In Need of a Good Wife (23 page)

This wasn’t the old George—this was a George she had never seen. No one had talked this way to Clara since she was a child. She did not abide being taken in hand, particularly by this man, but somehow she didn’t feel like getting her back up over it. It felt nice, to hand over the reins. Nice but strange.

“All right,” she said, sitting up all the way.

He brought the plate over to her and she ate in silence. The bread was fresh and chewy, the jam tart with rhubarb. George stood at her side, patiently waiting for her to finish, then took the plate away.

“All right, then,” he said. He placed the cup of tea on the floor near her head. “In case of thirst.” Then he sat back down in the chair, snapping open his paper once more.

Clara watched him for a moment, awestruck, but found her lids too heavy to continue.

Later on in the darkness, she felt the blanket shift on her legs. The mattress rustled as George slid close to her, his kneecaps pressing into the back of her thighs, the long bones of his feet sliding beneath her soles. He kissed the back of her head and she allowed herself to revel in the tobacco-spiced scent of him, knowing that, were she to turn and face him now, to run her lips from his mouth to his cheek to the cluster of gray hair that had sprouted recently at his temples, she would taste salt: the remnant of a day’s work. He had betrayed her, and she could go on punishing him for it—probably would for a while—but he
was
here now. Perhaps it was possible to begin again in this new place, not quite so wrenched and distorted by grief. With patience, with time. George slid his hand down her arm, across the plane of her small breasts, and Clara felt them pucker, shamelessly, at his touch. She clutched the back of his hand with her fingers and removed it to a cold place on the mattress.

Clara laughed. “Not a chance in hell, Mr. Bixby.”

The next day she felt better than she had in months, in a year. Who could have guessed that a simple night of deep sleep was all she needed to repair? The headache still thrummed on but it seemed very far away, like the echo of pain instead of the pain itself. She was hungry and thirsty and ready to work.

Downstairs in the tavern she chopped an onion and carrot and put them in the small kettle with a generous helping of shaved salt pork. There was no shortage of pigs here, and Nebraskans seemed to eat pork with every meal. As she was pulling the crockery down from the shelf, the door creaked open. This one had no bell.

“Anybody here?” a voice called. “Something sure smells good.”

Clara leaned out the kitchen doorway with a stack of bowls braced against her middle. “Well, hello, Mayor Cartwright.”

His quick smile deepened the lines at his temples. “Miss Bixby. I was hoping it would be you who was banging around back there in the kitchen.” He set a large bundle down on the floor. “I was just bringing my laundry to Mrs. Healy. She’ll do it for me, but she makes me carry it all the way from my uncle’s farm.” He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “That’s the life of a bachelor, I suppose.”

“Are you hungry, sir? This stew is just about ready.”

“Thank you. I would like very much to have some.”

Clara came around to the front of the bar and set a place for him, with a mat and a spoon, at the table under the window. “May I bring you something to drink?”

“Just an ale, if you will.”

Clara drew it from the tap and ladled the stew into a bowl.

“Say, Clara,” the mayor said. “How are things … coming along?”

She pressed her lips together. “Do you mean to ask whether I’ve yet come up with the money to pay those men back?”

Mayor Cartwright stirred his stew a moment before he replied. “I only ask because yesterday the sheriff for Dodge County, which includes our town, called on me to inquire about the whole matter. It seems those men intend to pursue this as far as they can.”

“They do?” Clara asked, her voice full of dread.

“Yes. And if they knew I had tipped you off about that, they would probably run me out of town.”

Clara sighed. “Well, I thank you for telling me, though it won’t do any good to speed up my plans. Mrs. Healy has me working in exchange for room and board, plus a fair wage, but a small one. At this rate it will take me years to pay them back. I suppose I should begin taking in sewing.”

Clara heard footsteps and turned to see George come into the kitchen through the back door with another man. George’s shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows and his collar was damp with sweat. He had been working to hang a new door on the privy out back.

“Well, sir,” Clara said to the mayor. “I’ll let you enjoy your dinner.”

George took a washcloth and bathed his neck at the wide sink, then strode behind the bar.

“Clara,” he said, jerking his thumb at the man who followed him in. “Have you met Tomas Skala? He’s a fine carpenter.”

