The Springsweet (13 page)

"I need both hands if I fall," I told him. "I'm clumsy."

Rumbling with amusement, he slipped his hands into his pockets and strode along with me smoothly. "Of this, I am aware, Miss Stewart. You were sure-footed as could be on that fountain until suddenly you were not."

"That's one way to put it," I conceded.

Theo tipped his head back, catching the slanting afternoon sun on his face. He looked rather like a Persian prince, bronzed by the sunlight, his dark hair trying to escape its ribbon. "Then you disappeared entirely; I was agog."

Thinking on it, I could summon the sensation of the cold, the marrow-deep ache of the water as it swallowed me. But it seemed awfully long ago, the dazzling peace I'd felt beneath the surface only slightly recalled.

I told him, "It was deep as a well."

"I know," he replied. "I went in after you."

The grass all around us whispered, stirred by a warm breeze. Trailing my hand across the shifting surface, I plucked a sprig of wild indigo. A ladder of pale blue flowers clung to the stem, and I broke it in half. I slipped a bit behind my ear, then offered the rest to Theo for his buttonhole. "I never did thank you for that."

"And you mustn't. I don't believe in it, gratitude for things that should be a given." Then, as an afterthought, he added with much fire, "I would have gone in after anyone; it wasn't particular to you."

Patting his shoulder, I reassured him, "You're every inch the gentleman."

Theo relaxed a bit, washed over with vindication. "I believe in chivalry."

"Oh, I don't," I replied. "A knight always gets to have his cake and eat it too, doesn't he? 'Hello, my lady, I love you-—but I must run off to find the Holy Grail now. Wait for me!' "

Cross, Theo considered me from the corner of his eye. "That's not chivalry at all. And finding the Grail would be an honorable quest."

"Says the man who would get to ride after it and savor all sorts of adventure in the search." I shrugged; I had hardly designed the way of the world. I was simply subject to it. "I assure you, there are absolutely no epic ways to make a sampler or to roast a lamb shank."

"So you're a suffragette," Theo declared.

I stopped and turned to him. "What if I am?"

And amazingly, Theo quailed. He honestly lost a shade of color from his handsome face, and his brows tented ever so slightly in horror, as if I had pulled open my coat to reveal a clockwork heart, or perhaps a second head growing just beneath my breast. It lasted just a minute, but the impression lingered, even as he recovered. "I don't see why women shouldn't have the vote."

"That's very generous of you," I said. Then I reached out to straighten his sprig of indigo. "But I don't believe we were talking about the vote."

He stood there quietly, perhaps wondering how the conversation had veered so wildly from his expectations. Eyes too dark to read, he pulled his shoulders back and straightened his posture. The wind tossed a stray lock of his hair; he cut quite a regal figure against the darkening sky.

But then, as if he had brushed aside some minor inconvenience, he said, "It
was
a house, it seems. There's someone in the yard."

What a pity he could neither draw nor concede. All his effort to follow me, from burying ground to ball to the great open plains, had been an effort to satisfy his curiosity and none of mine at all. I was the thing
he
wanted, but his affection was an unwanted calling card. I was in no way obligated to accept.

"So there is," I said agreeably, and I stepped past him to introduce myself.

***

"We've dug two wells now," Mr. Cole said, pointing them out. "The first one did nothing but seep. Ivetta caught more water in her teacups than we got out of that thing."

Ivetta watched us from the front of the house, an infant curled on her shoulder. Something about her coal-dark eyes and gaunt cheeks haunted me; she didn't cough, or sweat with a fever, but it was plain she wasn't well. Her wrists were leather-clad bones, much like the knuckle she offered the baby to suck.

Mr. Cole interrupted my thoughts, pointing out the second well. This one had a lid, which Theo held so Mr. Cole could draw the bucket up. "And this one, well, you see it. Half water, half mud. Gotta strain it through cheesecloth and boil it to get a sip."

"That's terrible," I said, peering into the bucket.

Letting the bucket back down, Mr. Cole sighed. "The government says we have to make a living here five years before the land's ours to keep. The way it's going, we're hardly going to make it two. We're hurting, Miss Stewart."

