I’m asking is if you’re open.”

Rose paused to gather her wits, the pace of this conversation too fast for her. She wished she wasn’t wearing her stained apron, and had on her Sunday dress. She even thought about removing the plain scarf covering her cornrows.

“I’m Creek,” she volunteered. “And Cow Tom was my grandfather. I assume you know that.”

“I do,” answered Jake, without pause. “His ranch was on Cane Creek, about a thousand cattle a year, branded with a half-moon and mule-shoe X.”

“How do you plan on getting this ranch of your own?” Rose asked, as calmly as she could manage. She cared more than she wanted to admit that he quantify his expectations of her land and her finances with honesty, and not insult her by treating her like a young, impressionable girl ripe for the fleecing with a few flattering words and the promise of passion. Better to get things in the open quickly, before other distractions came into play. Already she’d begun to think about those blue eyes in a different way than she had when he first knocked on the kitchen door.

“I have a sponsor, my employer, willing to get me started,” Jake said. He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs for her to sit, but she shook her head and remained standing, crossing her arms in front of her chest. Jake took her refusal in stride, twirling his hat in his hand. “When I was ten, I landed my first paying job on a ranch. Earned me six dollars. I worked hard, and learned, and got me ten dollars. And so on. Over the years, I got to know my cattle and became buyer. I’ve bought thousands of head of cattle for my boss, running them from Texas to Kansas, and now he depends on me. Next step is do the same for myself.”

“And what is that to me?” Rose asked. “Surely you could court someone closer your age, Indian or black.”

“When I marry, I’m going to marry me a black-skinned lady,” Jake said. “I been knowing that always. The closer to African, the better. None of my children going to grow up with slave ways, thinking they’re less than anyone else.”

There was something about Jake that reminded her of her grandfather. Not looks, one dark as a crow’s wing, the other pale as fresh-wove cotton, but in such easy acceptance of who she was, who she could be. Six years gone, and still she thought of her grandfather every day, the contradiction of him, the unfairness of handing her his shame alongside the bedrock of his righteousness. Most times she thought of Grampa Cow Tom as inspiration, replaying his stories in her mind, first as building blocks of grief’s recovery, and then to propel her into the world. Other times she resented him, a tainted man she was forced to protect.

“Sounds like you have hereafter all figured,” Rose said.

“Coming up, I moved from place to place, shuffled from one relative to the next when my mother couldn’t manage, one tribe to another, near starving most of the time. Early on, I made my way, but I’ve no interest in scraping by. I’m going to build a big ranch, and run cattle, and keep my family in one place. A big family. My wife has to help with all that.”