Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family] (10 page)

“All he asked was for you to talk to her…” she mumbled under her breath.

Sighing, she took the seat opposite Sarah.

“Mr. Grant said that you and your father came here from Arkansas,” Charlotte began as a gentle way of starting to understand
just how big a task lay before her. “Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you have any schooling back where you came from?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Just as Charlotte was starting to wonder if she would have to pry words from Sarah Beck as painfully as a dentist
extracts rotten teeth, the girl added, “But it weren’t much.”

While Sarah spoke, Charlotte took a long look at the young girl. Strands of her limp blond hair hung down before her face.
An outbreak of pimples stained her face near her thin lips and tiny nose. Thankfully, the darkened spot Charlotte had seen
on Sarah’s face appeared, on closer inspection, to indeed be dirt, not a bruise as feared, although the difference did little
to staunch Charlotte’s growing sense of apprehension and unease.

But what truly struck her as she stared at Sarah was the nearly overpowering fear that if she had ever found herself in a
similar situation, if she’d become pregnant at such a young age, her life would have looked every bit as hopeless.
How could I possibly have gone forward with my life? What burdens would I have put upon all those around me?
Even with her parents’ help, even with the best of intentions, the shame of what she had done would have consumed her. Though
she had only the briefest encounter to assess how much help Alan Beck would be to his daughter, confidence in the man eluded
her. Sarah obviously had nowhere else to turn.

Fighting down her apprehension and determined to, at the least, do as John had asked, Charlotte moved forward with her questioning.
“Can you read or write?”

At the question, Sarah’s eyes rose up and held to Charlotte’s for scarcely an instant, faster than it would have taken her
to even blink her long lashes, but in that fleeting moment a touch of shame revealed itself in her expression, a protected
yet painful secret being pried loose. When she spoke, her gaze was again facing down.

“Just… just a bit, I reckon,” she stammered, “but I ain’t got much of a chance to do any practicin’ or any such. My pa ain’t
the type to have no books just layin’ ’bout. I seen a Bible or two when I weren’t but waist-high, but since we weren’t never
much for churchgoin’, I forget it all.”

“But you do know how to read?”

Sarah nodded.

Determined to find out just how truthful Sarah was being with her, Charlotte began looking around the cabin for some means
of testing her. Just as Sarah admitted, there wasn’t a single book to be seen, but Charlotte’s gaze settled upon a large sack
of flour resting against the wall beside the stove. On it, stenciled in oversize red letters, were the words:
MCGREGGOR FLOUR—THE VERY BEST FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY
.

“Can you read what’s written on that sack?” she asked, pointing.

Sarah followed Charlotte’s request and her eyes squinted down at the advertising, her brow knit in furrows of concentration.
With a nervous uncertainty, she nibbled on her thin, pursed lips. When she finally spoke, her voice lacked
any trace of confidence or surety. “It’s a flour sack… but them other words… are a mite hard,” she stammered. “I don’t know
if I can…”

“Take your time,” Charlotte encouraged her.

“It… it says… it says ‘the ve-very… very… b-be-beast… very be-beast…’ ” The young girl struggled, each word coming out as
unsteadily as a step on ice. Frustration was so apparent across Sarah’s face that when she angrily folded her arms across
her narrow chest there was no doubt that she wouldn’t attempt to read another word.

“That’s all right, Sarah.” Being honest, Charlotte explained, “I just wanted to have some idea of where we might be starting
from.”

“Well, now you know,” Sarah declared as the first tears began to well in her eyes.

Sarah’s words, while the truth, were not what Charlotte wanted to hear; now she knew that Sarah lacked even the most basic
understanding of reading. There could be no doubt that her skills in other subjects, writing and math quickly came to mind,
would be equally poor. Teaching her anything would require a great deal of work as well as patience. They would have to start
at the very beginning.

But just as Charlotte began to grasp just how enormous a task lay before her, she looked at the way Sarah sat in her chair,
her face pointed down at the scarred old tabletop, her shoulders slumped, and
knew
that she had never had the least bit of encouragement. Sarah Beck was beaten
down, ashamed of her shortcomings, headed nowhere, and in that way looked to be even younger, even more of a child, than she
really was.

