“Oh.” My voice sounds tiny like the squeak of a mouse. I hadn’t had the chance to think it through.
Henry looks like he wants to fling me out the window, or at least send me to my room without supper. But before he can yell anything else, Effie clears her throat and stands up from the rocking chair. That’s all she has to do, and I know Henry won’t do anything like that now.
When Henry turns toward her, the tension in his shoulders loosens just a whipstitch. He lets out a deep breath. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Effie. I didn’t realize.”
She gives him a little nod and sets the Bible on the chair. She knows how to calm him down with just a look. It’s always been that way. If Henry was a girl, Effie would be his best friend, not mine.
She walks over and takes the hat off my head and hands it back to him. “It wasn’t the Devil who made the circles in the field, Henry. It was a young man, delirious from a dangerously high fever. Catrina saved his life—because of her care, his fever just broke. Your father’s taken him in like a Good Samaritan. When everyone hears what really happened, they’ll stop talking nonsense and forget all about it. Don’t worry.”
I love Effie for smoothing all the wrinkles from her voice and not telling Henry about me bringing Stonefield in naked. I want to hug her, but I just stand next to her and nod.
Henry stares at the hat in his hands. A line forms across his forehead like somebody plowed a tiny furrow in it. “Father should have spoken to me before taking in a stranger. What sort of man is he—a drifter? The Union Army’s conscripting folks in St. Louis—maybe he’s a secessionist, trying to run away to Springfield to join the Confederates. Or he could even be a criminal or a murderer for all we know.”
I snicker.
“You won’t think it’s so funny, Cat, if he creeps to your bed in the middle of the night and slits your throat.”
I imagine Stonefield coming to my bed in the middle of the night. But he doesn’t creep. He walks tall and naked through the moonlit room. And instead of a knife, he’s holding Papa’s Shakespeare. I smile.
Effie narrows her eyes at me before turning to Henry. “We don’t know what kind of man he is, and apparently, he doesn’t either. He says he lost his memory from the fever. But he looks strong and able. When he’s feeling better, he can earn his keep by helping you and your father take care of the farm.”
Henry shakes his head and sighs heavily. “That must be what Father was thinking when he took him in—we could use a hand.” The furrow on his forehead is still there, but it isn’t quite so deep. He puts his hat back on. “I’ll go over to the Hoss place and set them straight. Allow me to give you a ride home on my way, Miss Effie.” He smiles at her, and when she smiles back and says, “Yes, thank you very much, Henry,” he starts whistling a tune as he heads toward the front door.
Effie snaps her bag of medicines shut and turns to me before leaving. “I’ll come by tomorrow to check on your guest.”
I almost say that he only needs my care and a little sleep, and I want him all to myself, but I swallow those words. I just nod my head and make myself say what Mother would have said. “Thank you, Effie. That’s mighty kind of you.”
5
Stonefield sleeps the rest of the evening and into the night. I get up with a grease lamp every so often and poke my head into the study, quiet, just to look at him. I like to watch when his eyes move back and forth under their lids. I wonder what he dreams about if his memory’s still gone. I wonder if he’s dreaming about me.
Even though Stonefield’s still sleeping in the morning, Henry makes Papa wait until Effie arrives late in the day before they go mend the sorghum field. He says it’s not proper for me to be home when there’s a strange man in the house unless we have a chaperone. After they greet Effie and she checks on Stonefield, Henry invites her to stay for supper later. Of course she accepts, and when Papa and Henry head to the field, I’m stuck with her. I love Effie, but Lord, I just want her to go.
I can’t stop fidgeting. I glance toward the study. I feel him tugging me back to him like there’s a rope between us with him tied on one end and me on the other. I move toward the study door.
Effie sighs. “Catrina.” She shakes her head. “Stonefield isn’t going anywhere. Let him rest. Sleeping is what his body needs to get his strength back. I’m sure he’ll surprise us all with his improvement when he wakes up. I can tell that you want to make a friend of him, but he’s a complete stranger. It’s important that he find his family and friends as soon as possible. The newspapers are full of talk about Indians lately and it causes irrational fears. There are people in Roubidoux who might treat someone like him, someone different, as a novelty, but most people will just want him gone.”
“Oh, Effie, how do you know? You always think bad things will happen. What does it matter to those people who Stonefield is? He can stay here with us and do whatever he wants—they can’t stop him.”
Effie just shakes her head like she’s continuing her argument in her mind but won’t say it out loud because she thinks I’m too dense to understand it.