Clara shook her head, then extended her hand with a polite smile. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Skala.”

Tomas took it and covered her knuckles with his other hand. “That is my thinking, that
I
am pleased to meet
you
.”

George nudged Clara with his elbow. “He’s a Bohemian. Fresh off the boat—so to speak. I can’t get enough of the way he talks.” Tomas winced ever so slightly and Clara felt a pang of embarrassment.

“Are you hungry?” she said to Tomas.

“We’re both famished,” George said, starting toward a table. “What’s for dinner?”

Then he noticed Mayor Cartwright sitting under the window. “Hello, there,” he said. Tomas sat down across the room and removed his bowler, wiping his brow with a pressed handkerchief.

“Good day, sir,” Mayor Cartwright said to George. He put down his spoon and stood up. “Randall Cartwright,” he said.

“
Mayor
Cartwright,” Clara said. “Allow me to introduce George Bixby.”

The mayor’s shoulders softened. “Ah, I didn’t know you had a brother. What a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

“Brother?” George laughed. “Now, see here. I am this lady’s husband.”

Cartwright glanced at Clara, confusion clouding his face. “Forgive me, Miss, Mrs.—I wasn’t aware—”

“It’s all right,” Clara said. “You couldn’t have known. ‘Miss Bixby’ is the name I use for business, but in truth I am a Mrs.” She put her hand on George’s forearm to reassure him, and his jaw softened.

Cartwright extended his hand again and gave George a generous smile. George straightened his back but even then was a good deal shorter than the mayor. “Well, I am very pleased to meet you. Your wife is a remarkable woman, a remarkable woman. She’s turned this town upside down. And mostly for the better.”

He smiled at Clara and she replied with a nervous laugh. George’s eyes bounced back and forth between them. She would hear about this later, upstairs in their room. Like most unfaithful men, George had the gall to be jealous of any man who paid his wife attention. The fact that Cartwright was taller, stronger, and smarter only made things worse.

“Husband, let me bring you some stew,” Clara said loudly enough for George to know that Mr. Cartwright would hear. What efforts had to be made to protect men’s pride! The mayor returned to his stew, and George watched him for a moment, then joined Tomas at his table.

“Rowena?” Daniel said, as he slurped his coffee in the most intolerable way.

“Hmm?” Rowena did not turn to face him from where she stood at the sink scrubbing a pot. Lately she was finding it hard to remember what it was she had liked about him that first day in his wagon. Daniel sat in the center of the table, with two boys on either side of him. The quietest part of the day came during the five minutes it took the children to bolt their porridge. It was like the momentary stillness surrounding a company of soldiers as they reload their rifles.

“Leave
off,
Ully,” Dag said. He kicked the side of his chair with a thud.

“That’s enough now, Ully,” Daniel said.

“Pa, she won’t stop,” said Gustav.

Rowena took a beleaguered breath and glanced back at them. Ully sat cross-legged under the table, untying each of her brothers’ boots. Rowena couldn’t decide what was worse—that these illiterates covered with mange existed at all, or that the house’s dirt floor forced them to keep their boots on morning, noon, and night.

Daniel continued. “Rowena, would you please not wander far today? I am sending a carpenter to start work on the chicken house and you need to be here to show him where to put it.”

“Yes, Mr. Gibson,” Rowena said absently. She knew it irked him that she still would not call him
Daniel
. But he could hardly complain that she wasn’t holding up her end of the bargain. She kept the little hovel as tidy as possible. She hired Kathleen Connolly to come once a week and do the wash—Daniel hadn’t dared to assume Rowena would do it herself. She did do all the cooking, though, serving a rotation of the only three dishes she knew how to prepare: chicken pie, chicken on biscuits, and pork stew. That Rowena had not fallen in love with Daniel could not be held against her. Each month since they first exchanged letters in the winter, without fail, he had sent the postal order for the money to cover her father’s care.

