Elijah brought the iron pot over, holding it carefully with towels so he didn’t burn himself.
Jonah chuckled softly. “He made that stew, or mostwise, anyway. I cut up the rabbit, but he used a recipe in that scrapbook. He told me what it’s called, but I didn’t catch it.”
“Hasenpfeffer,” Ada said. “Mrs. Pitts made that scrapbook. It’s one of her family recipes that she altered for more common ingredients. Elijah cooked supper?”
Her husband’s arm came around her and drew her close. “’Round here, ain’t no man’s work or woman’s work. For ‘long time, there was jus’ me to work, and ever’thing was man’s work. Now, my woman goes off ever’day on a job.”
“Does that bother you?” If it did, he’d been doing a stellar job of hiding it.
But he shook his head. “There’s jus’ work, and we all do what needs doin’. Seems right to me.” With a squeeze, he led her to the door. “C’mon. He’s proud of his supper.”
The first time Ada crossed this threshold, she’d entered a home that, except for the children standing in it, had seemed abandoned. Grey and gloomy. Dead. Decaying.
Now, holding her man’s hand, she crossed into a cozy room full of lamplight, with a warm fire crackling and a good meal waiting. The walls were still covered with newspapers, but there were cheery new curtains, and a few more chairs. There were toys scattered and books turned upside down, holding their places. There were bright rugs on the floor and children’s artwork over those yellowed newspapers on the wall.
The sampler Grace had made still had pride of place in the center of the mantel. This family was still, and would always be, The Walkers, and Ada meant to do Grace proud and take care of this love that had been passed on to her.
Jonah stood behind her. Bluebird cried “Ma!” and ran to hug her legs, and Elijah stood beside the table, grinning with pride.
Momma sat at the table beaming with happiness.
They were the Walkers, and they were well blessed.
That night, Ada came upstairs after reading with her mother. Jonah had given up the large bedroom on the first floor so Momma didn’t have to climb stairs. He and Ada shared the second bedroom on the second floor, across from the children’s room. If life went as they’d been planning, someday maybe this house, big as it was, would need an addition with another room or two.
This room had been full of furniture and other pieces from the previous lives the house had held over generations. With the children’s help, they’d emptied it out, returning several good pieces to use and making a nice bedroom for themselves as well. The few pieces that remained without a purpose were stored in the nook under the eave, at the end of the hall.
Ada stood at the top of the stairs. The only light came from their bedroom, but it was enough. What had once seemed to her eerie and unwelcoming was now a cozy dwelling full of happiness and love. In the few weeks of their marriage and this new life, they had begun to restore the old house to a worthy dwelling for a family.
She peeked in on the children. They were sleeping, each bundled under an autumn’s weight of blankets. Soon, when winter’s cold set in, they’d all sleep in the front room, but it might be the last winter for it. They were talking about adding small woodstoves to the upstairs bedrooms to keep them habitable through the cold months. The rooms had had them long ago, and the downstairs stoves had been piped between the upstairs walls through the roof, so new stoves up here could be fitted easily. They’d already put one in the downstairs bedroom, so Momma would be comfortable regardless.
Pulling the children’s door to, she crossed the hall. Jonah was in bed, his chest bare despite the chill. Both lamps were still lit, one on each side of the bed. He sat against the headboard, and in his hands was the book Ada was currently reading: The Awakening, by Kate Chopin.
Every now and again, Jonah would show some subtle interest in the books around the house. Ada had once offered to teach him to read, and he hadn’t reacted well; since then, she’d noticed but had not remarked on his occasional displays of interest. She was waiting for him to decide when he wanted it. If he never did, that would be fine as well; the state of his literacy had no bearing on his worth.
He looked up and smiled. His face seemed to glow with love. No, it didn’t matter at all if he never learned to read.
“Everyone’s tucked in snugly,” she said.
“That’s good. I had to wrangle Bluebird for a wash. She says I shouldn’t help her no more. She’s a lady, she says, and it shouldn’t be her pa helpin’ her wash. She can do it herself, she says, but she never gets the back of her neck or under her arms.”
Ada laughed. “I’ll talk to her. A lady remembers to clean all her parts.”
“Why’s she think I can’t help her? Girl’s too young to be thinkin’ like that. Ain’t she?”
The true answer was probably that Bluebird had grown more than this one year in terms of her experience. She was reading and learning about other people and other lands. She was fascinated by fairy tales and stories about princes and princesses and true love, and she was spending more time among other girls her age or near it. She was beginning to understand that there were differences between girls and boys, and that some of those differences were meaningful.
“It’s not a terrible thing if she feels a bit modest. Is it?”
Jonah shrugged. “I reckon not. It’s hard to see my baby girl push me off, though.”
“You will always be her hero. Trust me. I know the bond a girl has with her daddy.”
As a sudden burst of melancholy ran through her, Ada went to the bureau and picked up her brush. On either side of the bureau mirror hung a sampler: the children’s birthday samplers. The sampler commemorating Jonah and Grace’s marriage was stored away—a keepsake, never to be forgotten, but no longer to be displayed.
Ada had not made a sampler for her and Jonah, and she didn’t intend to. She wasn’t replacing Grace. She’d merely come after her.