The way he laid it out, so plain, without embellishment, it felt like a tattooing in my flesh. From this very first introduction, I couldn't mistake this as playing. These were no amusing social calls; there would be no cakes and laughter. Everything I said would be of consequence; Emerson's warning came back to me and set my heart to trembling.

"Let me see what I can do," I said.

For my own ease, I walked away from them, trailing into the field to give myself a center of quiet. First my breath, then my will, I reached inside to find the pulse within me that matched the pulse without, thrumming through the earth to sustain it.

I wanted it so badly; I ached to give the Coles good news, to be the one to deliver fresh water and three more years on their land. The wind picked up, and blessedly, I tasted water on it. Turning slowly, seeking the sweetest point of it, I opened my eyes and gazed in wonder.

The silver trace of water ran all around us; I could see the paltry stream feeding the current well. Following it, drawing breath in the same weight and time, I sought its source. Though I had no sense of depth, I plainly saw a bright well before me, and I walked toward it.

When I stood on top of it, in the glimmering threads of my vision, it was just as if I had plunged into the fountain again. I ached with cold clarity. It clasped me and caressed me, pulling through my hair, swirling across my skin. I honestly felt that if I only tried, I could call it up.

But that was madness, just an artifact of seeing the impossible. Pressing a hand to my heart to calm it, I called out. "I beg you dig here, sir."

When Mr. Cole and Theo took spades to dry earth, at first I feared that I had called them on a useless errand. The ground yielded nothing; soon, they both stood knee-deep in the excavation, and nothing came.

Petty terror ran on my skin; I begged the water to come. I clutched my hands together and prayed in earnest. When I closed my eyes, I saw the sad, dark hollow of Ivetta's face and that poor babe wanting more than a dry knuckle to soothe it.

I looked into the silvered map again. Burying my nails in my hands, I pulled from some inward place. I strained toward the firmament, denying the loam its vicious hold-—it was almost a song in me, a call from the water in my flesh to the water in the earth, to unite.

Perhaps overcome with my effort, I thought-—for a singular moment-—that the earth moved beneath my feet. That something had split deep below, that I might have drawn the water up by sheer force and inexplicable magic.

Quite calmly, Mr. Cole said, "You better hop out, son."

My eyes burned, stupid tears promising to spill over, salt water no one could use. Except then I saw Theo throw his spade and Mr. Cole's after it. He scrambled up, hauling Mr. Cole out just as a geyser erupted.

A singular, spectacular spray arced against the sky. It threw crystalline beads like loose pearls; they rained on my shoulders and cooled my face. Then, as gloriously as it rose, it receded. The well filled to the surface and overflowed; water swirled and lapped at the heaps of earth displaced in the digging.

And Mr. Cole, a mature gentleman by my standard, knelt in the new mud and cried.

Eleven

That evening, I stood over a pot of boiling bones, steam like sweat on my face as Birdie sorted through her sewing box for worn patterns.

As the Coles hadn't expected us, we hadn't expected payment. All I asked was that they seed the community with the good news, and I was certain they would. But they also insisted on giving me a fox skin.

It was smooth and well-tanned, probably worth a great deal more than the two dollars that was my asking price. Since we were unlikely to get another, Birdie decided it would make a good pair of gloves for Louella.

"I wanted to tell you something," I said, brushing my face dry before going back to my stirring.

"Tell away, duck," Birdie replied.

I tapped the spoon on the side of the pot to disguise some of my words from Louella's ears. "The men who robbed me ... I saw one of them in town today."

Birdie took a pin from between her lips. "Royal Wakes, I imagine. Ellis keeps himself scarce."

"You know?" I all but dropped the spoon in surprise. It had been such an ugly secret coiled in my chest, one I had borne through our trip to Jubilee and our stop at the Coles'. I hadn't wanted to bring Theo into it or speak it so directly that Louella would pay attention and understand. But now that it was out, with so insignificant a reaction, I could barely contain myself.

Turning the fox skin to measure it, Birdie glanced over her shoulder at me. "Everyone does, Zora. But it's best we keep the Wakes brothers. They never harm anyone."

