The Bride's House (6 page)

“You’re the nicest person I’m acquainted with in Georgetown,” Nealie said, “except for Mrs. Travers. If it hadn’t been for her, maybe I would have ended up with those sorry girls on Brownell Street.”

“Why, Miss Bent!”

Nealie blushed and said defensively, “Well, there isn’t much choice for a girl like me.”

“If you had gone to Brownell Street, then I might have met you there.”

Nealie looked at Will in astonishment, because even she knew he had gone too far. “I’ll thank you not to talk like that,” she said. Then she spoiled the reproof by laughing.

“I suppose you’ve saved me from their clutches, for where else could I find a woman to talk to? And one who is so unpredictable. I’ve never met a girl like you.”

“Oh, there’s a plenty of ladies here.”

“None so fetching as you are.”

“Mr. Spaulding, I think you overspoke,” Nealie replied, because his remark was obvious even to her—not that she didn’t like it.

“Would you call me Will? I’d like that so much better.” When Nealie nodded, he asked, “And may I call you Nealie? It’s a prettier name than Bent. I suppose it’s short for Cornelia, isn’t it?”

“I guess you could. And Nealie isn’t short for anything. It’s just Nealie. I never liked it, or Bent, either.”

“Why didn’t you change it when you ran away? It would make it harder for your father to find you.”

Nealie had never thought of that. “What name would I pick?”

“Evangeline or Gertrude, maybe Mary or Pearl. I always favored Pearl.”

“What about George? I’m partial to it. I could call myself George.”

Will, who had taken a sip of his wine, sputtered. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and replied, “And would you have changed your last name from Bent to Straight?”

“Why, that’s the funniest thing I ever heard!” She began to laugh, too, until she realized that people had turned to stare at them and looked down at her lap. “I guess I’m too loud. Well, I had to be to get heard over the hogs,” she said.

“I don’t care. I haven’t had this much fun since I arrived here. You keep me from loneliness. I didn’t want to come here, you know.”

“Did your grandfather whip you to make you come?” Nealie asked, because of course, she knew old Mr. Spaulding controlled the Rose of Sharon.

He looked at her curiously. “Whip me? Hardly. My grandfather would never whip me, nor my father, either. My family is not that barbaric. They convinced me that firsthand knowledge of the Sharon would help my career. They’re right, of course. It’s just that I thought I wouldn’t like it here. But I do.” He smiled at Nealie.

Then Nealie asked him what name he would have chosen for himself. Will thought that over and replied, “General Ulysses S. Grant.” They laughed again, not stopping until the waiter removed their plates and set down silver cups, and Will explained, “Raspberry ice.”

“This time of year?” Nealie thought she had never tasted anything so fine. But when the waiter set down coffee in demitasse cups, she frowned. “You’d think they’d give you a decent cup of coffee. This isn’t any more than a sip.”

“You can have all you want, but you may not like it. This is strong.”

Nealie sipped and decided the coffee was indeed strong—too strong. She could tell the waiter a thing or two about making coffee, but of course she didn’t. She put the coffee aside and sipped the last of her wine. It made her feel fine, and she wished the day would last forever. In fact, it already had lasted far longer than she had expected, and when the two of them left the dining room, the sun had gone behind the mountain range. The mud in the streets was hard again, and the air was chilly. Will took off his coat and put it around Nealie, asking if she wanted to go home or walk a bit.

“Walk. I like to look at the houses,” Nealie told him. So they climbed the mountainside, then circled around and walked back past the hotel, down Taos Street, stopping to see a house that was under construction. “My, I’d like to live in a house like that, with an upstairs and a tower and a yard that’s all grass and flowers instead of a pigpen.”

The site was deserted, and the two of them circled the house, whose back door was on Griffith Street. “It’s a splendid house,” Will observed. “A bride’s house.”

“Oh,” Nealie breathed. “So it is. Fit for a bride. It’s just about perfect.” The girl tried to think of herself as a bride coming home to that house with its tall windows and big veranda and fanciful gingerbread trim, a house as white and fine as a bride’s cake, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine herself in something so nice. “If you lived in a house like that, everybody in town would take off their hat to you.”

