Citizens Creek (37 page)

A family in one place, Rose thought, afraid to believe this stranger’s goals could match so closely to her own impossible dreams. She slowed down her breathing, brought herself in line. She composed her face, as she had so often seen her grandfather do when he negotiated. But she couldn’t believe her grandfather ever had to stare into eyes the color of wildflowers.

“What kind of help?”

“Whatever it takes,” said Jake. “A sensible woman wanting the same things I want, not afraid of hard work.”

“I don’t tolerate lazy,” Rose said.

“Me neither,” replied Jake.

Rose tried to tamp down the hopefulness blooming in her chest, spreading as fast and dangerous as Russian thistle on the prairie. She saw potential in this young man—likable, even charming, but rough and unsophisticated. Yes, he was young, but he came to her, as no other man had. Jake Simmons was intrigued enough on the basis of her pedigree and stories he’d heard about the unmarried black woman with money in Okmulgee to ride all the way into town to offer himself up, and he hadn’t scared off once he saw her.

“Can you read?” she asked.

A defensive flicker crossed Jake’s face. “I never had a chance for
school. I get by on the trail. Not many cowpunchers read.”

“Maybe not, but running a ranch is different. People cheat you in a minute unless you let them know they can’t,” Rose said. There was no point to coyness. Charm wasn’t what she possessed to win him over. “I could teach you to read and write. It’s not hard. You probably know some basics from branding letters on cattle.”

Jake nodded. He stared again, his eyes on her in a new way. A small smile lifted the edges of his lips, and he looked even younger than before. “So, should I come back again to see you?” he asked.

Rose fought back a schoolgirl simper, dazzled anew by the intensity behind his eyes and the magnetism of his quick grin. A heavy door to an undreamed future swung wide to her, in the space of a single hour, miracle enough, but her heart’s pounding had surprisingly little to do with ranchland and cattle. Jake himself triggered this deep and unexpected longing, the lean-bodied hunger of him, the rich man-smell of him standing close.

She couldn’t gather herself to answer. After a life of guardedness, she was fallen, so fast, so hard, and dizzy with the possibility she could open her arms wide and reach for everything she wanted. How easy and wondrous it would be to slide and lose herself completely. Rose knew, with certainty absolute, that this was the beginning at last, the passageway to the life she’d waited so long to clarify. Jake.

Rose forced her thoughts to Grampa Cow Tom, and the command required for any successful negotiation, the need to hang on to oneself and mask inner thought in favor of outward deportment. She imagined herself surrounded by hostile Seminoles, facing a sure death, while Jake held her bloody ear aloft. Rose found her voice.

“If that’s what you’ve a mind to do,” she answered softly, with as much control as she could muster, “I’ll be right here.”

Chapter 51

ROSE WATCHED JAKE
trace his finger under each line as he read the newspaper by lantern light, a slow and laborious procedure. Sometimes, he moved his lips in determination as he sounded out a sentence until it fell into place. If they were alone, just he and Rose, he’d call out to ask her what a certain word meant, and Rose would drop whatever she was doing to answer. She considered these moments among her favorite times with her husband, but there were so many pieces of her life with him she cherished, she couldn’t confine her joy to only one. Teaching him to read had taken years, not because he was slow, but because they had so little time left after the avalanche of building a life together. He’d been a good student once he settled into the process, putting in the effort no matter how tired he was, but in the years since they married, there were long stretches when reading had to take second place to all the other demands—scrimping, saving, buying land, erecting a house, building a herd, cattle drives, crops, mending fences. Not to mention the children, who came quickly, one after the next, two girls in as many years, more Rose’s responsibility than Jake’s, though they adored their father.

As Jake promised Rose at their first meeting, they started a small ranch of their own half a day’s ride from Cane Creek, and managed in only a few years to grow and add improvements—house, barn, corral, fencing, garden. Cash money was always tight, but Jake often joked he could ride onto a stranger’s ranch sometime in the late afternoon, stay overnight in an unwilling seller’s barn or camped on the prairie, and by the next morning, have a handshake
deal and cattle exchanged with all parties smiling.

Jake put aside the newspaper, closing his eyes and massaging the bridge of his nose. Reading by the flicker of the lantern light took its toll.

