Choices of the Heart (20 page)

“Don’t do no lookin’ at me, ma’am.” Sam fidgeted some more, rubbing his pocket.

That pocket moved.

“Are you certain of that?” Esther pressed.

“She talks right funny,” Mattie whispered. He had stopped fidgeting and tucked his hands under his legs.

Esther laid her hand on Sam’s shoulder, thin but sturdy inside his blue-dyed shirt. “Do I need to turn you upside down to get at your pockets?”

“I don’t got nothing.” Sam stuck out his lower lip.

The others sat perfectly still, watching, lips sealed as though someone had glued them closed. They wouldn’t tattle on their cousin. They wanted to see what the new schoolma’am would do.

“Then here is your first grammar lesson, Samuel Brooks and the rest of you. When you say, ‘I don’t got nothing,’ that is a double negative, and in English and arithmetic, two negatives create a positive.” Esther hauled the boy to his feet. “That means you have something. So what is it?”

His pocket quivered.

“I don’t understand what you just said.” Sam’s lower lip protruded further and quivered. “That’s a lot of fancy words.”

She was tempted to give in to the plea for mercy in those pale blue eyes. He was angelic-looking, which probably meant he was a bit worse than an imp.

“What’s in your pocket, Sam?” she asked more gently. “Shall I have your brother pull it out?”

“Uh-huh.” He blushed.

“Mattie?”

Fourteen-year-old Mattie, homely face split into a grin, dove his hand into his brother’s pocket and emerged with a tiny green frog. It hopped feebly in Mattie’s hand, its eyes bulging.

“I believe,” Esther said, “this fellow needs some water. Liza, will you please fetch a bowl?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Liza scrambled over Brenna and raced out the door.

Esther frowned down at Sam. “You nearly killed one of God’s creatures for what reason? Trying to scare me sometime in the day?”

“It’s just a frog.” Sam could give Brenna pouting lessons.

“Frogs have a purpose on this earth, as does each of us.” Esther began to turn the moment into a lesson. “Frogs eat things like flies and mosquitoes.”

“And then they get et by bigger things,” Jack pointed out.

Esther nodded. “That’s right. Fish and snakes and other creatures that we might use for their skins, or animals we catch and eat.”

“We don’t eat no mountain lions,” Ned said.

“No.” Esther worked to suppress a shudder.

That humanlike scream had disturbed her sleep again the previous night.

“But they have a different purpose,” she continued.

Such as?

She didn’t know.

“They keep the varmints like rats away,” Mattie supplied.

Esther favored him with a brilliant smile of relief. Before she needed to continue, Liza returned with a bowl of water, and Mattie deposited the suffering amphibian into it, then carried it outside. Once he returned, Esther swept back to the front of the room and fixed each child with a stare until he or she met her gaze.

“Next time I will take the object home with you while you explain to your parents why you needed to bring it to class. Understand?”

“You ain’t gonna tell my momma?” Sam asked.

Brenna curled her upper lip. “She’ll tell mine. And I was just trying to draw.”

“We have time for drawing later, Brenna—with the appropriate implements.”

The children gave her blank looks.

“We’ll use chalk and slates for drawing,” she clarified. “Right now we are going to see what you can read.”

She had created sheets of paper with various paragraphs from the simple to the more complex. Copying each by hand had been painstaking but necessary for efficiency. She passed them out and the testing began. Liza, as expected, read the best, then Jack. Ned and Mattie read poorly, and Brenna somewhere in between. Sam couldn’t sound out a single word, which reminded Esther that Zach wanted her to teach him to read. She hoped he knew more than his youngest brother. Sam would be a challenge to teach from the beginning.

But not in arithmetic. He worked out the answers to her sums faster than anyone else and was accurate every time. By the time she declared the day over, he was grinning with triumph at his ability with numbers, and so was Esther.

She was also worn to a thread and wanted nothing more than to take her own drawing materials into a quiet place and be left alone, no one talking to her, no one asking her questions, no one demanding her time. But Mrs. Tolliver wanted to know how the day had progressed, if any of the children gave her trouble, if she thought her young’uns could learn.

“Of course they can. All of them are intelligent.”

The truth. Whether or not they wanted to learn remained to be seen after only one day.

It remained to be seen after two, four, five days. With a sigh of relief, Esther closed the door behind the last Tolliver on Friday afternoon. Whether it was risky or not, she intended to go for a long walk. The path up the mountain and then down again to the river was clear and well-traveled enough that she should be safe. She just must not stray off to the waterfall or any other alluring cathedral of nature. That much she had gleaned from the children and Mrs. Tolliver during the weeks she had been on Brooks Ridge. Two hours of solitude was all she asked.

She donned her half boots, hooked the buttons up the insides of her ankles, tied a poke bonnet over her hair, and exited her cabin with her sketching materials tucked under her arm. Two of the now four cats she fed scraps to each night wound themselves around her ankles. She bent and patted them, checking for flea bites and sores. One might be expecting kittens. In a few weeks, her sides would bulge indelicately.

“You should keep to your den soon, Momma,” she murmured to the gray-striped tabby.

“Meow?”

“Yes, I’ve seen that handsome tom. He’d better do right by you.” With a scratch behind the pointed ears, one a bit ragged from an old fight, Esther straightened and slipped behind her cabin and out the small back gate of the stockade fence, which was built to keep out marauding Indians that had bothered settlers to the mountains not that many decades earlier.