“How long has it been since you’ve had any schooling?”

“A long time ago,” Sarah admitted. “My pa took me out of school when I was younger ’cause he said it weren’t doin’ me no good,
said learnin’ never did him no good, neither, and he didn’t want me wastin’ my time. Besides, he needed me to help out farmin’,
and when I was away it just meant more work for him.” She hesitated for a moment, before adding, “We was happy like that for
a couple of years, makin’ of that farm what we could… up till I wound up pregnant, and now I ain’t nothin’ but a burden to
him.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Charlotte tried to reassure her, but Sarah wasn’t about to accept what she was offering.

“It was ’cause of what happened to me that we ended up losin’ the farm,” the girl disagreed. “My pa says it ain’t, just like
you did, but you can see it in his waterin’ eyes.”

“What’s done is done. What matters is what you do now.”

“Pa says that, too.” Sarah smiled weakly. “But it don’t make my burden any easier to bear.”

“That’s why you need to let it go,” Charlotte explained, wanting to give whatever meager hope she could to Sarah, but the
girl was already shaking her long hair in resignation.

“Some burdens are so heavy that you can’t let ’em go. They just got a life of their own and there ain’t no escapin’.”

Charlotte found herself stunned by the severity of Sarah’s words; the bluntness with which she spoke of her condition was
unsettling. It didn’t matter if it was becoming pregnant and causing her father to lose their farm that was her burden, or
if it was her unborn child that she would be unable to get away from; either interpretation filled Charlotte with dread.

But it also filled her with resolve.

Charlotte had always been a fighter, both unable and unwilling to surrender to defeat without giving the task her all; her
father had always claimed that she was stubborn to a fault.

Now, looking at Sarah’s downturned eyes and hearing how resigned she was to her fate, Charlotte knew that if she failed to
teach this girl anything, it would not be from a lack of trying, any consequences for her reputation around Sawyer be damned.
She was to be the schoolteacher of Sawyer’s children, so she would be so for
all
of them.

“So it’s been a while since you’ve been to school,” she voiced her thoughts aloud.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you remember anything at all?”

“ ’Bout the only thing I recall as far as readin’ goes is a story my mother used to tell me ’fore I went to sleep,” Sarah
answered, lifting her eyes only briefly before lowering
them again. “It was ’bout a little girl in a bright red outfit who was bringin’ her grandmother some food but found this mean
old critter, a wolf with big teeth, had done beat her there. He’d dressed himself up in the grandmother’s clothes and was
waitin’ in her bed, actin’ and talkin’ like a person, wantin’ to eat the little girl, too.”

“My grandmother used to tell me the same story when I was little.”

Sarah brightened at Charlotte’s words, smiling in a way that prettily lit up her face, a hint of a happier girl trapped by
the harsher reality of her life, faint dimples showing on her cheeks. “My mother used to make different voices for each of
the critters in the book,” she said, “but I used to get a bit scared when she talked like the wolf, what with all the growlin’
and snarlin’ she did.”

“Where is your mother now?” Charlotte asked, broaching the subject that had tugged at her from the moment they had been introduced.

Just as quickly as the smile had appeared on Sarah’s face, it now vanished. Instead of answering, the girl got up from the
table and walked over to the makeshift beds and picked up an item from atop the overturned apple crate. She paused for a moment,
unsure if she wanted to reveal what it was, before returning to the table and putting it down before Charlotte.

“This is her,” Sarah said simply.

The small, faded photograph was crooked inside the square wood frame, its enamel chipped and dusty.
Black-and-white, with a faint crease that ran all the way across its width, the picture showed a woman who appeared to have
struggled with the weight of life every bit as much as her daughter.

Sarah’s mother was neither ugly nor pretty, just plain, with mousy hair that, while long and straight, had been hastily piled
on top of her long face in an obvious attempt to look more sophisticated. Her small mouth was bunched tightly, the woman uncomfortable
at being the object of the photographer’s attention at best, angry at worst. Still, Charlotte knew that the picture she held
was Sarah’s most prized possession.

“She died when I weren’t waist-high,” Sarah said simply.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte replied.