“Say, Rose,” Jake said. “What say you and me go to the church supper Sunday?”

“That’d be all right,” answered Rose.

“But I know something to make it better than all right. Hold on.”

Rose put aside her needlework. Jake was up to something, and sure enough, he disappeared into the back room, and returned with a loaf-sized bundle wrapped up in old newsprint. He presented the parcel to her, watching the expression on her face.

Rose peeled back the edges of the wrapping. Inside was a pair of high-top black leather shoes, fancy. A curved row of covered buttons ran up the side, each in its own buttonhole, with a small sateen bow at each toe, and dainty little heels. The shoes were so beautiful, Rose was almost afraid to touch them. She set them down carefully.

“Jake! So many things we need. We don’t have money for this kind of foolishness. What were you thinking? What if the crop doesn’t come in?”

Jake pulled back. “I knew you’d fight me on this,” he said. “But I was thinking it time my scrawny chicken shows the other ladies a thing or two.”

In the beginning, years before, Rose had been sorry she’d told Jake about her mother’s careless comments as she grew up. But somehow, Jake had turned the insult on its head, and when he called her scrawny chicken, she felt bigger and bolder. And safer. Rose was Jake’s scrawny chicken, his anchor, and Jake was her freewheeling cowboy.

“Surely you can take them back to the store and get our money?” asked Rose.

“I could,” answered Jake. “But I won’t.” He was working himself into a state. “We been squeezing every penny till there’s nothing left, but this once, you’re going to show out. You can wear them to
church, and whenever we visit Cane Creek. And you tell Ma’am
I
got them for you.”

If the gift were any other extravagance, Rose would have been able to resist, easily, but shoes were her weakness. Jake knew as much.

Rose marrying Jake provided everyone an opportunity to be nicer to one another. Even Ma’am had come round, charmed by her daughter’s new husband, and then by the grandchildren as they appeared. Rose was happiest when Jake was home, but he was often gone away, chasing their fortune, buying or selling or both, that was his part of the bargain. Hers was to make a home for him to come back to. Home meant everything to him. And to her. Who could have believed the two of them fit so hand in glove? That the dead spots in her heart could soften, and give rise to new bloom?

Rose picked up the shoes again, and ran her finger across the smooth surface of one of the sateen bows. She sniffed the leather, a raw, heady smell that filled her with satisfaction, and placed the pair in her lap, picking up her needlework again.

It was impossible to imagine keeping such a firm hold on her book of dreams without Jake on every page.

Chapter 52

ROSE MISSED JAKE,
gone away this time along the Old Texas Trail in search of ten steers to add to the herd before winter set. With Jake away over two weeks already, the almost-baby occupied her thoughts most days and nights. Jake wouldn’t be much help with woman’s business even if he was home, but at least she could talk to him in Mvskoke. The bluntness of the language suited the occasion, and Rose always thought in Mvskoke in the days before a birth. Sometimes she’d rather live in the calm of no talk than navigate the trickeries of words, but she spoke to the little ones in English nonetheless. She and Jake agreed Mvskoke acceptable only between the two of them, their secret language. The children would be brought up with the language of the wider American world.

She rubbed her belly, soothing, stroking, the far end protruded like one of the overripe watermelons in the north patch. The baby was active, and already dropped. This one didn’t feel like the other two she’d carried, so she hoped for a boy, but the all-girl family curse had held true thus far. She wondered if she was destined to break the string and finally produce a son in this, the third generation, or if she tempted fate by asking for too much. Whatever, the child was due soon, very soon.

When the knock came on the front door, she had just put down the oldest for her afternoon nap and turned to putting a stew to boil for dinner for the ranch hands. She’d heard neither horse hoof nor wagon. The nearest neighbors, several miles downstream, seldom visited, and when they did, they knew to come to the back, where she would most likely be. Transients weren’t frequent, but
common enough, black, white, or Indian, asking for water or bread or a hayloft to sleep in, and Rose always complied, unless she sensed danger, in which case she shooed them off, her rifle never too far from reach.

“Can you spare water?” the stranger asked. “I’ve come far.”