"I could have been-—"

"But you weren't." She turned back to her sewing. "Sometimes you put up with the bad to avoid the worse. The Dalton boys haven't got a soul to share between them. At least Royal walks around looking like he feels guilty."

I didn't know what to say. Perhaps I had a great deal more to learn about living in the West, but what was the purpose in having a sheriff and a marshal, and a jail right in town, if they were nothing but decoration? I couldn't believe how casually Birdie took it and how easily she said, "Promise me you'll keep it to yourself."

Betrayed, I could only shake my head. But her betrayal made it that much easier to lie to her. "In any case ... I think tomorrow," I said, attempting to disguise my plotting as casual conversation, "I shall go back to those nests and see if I can't find more eggs."

Birdie hummed her agreement, raising a pattern to check it for defect. Lamplight shone through the worn tissue paper, casting a dreamy glow on Birdie's face. "That will be a treat. I wouldn't complain if you brought another chicken."

"I can't imagine I will."

"Zora!" Louella exclaimed. She swung a little fist and laughed, settling in with her grass dolls. "Zora hit the birdie!"

"Yes, I did, and surprised us both." I laughed to myself, for that seemed to be the most excitement Louella had ever enjoyed. Then, thoughtfully, I said, "I should write to Papa and have him send instructions for string traps. He made them when he was a boy; he used to brag about them."

Birdie smoothed a pattern out, then plucked a pin from her sewing box. "Shame we only have the one shotgun."

"Isn't it?" I said, and didn't mean it at all.

Let her believe I'd kit myself out like Annie Oakley and go hunting. Since it was fantasy, it harmed nothing and kept me from having to refuse it. A sharpness pricked at my heart, and I drained from it: I had tucked Thomas' dance card in my corset and put them both away.

Now it seemed to accuse—how many hours had passed since I'd considered him? Certainly I'd given him no thought at all when I agreed to meet Emerson at the creek, when I lied to my aunt to make that meeting possible.

"Do you think about Petty?" I asked softly.

Then Birdie and I both looked to Louella. I should have measured the question before I asked it, but the baby was happily distracted with her grass doll. Birdie moved a bit closer to answer.

"It's hard not to." Gesturing faintly at the soddy, she said, "This was his dream. Wide-open spaces, answering to no man..."

Fishing the bones from the soup, I put them aside to be cracked for marrow. "Didn't you have that in Kansas?"

Birdie made a faraway sound that might have been laughter once. "It got too crowded, he said. We could see our neighbors from our porch. We had a porch then, and glass for our windows. A wagon and a pony..."

I didn't have to ask what happened to them. Everything was dear in the Territories—no doubt they sold them all, to start again on this prairie. How cruel for the first winter to fell him.

"Why don't you go home? You know Mama would love to have you and Louella to fuss over."

Birdie squinted at me. "I
am
home."

Quickly, I apologized. She said it as if I should have realized that; simple Zora, somehow failing to understand something so integral to her being. Heat stung my cheeks, and I stammered to recover. "I didn't mean anything by it."

"Of course not." Birdie clasped the back of my neck, giving me a shake. She was so very like my mother in that moment; I wondered if I were like them, too. Rubbing her thumb against the nape of my neck, Birdie said, "Don't take this personally, duck. You're young and foolish and running away. That doesn't mean we all are."

I did take it personally. Bristling like a boar, I was quite short when I replied, "I came here deliberately. If it hadn't been your home, it would have been a widower's."

"If the destination didn't matter," Birdie said, taking the spoon from my hand, "then how is that anything
but
running away?"

She struck me silent a moment. When I finally rose to my own defense, it was with a change of subject. Stiffly, I said, "My indiscretion at the ball was incidental, I hope you're aware."

"Oh, I'm aware." Tasting the broth, Birdie made a face. "Pauline writes exceptionally detailed letters. I think she's a frustrated novelist."

"A means to an end. Ruination in Baltimore meant I could choose my path thereafter." I lifted my chin. "My plans are honorable; Thomas meant to spend his life caring for people, so that's what I'll do in his stead."

"You can't live his life." And that simply, Birdie clasped my face in her hands. They were worn rough, hard living taking a hard toll on fingertips that were once, no doubt, as smooth as my mama's. "You can only live yours."