Choices of the Heart (27 page)

“I didn’t fall and I’m not injured anywhere. I was thinking of that thread. It’s like having a spider spinning a web through my face.”

“Ah.” She smiled. “It’s silk. You need something fine for stitches on the face or head. Ready for the last one?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Mrs. Tolliver, perhaps you’d better put your arm around him. He’s looking a bit green. If he faints, I’ll never catch him.”

“If I faint,” Griff said, “I’ll die of shame before I hit the floor.”

“You kind of look like a body does before he keels right over. Those pretty eyes of yours are going to just roll up in your head and you’ll slide right down—” She stuck the needle in.

He clenched his teeth hard enough he should be cracking his molars. His eyes watered, but he remained upright.

She said he had pretty eyes.

“You are all right.” She smiled at him. Though Momma’s arm encircled his shoulders, Esther laid her hand on his upper arm and looked straight into his eyes. “I’m going to clean that up a little more and put a sticking plaster on it. We’ll keep it clean for a week or two, and it should be all right. But it’s going to hurt. The swelling’s just setting in.”

“It’ll learn him to mind his tongue,” Momma said, rising. “I’ll fetch some water so you can clean yourself up.”

“There’s two full buckets by the well.” Griff spoke to Momma but kept watching Esther as she cleaned her needle and wrapped it in a square of soft cloth, then took a packet of papery stuff from her bag and moistened one side with some water.

“Did you tell Zach you kissed me?” she asked as she stuck the paper on his face.

“I’m afraid I did.”

“Is that why he hit you?”

“He didn’t like it. But he hit me because I told him you’re a shameless flirt.”

“I’m not shameless.”

“You weren’t shameless when you were petting me like one of those cats when you want it to sit on your lap, just to get me to set you down?” The surge of disappointment and anger roiled inside him again. “What do you call it then? Taming me like some kind of beast?”

She bent low over her satchel, peering inside as though searching for a lost coin the size of a pea. “I’m not making myself understood.”

Momma was coming back, bucket bales rattling.

“I can’t say now.” She spoke quickly. “My foot hurts. I’m worn to a thread, and your mother is about to walk in. So answer me this before she does: will this start the feuding again? Because if it does, you know I have to leave.”

“Zach will see good sense by morning. It’ll take more’n a little spat over a female, even you, to start up the fighting again.”

“’Course it will.” Momma swung through the doorway, carrying two buckets and a stout stick from the woodpile. “My nephew’s not a fool. Now, see here, I’ve brought you a stick to help you hobble around. Can you get back to your cabin on your own, or do you need Griff to carry you?”

“I can manage,” Esther said. “He shouldn’t strain himself.”

Or be that close to her again.

Except that didn’t matter. The grace of her movements, the sweetness of her voice, the way she had been so kind to him after what he’d said about her, lured him like a trout to a fly. More like to a butterfly. Despite being convinced she wasn’t as good a girl as the preacher’s daughter should be, nothing stopped his heart from wanting her.

“Good night,” he said. “And thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She limped across the room, leaning on the stick and clutching that satchel she had so clung to on the journey to the ridge, according to Zach. “I suppose I’ll see you all in the morning.”

Griff relaxed. She wasn’t going to run away, not yet anyway. “In the morning.”

“We’ll bring you your vittles,” Momma said, “so’s you don’t have to walk too much. And there won’t be no school. The young’uns are worn out anyhow.”

“I can teach,” Esther protested. “Perhaps if I have a chair.”

“You just rest a day or two and see how that foot does. Now git yourself to bed before you fall down yourself.”

“I’ll bring you the dulcimer so you don’t get tired of doing nothing,” Griff offered.

“I’d like that.” Her smile was warm, reaching all the way to her eyes.

Their gazes held for only a heartbeat, but she might as well have stitched herself right to him, so powerfully did he feel her nearness.

Griff rose and opened the door for her. From ten inches away, he didn’t look at her. “You don’t need me to walk with you?”

“You’d better not.”

She was right in that.

“Then I’ll stand here until you’re there and have a lantern lit.”

She nodded and started across the yard, past the garden and the well and over the patch of barren ground he wanted lush with grass one day. A cat meowed in greeting. Her voice murmured through the night. Then the cabin door latch clicked. A few minutes later, light flared through the window. Still Griff remained in the doorway with his back to Momma and his face to the night.