Cool, sweet air met her beneath the trees. Weaving around rocks and in and out of the rocky ground, a stream babbled along beside her path. Few birds summoned the energy to sing in the afternoon heat, so her footfalls crunched loudly on dead leaves and loose stones. No one could truly walk silently on this ground, but Griff came rather close. She rarely heard him approach no matter the terrain. Zach, on the other hand, whistled and tramped along as though announcing his presence. He didn’t surprise a body. She appreciated that about him. She didn’t appreciate Griff’s stealth.

And she didn’t appreciate the way her mind turned to comparisons between the two men. She would choose Zach if she were to choose either of them, which she would not. She held no more feelings for Zach so far except mild liking. He’d come by twice that week for her to give him a reading lesson. He knew his letters and could read simple words, but not much more. He was intelligent, though, and learned quickly. Teaching him was no effort, yet when he read his first verses from the Bible, he gazed up at her with an expression of such admiration and longing she had cut the lesson short and made excuses for him to stay away.

As for Griff . . . She warmed at the memory of sitting close as he positioned her fingers on the dulcimer strings. She tensed at the memory of how he pretended she didn’t exist half the time during meals.

Shoving the two men out of her head, Esther chose a fallen log beside the stream at which to stop and perch her sketchpad upon her knees. Sunlight shafted through a break in the canopy overhead. Dense underbrush shielded her from view from the path, and peace settled around her. She concentrated on capturing the scene around her. If—when?—she told her parents where she was, she wanted pictures to send them.
I am well, Papa and
Momma. Well.

And right then, she was happy, more peaceful than she had been in months. Warm and drowsy and lulled by the gently chuckling water beside her.

Too warm and lulled by the gently chuckling water. Her charcoal dropped from her fingers. The pad fell from her knees. She leaned back against an oak and let the serenity of the mountains wash over her until she experienced a hint of God’s presence with her. A hint . . . A hint . . .

The voices jerked her from her doze. She started upright, then ducked her head so her pale face didn’t shine beyond the bushes.

She recognized one voice—Bethann Tolliver’s, but not sounding like anything she had demonstrated around Esther before. No anger. No bitterness. Not even the grudging and rough kindness she showed her younger siblings and parents.

She was crying and speaking in staccato bursts between sobs. “You promised . . . me. You—you . . . p-promised.” Her voice swelled then faded as she passed Esther’s hiding place, then moved on with two sets of footfalls accompanying the accusation.

Promised. Promised. Promised.
The word seemed to echo off the hills.
Promised. Promised. Promised.

Slowly Esther rose to her knees and peered through some branches, trying to glimpse Bethann’s companion, but they were already too far down the hill, all that was visible being a shock of red hair.

Esther didn’t know anyone on the mountain with red hair other than Mr. Tolliver and Bethann. Bethann was not likely to be talking to her father out on the mountainside in the middle of the afternoon. And what had her companion promised? To marry her? And now he had changed his mind?

Not my concern
, Esther told herself and began to rummage in the old leaves and fallen pine needles for her charcoal pencil.
Not my concern.

Yet if she saw Griff and he chose not to ignore her, she would probably tell him. And at the upcoming celebration, she would look for a tall man with red hair the color of a sunset.

Before Esther could mention to Griff what she’d seen, Saturday night arrived and he came to her door smelling of spring water and the woods, his hair still wet from his swim. He held his dulcimer under his arm. “Ready for a lesson?”

“Won’t we wake up the children?”

And didn’t he awaken something she thought dead inside her?

“I mean, it’s late. You must be tired.” She offered him a smile.

“Never too tired to play on a Saturday night, with the work done and a day of rest ahead.” He ran his fingers down a string, making the instrument sigh. “If you get good enough, you can teach the children.”

“Perhaps you should.”

That single note reverberated through her ears, her head, her soul—a soft cry for someone to release . . . something.

“All right.” She couldn’t say anything else. “We can drag one of the benches outside.”

Griff handed her the dulcimer while he brought out one of the school benches. He set it beside the door and waited for her to seat herself. Not until he joined her did she realize her error—the benches were large enough for two females or two half-grown boys to share, but not a full-grown man and woman. They were too close to both fit. Shoulders, hips, thighs touched. Their arms entwined as he laid the instrument across her knees.

“Show me what you remember from last week.” He curled her fingers around the neck.

She gave him good G and D chords, then her fingers slipped on the C. They were sweating in the sultry June heat that was waiting for a storm to strike.

“Like this.” He turned to face her more. His knee pressed harder against hers.

She tried to edge away. Her skirt caught under his leg, and she slipped to the edge of the bench.

“Careful.” His arm shot out and encircled her waist, drawing her back onto the seat, pulling her close to his side.

Just as Zach sauntered across the yard.

“I think,” he said coldly, “that she wants you to let her go.”

“I think,” Griff responded with the flash of a smile, “if I do she’ll tumble onto the ground.” He rose with languid grace, drawing Esther up with him. “But you’re right. This bench is too small for decency.”

Esther gripped the dulcimer hard enough to untune the strings and stared from one male to the other. If they were stags, they’d have locked horns by now. Moonlight behind them obscured their expressions, but they carried themselves with the identical stance of men on the edge of combat.