She brought the brush with her and sat on the bed, her back to Jonah, and ran the brush through her hair for her nightly routine: one hundred strokes. She could feel his gaze on her.
After sixty-one strokes, she felt his fingers, drawing through her hair, skimming down her back. Though she wore a nightdress and shawl, the touch raised gooseflesh over her skin.
“You are beautiful,” he murmured.
Ada set the brush on the bedside table—sixty-seven strokes was enough tonight—and turned to her husband. “And you are magnificent.” She nodded at her book, still in his hand. “I don’t think you’d enjoy that story. It’s about a woman who can’t find a way to be happy in the world she must live in. Finally, she kills herself.”
He made a face and set the book on the bed between them. “Do you like it?”
“I do. It’s sad, and sometimes the main character is frustrating, but it’s beautifully written. And, I suppose, I understand her in part.”
“What part?”
“It is hard for a woman to make the life she wants.”
“Ain’t it hard for ever’body?”
“Sure, but ... if I were a man, I’d still be a teacher. I wouldn’t have been fired for getting married.”
“You still are a teacher. You teach the children ever’day. You teach me ever’day. And all the people you bring books to.” He picked up her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “You’re a teacher in your soul, darlin’.”
There was a bigger point he wasn’t quite getting, but suddenly, Ada didn’t really care. Up here in their tiny nook of the mountain, the pressures and injustices of the world below couldn’t reach them. Life was hard here, but it was simple. It was like he’d said when she’d gotten home: there was no man’s work or woman’s work here. There was work, and people to do it. There was life, and people to live it. There was joy, and a family to share it. There was love.
She had the life she wanted.
She picked up her book, meaning to set it on the table and spend their remaining time
before sleep doing something other than talking, but Jonah set his hand on hers.
“I’m too old,” he said.
“Too old?” He was thirty-seven; hardly an old man. Then she realized his statement was really a question, one he was ashamed to ask. “No one is ever too old to learn anything, Jonah. And you are smart and perceptive. Do you want to learn to read?”
He stared at the book under their hands. “Sometimes ... sometimes I think I’m ... I dunno.” His eyes came to hers. “I watch you with the children, sittin’ by the fire, readin’ to each other. I watch when you give ‘em lessons, and see their little minds workin’. I listen when you and Bess talk about the books you read her. I’m so proud, Ada. Of you, of the children, of ever’thin’ you brought to them. To us. But sometimes, I feel a little lonesome about it, too.” He shook his head as if dismissing the weight of his doubts. “I don’t know. Silly, I reckon.”
“It’s not silly. Whether you read or not makes no difference in what a good, worthy, wonderful man you are. It doesn’t make you less smart, or less strong. But if you want to be part of this thing the rest of us share, there’s only good in that. I would be honored to teach you to read.”
“I don’t want to stand off to the side no more.”
Ada set The Awakening on the table and wrapped her arms around her man.
“We’ll start tomorrow,” she said and pulled him down on top of her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It hadn’t taken Momma long at all to know this new house. She didn’t go up the stairs, but she moved nearly as well as a sighted person through the big front room, the narrow hallway, and the bedroom that had been made hers, and they’d made a space outside, with a rope guide circling the house, so she could be outside enjoying good weather, even as the others tended to their chores.
Elijah and Bluebird had learned to be careful about leaving things lying about on the floor, and to say out loud when they set something down in a place their Grammy might encounter it. It had become an easy habit for them to call out the placement of dishes on the table and food on the plates, and to describe in vivid details the things they wanted her to ‘see.’ Because she had not always been blind, she had a keen understanding of color and shape and, over the years she’d been without that sense, she’d tied her others tightly to her memories of sight.
Watching the children with her mother, Ada saw that they were gaining new understandings of the world around them through the ways they described things to her.
Ada thought the same was true for her, and for Jonah as well. Seeing the world for someone without sight, perhaps especially for someone who’d once had that sense, required that one truly see it, and take none of it for granted.
The children loved her mother like a gift they’d never even imagined they might have, and her mother loved them the same. Despite all her losses, despite her keen grief for Ada’s father, Momma was happy.
The loss of plumbing and electricity, of the flush toilet, the gas oven and the ice box, bothered Momma not at all. She’d lived most of her life without them and had simply reverted back to that condition. Ada, on the other hand, did lament their lack, especially of the plumbed bathroom. There was a washroom in this house, but it was simply a small room, behind the stairs, where washing of bodies or clothes could take place indoors. The water still had to be heated on the fire and drained from the wood tub with buckets. And personal business was conducted behind the house, in the privy, or, in the cold nights, in pots they kept under each bed.
It was how things were as she’d grown up, but she’d lived long enough since in more modern circumstances to feel inconvenienced. Reading by sunlight or lamplight or candlelight was not a bother. Warming a home with a fire was cozy. Cooking with a woodstove was no trouble—and not, in the main, her chore. But she missed her soaking baths. She hadn’t realized how luxurious—how decadent—they’d been.
It was a small thing, though, and no need at all, particularly in light of all their blessings. Still, Ada harbored a small hope that one day the little washroom would be plumbed.