“Are you going to do right by her?” Momma asked.

“How can you ask? I scarce know her.”

“You seem to think you know her well enough to take liberties with her.”

“Yes, ma’am, I thought she might be willing. And that’s what’s wrong. She ran away from Zach. She still might run away from me.” He took a deep breath to ease the constriction around his heart. “Until I know why she ran here, there can’t be anything else but what we got now, maybe less. ’Cause I’m afraid it’s something bad.”

23

Pounding on her cabin door dragged Esther from sleep at dawn, only an hour after she’d managed to fall asleep. Eyes still half closed, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and cried out as her injured foot hit the floor.

“Miss Cherrett? Miss Cherrett, come quick.” The voice belonged to a boy, and not one of the Tollivers. Neither Jack nor Ned called her Miss Cherrett. “Please.” The latch rattled.

Lips compressed to stop another cry of pain, Esther snatched up her dressing gown and wrapped it around her as she limped to the door, calling, “I’m coming. I’m—” She raised the bar.

The door flew open, and Mattie Brooks tumbled over the threshold. “Praise Jesus.” He grasped her hand with both of his. “You’ve got to come now.”

“Come where?” Esther rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Mattie, what are you doing out this time of night?”

Not even the roosters had crowed their greeting to the day.

“Zach. It’s Zach. He’s been stabbed.”

“Not another one.” Esther’s hand flew to her side as though a knife might be sticking out of it. “When? Where? No, never you mind all that now. Let me get dressed.”

She returned to her room. Once there, she stared down at her bandaged foot. She could never walk across the mountain to the Brookses’ home.

“Mattie,” she called through the door, “go to the barn and saddle a horse. I can’t walk.”

“I don’t want to get shot by no Tolliver for stealing.”

“You won’t. I promise. But I can’t walk that far right now. Hurry.”

“Yes’m.” The outer door banged. Most likely, his racket had already awakened someone in the house who would be down any moment to learn what was afoot. But they wouldn’t shoot a boy even if it looked like he was stealing. Of course, at fourteen, Mattie wasn’t considered much of a boy any longer, certainly not a child. And shooting him would start up the feuding.

But if Zach had been stabbed, someone had already recommenced the feuding.

No need to ask whom. Those Tollivers the night before talked about getting rid of more Brookses. Drunk enough, angry with Griff for shaming them by making them run away from him, they might have retaliated on a Brooks caught out alone in the night. Or another Tolliver might have retaliated for a blow to his face. And a stab wound from over two months ago?

Esther’s fingers fumbled on the buttons of her dress. Not Griff. Surely Griff would never do anything so violent. If he were inclined that way, he would have struck back in the yard, not ambushed his cousin in the night.

Or perhaps he had struck out—with a blade—and left Zach bleeding in the yard. None of them would know. No one had gone outside except to the well and Esther’s cabin.

“No, I won’t believe it.” She tossed a shawl over her shoulders, bundled her hair into a knot on the back of her head, and snatched up her satchel. By the time she hobbled to the front door, Mattie was waiting with a horse bridled. It was the dark gray one Griff had been riding on the journey from the east, black in the dawn light. Mattie’s face was ghostly pale in comparison.

“C-can we both ride?” His stammer said as much as his pallor—he was scared to death.

Esther was going to a patient, nothing more—not a young man she had hurt the night before, not a young man whose spurt of violence caused an injury she had repaired. He was a patient in need of help—if the distance didn’t mean she was too late to provide it.

“Yes, we can both ride,” she said. “We’ll have to. But let’s walk outside the compound first.”

They exited through the rear gate so as not to pass the house. A tree stump offered Esther a mounting block, and she swung up behind the saddle with only a little clumsiness and a small flash of ankle. Her soft slippers, all she could wear over her bandage, were not suitable for riding, so Mattie used the saddle and stirrups, and they headed along the well-trodden track that served as a road—up, up, up the mountainside, past cleared fields with their ripening corn, through high pastures with a few sheep, goats, and cows, then into the forest where night still reigned.

“What happened?” Esther asked under cover of the trees.