A small mercy had arrived in a note from Anna Ludlow Crowley, the reverend’s new wife, explaining that she wanted to start a school at the church for the Gibson children, and “any other young ones who may come along eventually.” Rowena could almost picture the woman winking as she wrote that last part, and it made her shudder. But Rowena was grateful for the respite the school provided. Daniel’s children would complete their chores after breakfast and walk straight there for their lessons, guaranteeing Rowena four hours of peace.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do about this drought,” Daniel was saying. “Cows don’t get fat off dry grass.”

Odin began to whistle a cloying tune and Sigrid joined in, banging his spoon on the table top to keep time.

“No whistling at the table,” Dag yelled.

“No
yelling
at the table,” Odin yelled at Dag.

“Boys,”
Daniel said. “Enough.”

Dag turned to his father. “Ully’s still at it, Pa.”

Daniel stuck his head under the table. “Ully, I said that’s enough.”

“No,” she said sweetly. “You told the boys it was enough. You didn’t say anything about what the girls could do. I suppose that means Mrs. Gibson and me can do as we please.”

“Mrs. Gibson and
I
,” Sigrid said. The family scholar.

Rowena took a still-wet bowl from the drain board and slammed it against the chopping block. It made a bright crash and the shards of china scattered across the kitchen. All six of the Gibsons stared, openmouthed, at Rowena.

“If you do not become absolutely still this instant, I will poison your food,” she said to them in an eerily calm voice. “But you won’t know when. You’ll never know which bite will be the one that kills you.” The boys traded glances, their eyes wide. “I assure you—it’s not an empty threat.”

Daniel pressed his lips together to keep from breaking into laughter at how well her threat worked on the children. He glanced at his wife to share the moment of triumph, but Rowena had no intention of allowing any kind of alliance to form between them. It seemed impossible now that she could grow to feel anything more than tolerance for him. She couldn’t get past the children. This wasn’t what she had agreed to.

“Yours too,” she said to Daniel, tapping the side of the iron pot with her fingernail. Clara Bixby was to blame for all of this, Rowena reminded herself, as she did at least once a day. And the woman would get her comeuppance.

As soon as Daniel and the children filed out of the kitchen, Rowena tied a light shawl across her shoulders and walked out the door of the soddy to the other end of the main road. Drake’s Brewery occupied one of the few wood-frame buildings in Destination. It, along with Mr. Schreier’s farmhouse, was among the first to have been built from the few dozen mature trees that once stood on both sides of the Platte River. Clearly no one had thought about how many decades it took for a tree to grow that tall, and that when they used up this wood, there wouldn’t be any more to replace it. Probably no one had thought the town would last longer than a few years. If only they had been right.

The heavy door creaked as Rowena pulled it open. The brewery structure resembled a barn, two stories high and open from the floor to the ceiling inside. The sun shone through the spaces between the slats of wood along the walls and cast a lined pattern of light and shadow across the floor. Rowena cleared her throat.

“Good morning,” she called into the expansive room. She didn’t see anyone, but she could hear the clanking sound of work with a metal tool somewhere. The air was thick with the floral bite of hops. “Good morning,” she called again.

The clanking stopped and a pair of men’s boots appeared on the ladder that ran down the back side of the enormous copper kettle standing twenty feet high in the center of the room.

“Are you Mr. Albright?” Rowena asked. She had been in Destination for more than two weeks, but had been so overwhelmed with the work in the soddy that she had ventured out little and met almost no one.

“Yes, ma’am,” Bill said. She waited for the expression on his face to shift, the light to come into his eyes that would indicate he noticed her beauty. Nothing happened. Rowena stepped farther into the room and threw her shoulders back.

“I understand you and some other men in town aren’t very happy with the matchmaker Mayor Cartwright hired,” she said.

Bill’s eyes widened. He held up his hand. “Look. I understand she may be your friend, but this business doesn’t concern you. Your husband may be happy with how things turned out, but that Miss Bixby took our money and didn’t deliver what she promised.”

“Sounds to me like you’re accusing Miss Bixby of fraud. And don’t worry. She’s no friend of mine.”

“At this point, it’s only theft. We can’t prove that she never
intended
to deliver the brides she promised us. All of us spent the winter corresponding with … somebody. As far as we can tell, Miss Bixby is telling the truth: Our girls just changed their minds about coming out here. We can’t hold her responsible for their temperaments. But the money is another thing. We intend to get that back.”