Journey to Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #3) (31 page)

“Aye, it’s true,” she finally added in a strangled voice, “he came nigh to killin’ me. And the fear he has put in me is even worse. It’s a cruel thing, is fear. I dinna know why I’m here, except that I had to get awa’, and my first thought was to go to Tierney, who helped me before, in Binkiebrae. Weel, I hae nae family here, ye ken. An’ e’en if I did,” she added bitterly, “they’re afeard o’ the MacDermotts.”

Many clucks of sympathy, several clearings of throats, a surreptitious wiping of Oma Gussie’s eyes.

“You’re velcome to stay here, liebchen,” Frank Schmidt, the patriarch of the family said and meant it. “You’ll be safe here.”

“Thank you! Oh, thank you! But I feel like I want to be wi’ Tierney. She’s havin’ a hard time herself. Perhaps Pearly has told you that the lady where she works—Mrs. Ketchum—died several months ago, and Tierney isna supposed to be there withoot another woman. And yet she feels such sympathy for Mr. Ketchum, and willna leave until someone cooms along to take her place, maybe a relative from Bliss. You know Bliss?”

Anne meant the town and district of Bliss, of course, but, looking around the loving circle, felt that this family, in the truer sense of the word, did indeed know the meaning of bliss.

Being assured that they all knew Bliss, a town north of here, in the bush, Anne continued.

“It’ll ease the situation there, for Tierney, if I can be wi’ her now. An’ surely Lucian won’t go way oot there. Think?”

“Surely not,” Pearly “thought.”

“But,” Pearly continued, “how is she to get there?” Pearly, wise Pearly, did nothing but look around the room, and at Frankie in particular, with her pansy/purple eyes and, as ever, the heart of young Frankie turned over.

“I’ll take her! Whattya say, Opa?” Frankie looked expectantly toward his grandfather.

“Shall I take her? There’s not that much work to do here, being winter and all, and Pearly will be here to help. Right, Pearly?” Frankie, wise Frankie, looked at Pearly trustingly, and her heart turned over.

“Right. I can help outside, as well as in,” she said eagerly. “I can help with the chickens—I feed ’em anyway—and I can even help with the milkin.’” Pearly had learned much more than baking since she had been on the homestead.

Mr. Schmidt looked properly persuaded. “Da veather iss goot now,” he said sagely, “and I tink iss gonna be fine for a few days, dough ve neffer can tell . . .”

“It’ll just take two days, Opa. A day over and a day back. Whattya say?”

Frankie’s strong, square face was confident. His broad shoulders straightened; he loved a challenge in his own quiet way. His heart, once testy with this Anne Fraser, had, in the space of a few minutes, come full circle, and he was ready to defend her with his dying breath.

Would he be called upon to give it?

T
he wind was muted, but still loose snow skirmished over hard-packed drifts, curiously resembling the breath that curled from the mouths of the team as Anne and young Frank left the homestead and headed out across the prairie.

As the cutter passed through Hanover, they could see children on their way to school, romping and playing, running up the frozen banks and sliding down with great glee and much shrieking, breath also curling in white mists around their tightly and brightly capped heads.

“It’s a glorious day,” the usually taciturn Frankie commented, having learned a new appreciation for his wintry surroundings from an ever-awed Pearly. Pearly thought Hanover, in winter, was almost as fine as in autumn, when the grain covered the fields in countless stalks of bound sheaves soon to become wagonloads of golden grain. Such bounty! Forgotten the long days of summer and the burning of a sun that came early, stayed late, and poured out its heat tirelessly, only occasionally routed by dark skies and enough rain to ensure a good crop for the hardworking people of the prairie lands. It had been a good year.
Thank God! And thank Him they did, being, for the most part, God-fearing people, well aware of their puny ability and their heavy dependence on divine providence.

The parting from Pearly had been brief. Wrapped in their heavy outside garments, Anne and Frankie were too warm to linger in the house and too cold to linger on the step. Pearly had spent as much time fussing over Frankie’s scarf as Anne’s, and her farewell waves, if they but knew it—and perhaps they did—were as much for the man she saw every day as for the friend she hadn’t seen for the best part of a year. Frankie drove away feeling like a king in his royal carriage and flourished the reins as happily. Anne departed feeling a warmth of family closeness she hadn’t known . . . perhaps ever. That it was because of the Lord they loved and served, Anne recognized, and it made her own empty heart yearn for the same satisfaction and contentment.

“It worked out well, dinna it,” Anne offered tentatively, finally. “For Pearly to coom work for ye instead o’ me, I mean.”

The younger Frank Schmidt, called Frankie to differentiate from his grandfather, looked down on the fair face of Anne Fraser and counted himself blessed that usually it was the thin little face of Pearly Chapel beside him. Consequently his answer was generous.

“Yah. Yah, it has. Pearly was God’s choice for the Schmidt family. I—that is—everyone loves her.”

“I ken that; I can tell,” Anne said humbly, adding after a moment, “forgive me, Frankie, if ye will, for being such a . . . such a gowk. Please?”

Frankie slapped the broad backs of the team with the reins and his laugh soared out over the prairie, happy and content.

“It may just have been the best thing you could have done for me,” he said, pale eyes alight, “and, I hope, for Pearly. Of course I forgive you.
I thank you!
”

Well!
Anne thought to herself, slightly taken aback by his enthusiasm for her bad behavior,
he doesn’t have to be that happy about it!

The barriers between them, however, if they did indeed exist still, were broken, and the remainder of the day passed in harmony.