“Then it’s just the house you should have. Who’s to say you won’t live here someday?”

And then Nealie saw herself standing at the front door of the house on an early evening, watching a man come up the steps and kiss her on the cheek, then follow her inside where children waited. The man looked a great deal like Will Spaulding.

They walked back to the boardinghouse then. “I don’t know how long I’ll be in Georgetown, but I’m sure it will be through the summer, maybe longer,” Will told her when they stopped on Mrs. Travers’s porch. “I’ve got obligations, if you know what I mean. I can’t do anything about that, but I think we could have a good time together. I hope you’ll let me see you again.”

“Oh, I will,” Nealie said, and in the dark, she blushed, either from the wine or the pretty words.

Will took her hand and kissed her fingers. “Good night, Nealie.”

“Good night, Mr. General Grant.”

CHAPTER 3

N
EALIE DIDN
’
T HEAR
C
HARLIE
D
UMAS
until the big man, hat in his hand, called to her from the street. She was sitting on the porch, dreaming about the day nearly two weeks before that she’d spent with Will Spaulding and not paying the least attention to the passersby. Nealie was startled, and Charlie looked crestfallen. “I didn’t mean to scare you none, Miss Nealie.”

Of course, if she’d had her rathers, Will would be standing there, but Nealie was feeling so happy that she was glad to see even Charlie. “Mr. Dumas, come and sit,” she said.

The big man grinned and stomped onto the porch. He towered over her, until Nealie indicated the place beside her on the bench. “Today’s a fine day,” he said.

Nealie had to agree. In almost the blink of an eye, it had gone from winter to summer. There was no spring in the high country, Mrs. Travers had explained to her, just mud. The runoff from melted snow still ran high, filling the creeks almost to the tops of their banks, and the streets had their patches of mud yet, but the sun was so bright that it quickly dried the mud into ruts. The yards were greening, and people had begun whitewashing their houses and sheds, replacing the paint that the wind and dirt had sanded off during the winter. Houses were going up, and every day, Nealie walked past the place that Will had called the bride’s house, stopping to watch the carpenters nail up siding. And each day, she thought of Will walking up the stairs of the house to greet her. It was such a fine house, with a gable in front and a tower with a peaked roof, a porch around two sides, and a bay window that caught the sun all day long.

Smoky-gray bluebirds and the black-and-white birds that Mrs. Travers called camp robbers flitted about, along with red and green hummingbirds that hovered in the air, their wings spinning so quickly that Nealie could scarcely see them. She sat on the front porch, a bit of mending idle in her hands. Before Charlie had called to her, Nealie, eyes closed, had held up her face to the sun, despite Mrs. Travers’s warning that the air was thin, and the girl’s pale skin would burn before she knew it.

“Why aren’t you up at the Bobcat?” Nealie asked. She turned to look Charlie in the face. “You didn’t get laid off, did you, Mr. Dumas? Mrs. Travers said there were rumors the vein pinched out last week. She feared you might be out of work.”

“Did you fear it?” Charlie asked.

“I fear anybody missing payday,” she replied, carefully choosing her words. Of course she didn’t want Charlie losing his job. She didn’t wish it at all, wouldn’t wish it for anybody, because being out of work was a tragedy. Besides, in Charlie’s case, if he wasn’t working, he’d be hanging around the boardinghouse. She didn’t want that, either.

“Well, I’ve not been laid off. I just took a day to work my claim is all. I’ve found blossom rock, and I mean to follow it.”

“That’s fine,” Nealie said, holding her tongue, because she did not want to say that every man at the boardinghouse claimed he’d found blossom rock, which was an outcrop of mineral-bearing rock. “I wish you good luck,” she said, and surely she did. After all, she liked Charlie Dumas. She just didn’t like him that much.