The woman at the front door was young, too young to be carrying such a bundle. She was taller than Rose, as were most women, full-bosomed, her straight, black hair in a long, single-plaited tail down to her waist, tall moccasins visible beneath her dusty, sweat-stained cotton dress, her fawn-colored skin blemished but aglow. Her clothes, speech, and carriage indicated a woman from an Indian family. Rose wasn’t sure which tribe, maybe Cherokee, maybe Creek, neither well-to-do nor brothel, but something in the middle. Most probably a farm girl, but with some little education. Clearly she’d walked a distance, and she leaned on first one foot and then the other, finding relief in neither. As much as Rose would rather shut the door and go about her business, she invited the woman inside, helping her sit on the upholstered chair, Jake’s chair, and rest. Rose brought her a bowl of
sofki
and water from the pump, and waited until she drank down the last of the cup to inquire the reason for her visit.

“I’m Angeli,” the woman said. “From Cow Hollow.”

Rose had never been there, but she knew of the town, as described by Jake, one of many small clusters of tiny, remote ranches and wide-open spaces where he bought up cheap cattle one or two at a time to increase their herd. Sometimes he struck up partnerships and ran the ranchers’ cows along with their own to market, for fee of cash or cattle.

“I know of it,” said Rose.

“I’m looking for Jake Simmons,” the woman said. “Some directed me here.”

Rose felt her baby kick, once, twice, a demanding claim. She held her side in counterweight to reassure it. “Jake’s gone with the cattle drive,” she said.

“Is he soon back?”

“No way to know,” said Rose.

“You the wife?” Angeli asked.

“I am,” said Rose.

Angeli looked around the front room for the first time. Both of Rose’s daughters slept, the oldest, three, in a crib in the corner, the youngest, sixteen months, in a woven basket nearby. Rose didn’t believe in the waste of fancy, but they’d built the ranch house large, to accommodate the life they intended, and she had decorated, albeit sparely, with needlepoint headrests on Jake’s stuffed chair and braided rugs on the floor. She worked each day to keep grime and dust outside where it belonged, and not on her inside possessions.

“This baby is your husband’s work,” the young woman said.

Rose was caught with a polite smile frozen on her face. All turned muffled inside. She stood, not sure why or where she could go, and turned her back to the woman as she tried to find some thought to latch to. Other than that she was a fool. A fool. If the woman said something more, she didn’t hear.

She searched for some anchor place in her mind, something to stop the shattering. She’d called on Twin years back as Grampa Cow Tom lay dying, but he’d never appeared to her again. Only that once had he come at her beckoning. He was gone, almost forgotten completely, pushed aside by the blue of Jake’s eyes. She fixed on her children. On her home. But thinking thus only sent her further into her despair. What would happen to them now? Grampa Cow Tom had gone from Gramma Amy for days and months and years on end, but there were never any babies finding their way back to his ranch door.

For no reason, she thought of the cast-iron cook stove they’d just bought for sixteen dollars, she and Jake together, plotting like children until they had the money saved, how proud and happy they’d both been. There was no anchor there. She couldn’t think on Jake. Not yet.

She thought of Grampa Cow Tom, spiriting his mother onto
the ship bound for Indian Territory, under the nose of the slave catcher. How her grandfather had turned disaster into advantage, in defense of his family. She could learn from his boldness.

A familiar voice asserted, stronger than any other, stronger than her own.

Make your own family.

Grampa Cow Tom’s words came to her, and she felt a slight loosening, a small clearing of mind. Her family was what mattered, the family in her power to make. She pulled herself back from the brink, composing her face as she did so. Composing her resolve. Never show your enemy your true face. Grampa Cow Tom taught her that.

She turned to Angeli. “Why should I believe you?” Rose asked.

“His name is Jake,” Angeli said, as if revealing a winning poker hand.

“That proves nothing.”

“Look at him then. Look close.”

Rose accepted the baby, settling him into her arms, balancing him on the curve of her belly, and she pushed back at the flimsy blanket wrapped round his body, obscuring his face. He couldn’t have been more than two weeks old, a weak, defenseless thing. He opened and shut his eyes, unfocused, but already they reflected back Jake’s eyes, and the jut of the infant’s jaw followed like a tracing the jut of Jake’s jaw. A ruddy baby, more Creek than black, dark hair sleek and plentiful. A boy child, in a family that didn’t produce sons.