It was the northland at its best—shimmering in its beauty, snapping with cold at first, slowly growing milder as the day advanced, until Frankie was moved to say, “I feel the first hint of the coming spring in the air. Oh, it’s not yet a chinook or anything like that, but it’s definitely warming up. And it sure helps us get across this old prairie—not having to fight wind and weather, that is. We should be in Fielding by midafternoon. Then we’ll ask where the Ketchum farm is and be there by supper time. Whattya think of that, Annie?”

His use of “Annie” set the seal on their new friendship, and Anne’s heart, still feeling the faint touch of shame over her previous behavior, was finally absolved and cleared.

A sandwich at noon, as they drove, and a sip of milk from a bottle they had kept under wraps, and the miles slipped away almost happily. Anne was going to Tierney, and there she would be safe.

The proprietor of the general store in Fielding gave them clear directions to the Ketchum place. It wasn’t difficult; there was only the single track to follow out across the vast expanse of white, turning right at the tenth meridian road. Ten meridian roads laid out precisely—ten miles.

“You’ll pass the Brokaw place about two miles from here,” he said, “then nothing, at least on this road, until you get to Will’s. Say, you want land, young feller? I’m also a land agent, and there’s still plenty abeggin’ to be taken—”

Frankie proudly assured the man that he had a place of his own. “My Opa’s,” he said in an aside to Anne. “It’s to be mine. That’s why I stay and take care of the place, and of Opa and Oma.”

“Strange, your asking about the Ketchum place,” the man said thoughtfully to Frankie as Anne studied the candy counter and made a decision to take some licorice to small Buster. “Just finished directing another feller out there. But I guess he decided not to go. He went over to Swiger’s Stopping Place; guess he got himself accommodations there.”

“Come, Annie,” Frankie called. “Best we get on our way if we want to pull in for supper. I could eat a horse and chase the rider, myself.”

Annie laughed, admitted she would welcome a good meal, and followed Frankie back out to the cutter, where they crept back in among the cold quilts and blankets and shivered their way back onto the proper road out, once again, onto the broad prairie.

Jingling along through the otherwise silent landscape, they might as well have been on the moon, so remote were they, and so bleakly barren was the terrain. Thinking of the warm fire ahead and the warmer welcome, Frankie and Annie found their expectations rising, and their laughter rang out from time to time.

Eventually Anne took the opportunity to nap a little, her head bobbing in time with the horses’ gait and the slipping and sliding of the cutter’s runners on the road over which, it was apparent, only one or two other rigs had passed since the last snowstorm.

“That must be it,” Frankie nudged Anne awake and pointed.

Smoke from a stovepipe drifted, white and pure, across the blue sky already dimming toward evening, as the house lifted over the curve of the horizon. Anne and Frankie watched as it seemed to move toward them, closer and closer until, with a flourish, Frankie urged the weary horses to a trot and curvetted between half-buried gate posts into the Ketchum yard.

It had been a long day. Tierney had spent several hours ironing, and her shoulders ached. Ironing was a wearying job, though the Ketchum equipment was the very latest and best. For one thing, there was a real ironing board, one that could be folded away when not in use and with a sadiron holder on one end. It was the first time in her life that Tierney had not ironed on a board set across two chair backs.

The irons themselves were at the root of her weariness. There were three of them, set to heat on the range top, each a different size: No. 1 weighed four pounds and had one end rounded
“for polishing”; No. 2, 5 1/8 pounds; and No. 3, recommended for heavy overalls and the like, weighed 5 3/8 pounds. The detachable handle could be used on all three and, supposedly, “fit naturally to the hand without straining the arm or wrist.”

Arm and wrist perhaps, nevertheless, as Tierney prepared a batch of macaroni and beef and tomatoes for their supper, she stopped from time to time to rub and manipulate her elbow and shoulder; it had indeed been a big ironing. Soiled clothes were left to accumulate through blizzards, and Tierney always hastened to get out a batch of laundry when a day dawned bright and clear and promised to be sunny long enough to dry clothes. Or stiffen them. It was a Herculean task to wrestle the garments, frozen into bizarre shapes, off the line, collapse them by main force into a basket, and take them into the house, there to warm, sag, and eventually finish drying. And of course such a hit-or-miss laundry schedule deviated sadly from the housewife’s cardinal rule of washing on Monday and ironing on Tuesday and threw the entire week into housework chaos.

The macaroni dish, a sealer of green beans, and great slabs of bread—which Tierney had learned to make well under the direction of Lavinia—this would be their supper. Planning to serve a sauce dish of canned peaches for dessert, at the last moment Tierney had put together a cakelike topping called “Cobbler” in Lavinia’s
White House Cook Book
. Written by Hugo Ziemann, chef of the United State’s White House under President Harrison, it promised “1,600 tested cooking recipes, besides numerous hints and helps for the toilette and household” and was a great aid to proper cooking for Tierney.

She had barely taken the dessert from the oven when she had cause to rejoice in her decision—a rig was pulling into the yard. What a rare occurrence! And right at supper time. There was no thought of sending anyone on without food and drink and a good thawing out at the side of the heater. Tierney glanced at the cobbler, lifted the lid to the macaroni dish, sniffing appreciatively, stirred the beans, and felt herself prepared. Just pray it wasn’t the preacher from Fielding
with another stern rebuke for the arrangement at the Ketchum house!—a single female,
unchaperoned
, living with an eligible widower! Perhaps a good meal would soften his countenance and bend his rigid back. In his disapproval he made Tierney think of nothing so much as the misshapen, frozen balbriggans she wrestled from the line after washday.