“We dunno.” Mattie’s tall, gangly frame trembled as though he were cold in the misty morning. “Pa found him when he come home this morning.”

Whatever Mr. Brooks had been doing out all night, his coming home in the wee hours of the morning proved fortuitous for Zach.

“Zach was lying on the path bleeding like a stuck pig,” Mattie continued. “He was outta his head, but he kept asking for you, so Momma told me to come fetch you.”

“Where was the wound?” Esther asked. “Chest, belly, a limb?”

“Kinda to the side of his belly, I think. Couldn’t tell for all the blood. Momma’s doctored him some, but she’s not so good at it.”

“He was conscious?”

“Ma’am?”

“Awake?”

“If you count talking nonsense awake, then sure.”

“What sort of nonsense?”

Ask
questions, gather facts.
It kept her from thinking of the worst cases.

Mattie bent his head to avoid a low-hanging branch. “Just asking for you mostly, and how you was really an angel. And something about Griff—” He shut up as though someone had laid a hand over his mouth.

Esther tensed. “What about Griff?”

Mattie shrugged.

“Mattison Brooks, what did Zach say about Griff?”

“Momma said not to say. She don’t think he did it.”

“But someone else in your family does?” Now Esther shivered too, though heat from the day before seemed trapped beneath the tight canopy of leaves without a breeze stirring.

“Pa and Henry,” Mattie whispered.

“Oh no.” Esther closed her eyes and didn’t duck in time to avoid low-hanging leaves from catching in her hair and tugging it loose from its pins. It tumbled down her back in abandoned waves, messy, inappropriate for a sickroom.

If not worse.

No, she would not consider that for a moment. Zach. Must. Not. Die. The consequences of that, the repercussions, would prove disastrous for everyone.

“Mattie, believe me, no one at the Tolliver house left last night. I was awake until a little over an hour ago and heard nothing.”

“They ain’t the only Tollivers.”

Too true, and some had been planning to be rid of more Brookses.

“Can we go any faster?” Suddenly she needed the horse to gallop, take flight, and leap over the mountain to the next hollow.

“No, ma’am. It ain’t safe.”

“Then let’s hope I’m a better healer than teacher.”

“Ma’am?”

“Your grammar, Mattie,” Esther tried to say with some cheerfulness. “It’s appalling.”

“It’s what?”

“Bad. But at least you learned what grammar is.”

“Yes’m. I’m doing my lessons, but if Zach’s laid up, I can’t come to school. Gotta work the ferry.”

“Aren’t you too young?” She couldn’t imagine a lad of his age in charge of safely carrying wagons and horses and people across the swift waters of the New River.

Mattie stiffened. “Zach’s been doing it since he was younger than me. I wanta be there now, but Momma and Pa said I should be getting book learning first.”

Even with a lead mine starting to produce money for them, they insisted their children work. Good in many ways, yet it denied them the gift of reading and writing and learning about the world around them. The latter would intrude on them soon enough. The mountains couldn’t remain isolated forever. The more people moved west, the more traffic the river would get. Towns grew. New ones sprang up. The Tollivers, Gosnells, and Brookses would want to spend their lead mine income and needed to learn not to be taken advantage of.

She should be in her classroom in another five hours helping with this, but Mrs. Tolliver had canceled classes because Esther’s foolishness had injured her. She was supposed to be resting, and yet she was riding across the mountain on Griff’s horse to practice a skill she had sworn she would leave behind. Next thing she knew, she would be delivering babies.

“A sad joke, God?” she murmured.

Mattie made no indication that he heard.

Surely God had taken her profession from her, rejected the skill she had worked to gain for years to make her mother happy and both parents proud. They had loved her and given her so much, it was the least she could do in return, but she had failed them. God had rejected the gift she’d dedicated to Him when she took the midwife’s vow practiced by women in her family for centuries.

And yet there she was close enough to one more patient to see smoke from the Brooks house curling into the pale blue sky and rising to mingle with the mist still lying along the ridges. Cows lowed, begging to be milked, and the rising cackle of chickens suggested their eggs were being gathered and grain spread for their breakfast. Mattie guided the gelding around a curve in the path, and the Brooks compound opened up below with a pale finger of sunlight centering on a small pond of water surrounded by green grass and other vegetation.