“It come on in the fall,” the girl explained. “Pa said she’d been out in the rain too much… that a wet had done settled into
her chest and it weren’t comin’ out till it killed her. Weeks went by and there weren’t nothin’ to do but listen to coughin’
comin’ from her bed.

“Last time the doctor come to look in on her, he was real quiet, like he was in a church or somethin’. He listened to her
breathe, put his hand on her wrist, gathered up his things, and made for the door. Just ’fore he left, he turned to Pa and
said he was sorry. Pa just nodded. She died that night.

“Since then, it’s just been me and Pa and…” But her voice trailed off before she could say more.

In silent answer to Sarah’s sad tale, Charlotte retrieved the locket she always wore around her neck, opened the tiny clasp,
took a familiar look at what it contained, and held it out to the pregnant girl. Curiously, Sarah took it.

“This is my mother,” Charlotte explained.

“She’s pretty.”

“Yes, she was,” Charlotte agreed with a tiny smile. “But just like your mother, she was taken from me when I was very young,
and just like you, about all I’ve got to remember her by is a photograph.”

“You look an awful lot like her.”

“My father has said that I’m the spitting image of her, especially the hair.”

“What did she die from?” Sarah asked abruptly.

Charlotte’s heart clenched tightly. She knew that there was no way she could tell Sarah the truth: that Alice Tucker had died
in childbirth, leaving her newborn daughter behind to be raised without either of her parents. Thankfully, in Charlotte’s
case there had been her aunt and grandmother to lovingly take over and raise her, an essential task that she doubted Alan
Beck would be capable of performing. In Sarah’s fragile state, already feeling responsible for the predicament she and her
father found themselves in, adding the fear of dying seemed unnecessarily cruel.

“My mother… had a weak heart,” Charlotte managed.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke, content to sit silently, each staring at the other’s photograph, the only
sound a dog’s distant bark. Charlotte was getting ready to speak, to again talk about furthering Sarah’s education so that
she could provide for her unborn child, when the girl spoke, her voice trembling: “I’m a bit scared to be a mother.”

“I think that any woman, no matter her age, would be a bit frightened.”

“Would you be scared if you were me?”

Charlotte nodded.

“Thing is, I ain’t got no one around to tell me right from wrong with a baby. I ain’t never had no time with one ’fore, ’cept
for this one time on a train. What happens if I do somethin’ wrong?”

“You have your father…”

“He ain’t no woman.”

“No, he’s not,” Charlotte agreed, her concerns about Alan’s skills at child rearing already in question. “But…” She paused,
the weight of what she was about to say heavy before plunging forward. “You have me.”

“You’d… you’d help me?”

“I’ll try, but only if you’ll let me teach you proper schooling.”

“I’ll have to do learnin’… and you’ll be my teacher…”

Charlotte began to smile a bit beside herself; that
was
what it meant. When she had first set foot in the Becks’ small cabin, she’d already resigned herself to exiting as quickly
as possible. But, after beginning to understand Sarah’s predicament, she had been swayed. Now she
would take on the task with everything she could muster. She would be a teacher. But before she could say as much, John Grant
burst into the cabin and shouted, “Charlotte! We gotta go right now!”

“What… what’s wrong?”

“The prairie’s on fire!”

J
OHN
G
RANT DROVE
the truck recklessly down the dirt road, his eyes surveying the sky through the dusty windshield. Unlike the trip to the
Becks’ ramshackle cabin, a gentle drive that gave him and Charlotte plenty of time to look at the beautiful yet rugged landscape,
they now hurtled sharply around corners, wheels sliding in the scrabbly, loose dirt, and bouncing over the many rocks and
ruts that littered their path. Charlotte clung tightly to the truck’s door frame, her feet pushed hard against the floorboards
as she desperately tried to keep from bouncing off the seat. She wasn’t brave enough to guess how fast they were going.

From somewhere close by, somewhere over the gentle rises of the hills before them, dark tendrils of smoke rose steadily upward
to the cloudless sky, faintly billowing and spreading in the soft breeze. Charlotte couldn’t be
absolutely certain, but she thought that the plume came from near the ranch; still, to her eyes it didn’t look particularly
threatening, certainly not enough to have caused John to react in such a panicked way. Regardless, they continued to race
onward.