Charlie leaned forward on the bench, his knees apart, his cap between his heavy hands. He cleared his throat a couple of times, as if he was trying to say something but couldn’t. Nealie waited, watching Charlie twirl his cap, until he burst out, “There’s a play at the opera house on Saturday night. I’d like it awful well if you’d go. With me, that is. Would you?”

Nealie didn’t answer right away. She loved the opera house more than anything in Georgetown, was enchanted with the way it took her into another world, and she wanted to go in the worst way. But she’d hoped that Will Spaulding would invite her. He hadn’t mentioned going out a second time, however, and that troubled her. She’d turned it over in her mind and wondered if maybe he’d been embarrassed by her table manners. Since that night at the hotel, she’d studied the way he ate his supper at the boardinghouse and was trying to imitate it. She’d read every romantic story in Mrs. Travers’s
Peterson’s Magazine
to learn how to act, and she’d consulted a book on etiquette that Mrs. Travers kept on a shelf in the kitchen. She’d memorized what to eat with a fork and what with a spoon and how to hold utensils and cut food with a knife. But it was awfully confusing, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever get it right.

Or maybe it wasn’t her manners but the fact that Will just plain hadn’t liked her and was too mannerly to say so. After all, she was only a hired girl, and he was used to ladies like the ones she’d seen on the streets of Hannibal. There were enough of them in Georgetown to tempt him. Maybe he’d found somebody else and hadn’t told her. So if she wanted to go to the opera house, Nealie realized, she’d better accept Charlie’s invitation. “Why, I’d like that,” she said at last.

Charlie beamed. “I already asked Mrs. Travers if you could have the night off so’s I could take you to supper someplace,” he said. “I hope you wear that green dress. I never saw anything so bright.”

Nealie smiled prettily at him, for after all, she was not immune to compliments.

*   *   *

Of course, it wasn’t more than a day later that Will Spaulding, too, asked to squire Nealie to the opera house on Saturday. “I should have told him yes, Mrs. Travers. I wish I had,” Nealie said later. “I could have told Mr. Dumas I had a sick headache and couldn’t go or that you forgot and needed me here.”

“You’d do no such a thing. He’d find out and know right off you put him aside for Mr. Spaulding. You’d shame Charlie, and him being so nice to you.”

Nealie was a little ashamed of herself then, although she couldn’t help but wish she’d turned the big man down and risked staying at home.

“Besides, it’s not such a bad thing to go with Mr. Dumas,” Mrs. Travers continued. “You’ll make Mr. Spaulding jealous.”

Nealie had to think that over, because she’d had no experience with men—with gentlemen, that is. She’d had plenty with the other kind, and she didn’t like them—her father and his friends. They were animals. They’d put their hands on her and tried to kiss her and more. Her own pa was the worst of the lot. She’d seen farm animals coupling and figured the same thing went on between her ma and pa. She heard her pa rutting in the bed, her mother crying out in pain, because the old man liked to hurt her. After Nealie came into young womanhood, her pa began to look at her with greedy eyes, staring at her breasts. Sometimes, he came into the barn and touched her there, his eyes hard with longing. Once, he’d put his hand under her skirt, on the inside of her leg and slid it upward. Nealie had run off, but Pa had found her and whipped her, cursing her for being a temptation. Her ma, that sweet, gentle woman worn down from overwork, protected her as much as she could from the beatings, the railings, explaining that Nealie’s father had been a good man before hard times turned him sour. Nealie, knowing her mother was fragile, kept her pa’s fumblings to herself, although she suspected that dear woman knew and subjected herself to the old man’s brutality to keep him from Nealie.

Then her mother died, leaving Nealie alone with her pa, and the girl knew she had to get away. The day came when Pa brought home Hog Davis from two farms over. He raised pigs and leered at her, following her along the fence whenever she passed on the road. Hog had a jug of silly-bug, and the men went into the barn and got drunk. Nealie had to milk the cow, but she stayed in the house until she figured the two had passed out. Instead, they were lying in wait for her, and her pa grabbed her as she went into the barn, gripped her in a hand of iron, and said, “The girl’s been devilin’ me, although I give her a flailin’ every time or two. Makes me feel better.”