She carried a basket of wet clothes from the washroom and went into the front room. November was full winter in Cable’s Holler, and the temperature hadn’t reached above freezing, despite the clear sky and bright sun. She’d strung the clothesline back and forth across the front room, before the fire. Once she got these things hung, they’d dry in a couple hours, hopefully before Jonah and Elijah were back from their hunt.
Normally, Jonah didn’t hunt on days Ada didn’t ride. He wanted to be home when she was. But that morning, as they were tending to the animals, a big flock of turkeys had wandered through the woods, and Thanksgiving was only a few days away. So, with Ada’s blessing, her men had finished their chores and collected their bows and gear.
Bluebird was asleep near the hearth, curled up under Ada’s bearskin, her cheek on the pages of her fairy tale book.
“Let me help,” her mother said, setting aside her knitting and rising from the rocking chair near the table.
“Thank you. Watch the lines. Three of them, starting four steps directly ahead, about thee inches above your head at their lowest point right now.” Ada set the cotton bag of pins down. “Pins are on the table by the hall door. Bluebird’s sleeping on the floor, right in front of the hearth. She takes up about two steps of room. She’s under the bearskin.”
“Can’t decide if I hate that skin or not,” Momma said as she picked up a shirt and felt for its hem. “My only girl hurt by a bear.”
Ada still had no memory of the bear, and could only take Jonah’s word that one had made the scar on her side, or that the skin he’d tanned was of the same bear. But it was a beautiful thing, dark and soft and warm. Bluebird had more or less claimed it for her own, and Ada didn’t mind.
“I’ll be glad when you get to growin’ this family and set that job aside,” her mother added.
They weren’t really trying yet to grow the family. Occasionally, she and Jonah would be caught in a moment and unwilling to separate in time to be sure of preventing it, but, for the most part, they had a plan, to wait until spring, because Ada didn’t want to give up her route yet. Her work was a calling, and she wasn’t yet ready to turn from it.
But yes, the pull to have a baby was powerful, to grow life inside her and nurture a child from its very beginning, a thing she’d always wanted but had once thought lost to her. Elijah and Bluebird were hers now, and when they’d begun to call her Ma her heart had nearly exploded with joy. But she wanted more children. She wanted to fill this revived house to its rafters with love.
As for her mother’s consternation about Ada continuing to work, Ada let her grumble and didn’t bother to argue. Momma had been proud of her when she’d been a teacher, but she didn’t think a married woman should work away from home. It was the husband’s job to take care of his family, she thought, as most people did. Ada thought Jonah was doing a brilliant job taking care of her by understanding that she loved her work, that it had value and made her happy.
So she let her mother’s statement hang until it faded, and focused on the work before them. Together, they hung their family’s wash. As Ada moved across the line, she glanced at her mother’s momentarily discarded knitting, and thought of a way to change the subject. “Looks like you’re almost done.”
Momma nodded. “Another foot, and then I’ll do a finishing edge. How’s the pattern?”
Ada wiped her damp hands on her apron and cast a glance toward the hearth. Bluebird was snug asleep in her furry nest. She went to the bundle of knitting and spread it out. Dozens of tiny bluebirds and little pink bows on a pale yellow background. She kept it bundled in a basket so Bluebird wouldn’t see what the project was becoming; the blanket was to be a Christmas gift.
It had come from a pattern Ada had found in Callwood. She’d read the pattern to her mother until she had it memorized, and she’d separated her colors as she always did. Her blind mother hadn’t missed a stitch. “It’
s breathtaking, Momma. Just beautiful.”
Momma grinned. “Good, good. Bundle it up again—don’t let her see. Soon’s it’s done, I’m gonna start one for Elijah. When you go down to Callwood next, see if you can find a nice pattern. I think somethin’ in red.”
Ada laughed. “I’ll do that.” Her mother might not like her job, but she sure liked Ada’s regular trips down to town because of it.
A sharp, bitter wind sliced straight down the mountain, blowing snow like tiny blades into Ada’s face. Henrietta snorted and dropped her head, giving it so firm a shake Ada nearly lost the reins.
“I know, lady, I know.” Ada turned off the trail and found a place to stop where the trees made a bit of a windscreen. She swung down from the saddle and grunted as her cold feet hit the ground.
This weather wasn’t unknown to them; winter on the mountain meant snow, wind, and cold. But familiarity didn’t make it easier. These were hard days; sometimes, like right now, they seemed too hard, and Ada felt ready to give up the job. There was plenty of work to keep her busy and fulfilled at home. She had two children to educate—more, when she and Jonah had more children. Or if she started a school in Red Fern Holler.
Or both.
She shuddered and glared at the snow flying sideways. She was dressed in layers—a pair of sturdy cotton stockings, two sets of long underwear, three pairs of woolen socks, sturdy boots, heavy dungarees, two shirts, one of them flannel, a wool sweater, and a heavy deerskin coat, a thick wool scarf, knitted fingerless gloves under lined leather gloves, and a thick knit cap under the coat’s hood. She was as layered and bundled as she could be and still ride. But the cold got in anyway.
Carry the World Page 28