It burns me up.
She clears her throat. “If we’re going to have supper ready by the time your father and brother get back, we should get started. What are we having?” Effie’s always suspicious of my cooking, for no good reason.
“It’s a surprise.” I head toward the back door, anxious to find a way to see Stonefield without her knowing.
“Well, where are you running off to?”
“I have to go hunt down some ingredients.” I turn the doorknob. “How about you make the cornbread and potatoes while I’m gone.”
“How about you hurry back and help. And you still haven’t taken a bath! You should wash the mud off yourself—you look like a pig.”
Before she can say anything else, I slip outside and shut the door behind me. I watch Effie through the window as she walks to the kitchen, shaking her head at the mess she sees. As soon as she gets there, I run around the house to the study window and peer through the pane. Stonefield lies on the cot with his back toward me.
I drum my fingertips against the glass and Stonefield turns right around like he knew I was coming. His hair’s ruffled and his eyes are bright as he sits up. He grins at me and starts to get out of bed. I point to the set of Henry’s old clothes that I laid next to the pillow and I watch as he puts them on. Every muscle and tendon in his body’s strung tight as a fiddle string, yet he moves so slow and easy. Lord, how can the same pants and shirt that hung on Henry’s body look so different on Stonefield? It’s like the clothes were sleeping and now they’re awake. Watching the way he moves makes something inside me tremble like a blade of grass in the breeze.
He comes to the window and presses his nose flat against the glass. I clamp my lips shut so Effie can’t hear me laughing at the face he’s making. He lifts the window and leans out.
“Catrina.”
I hear my name every day, but not the way he says it. He makes it sound like a precious jewel cradled in the palm of his hand.
“Stonefield. How do you feel?”
“New. Like I was just born.”
“Then come with me.”
Before I finish the words, he’s climbing out the window. He doesn’t even ask me where I’m going, but that rumbly voice of his that I hear in my head says he doesn’t care as long as we’re together.
I grab a gunnysack from the shed and take off through the backyard toward the woods. He’s right behind me. Dry leaves crunch under our feet until we reach the quiet of soft moss. We’re almost to the creek. I feel him reach out and touch the ends of my hair, whipping in the wind, and he catches hold like it’s a horse’s mane and pulls me back against him. I laugh at the sharp-alive feel of it. We’ve stopped running, but still, we can barely catch our breath. His fingers get tangled in my hair, but he doesn’t try to get loose. He holds on tighter. The stern lines of his face make him look wild as a wolf. He could break my neck with a jerk of his hand, but his ey
es and his touch tell me he’d never hurt me in a thousand years.
“Stonefield.” I like to say it. The name sounds hard and gentle at the same time. Dark cold rock and soft warm earth like our sorghum field.
He smiles. I want to run my fingers over his lips to memorize it. I want to keep him smiling like that forever.
“Effie says I’m dirty as a pig.”
He laughs. “Effie sounds very observant.”
“There’s a swimming hole under that weeping willow.”
Stonefield glances at the creek and laughs again. “Looks like a good place to wash a pig.”
I laugh, too, as I work at pulling his fingers from my hair.
He tightens his grip. “But what if you’re a water nymph, trying to escape me?
“‘You nymphs, call’d Naiads, of the winding brooks,
With your sedged crowns and ever-harmless looks,
Leave your crisp channels, and on this green land
Answer your summons; Juno does command:
Come, temperate nymphs, and help to celebrate
A contract of true love; be not too late.’”
“If you don’t let me go, I’ll be too late to help Effie and she’ll want to skin me.”
“Well, I don’t want to be the cause of a water nymph’s gruesome death.” He loosens his fingers on my hair, and I pull away, still laughing.
I bolt to the willow, part its branches like a curtain, and duck inside. When the curtain falls back into place, light seeps through the little gaps and I see Stonefield staring back at me. I want him to see all of me, the way I saw him naked in the field. I take off my shirt and pants as we watch each other. I like the way he looks at me, like his eyes are touching me. I can almost feel his gaze on my skin. But when he moves toward the willow branches, my heart starts thumping hard and sudden like it wants free from my ribs. It startles me and I step quick into the cool shady water of the creek under the willow’s canopy.
It’s like stepping into another world. The water laps at my thighs, beckoning me in. It drinks me up like cold ale and swallows me as I sink to the pebbly bottom. I push off and swim underwater until I think I’ve cleared the willow’s sweeping branches. When I come up and feel the air kiss my skin, the world seems more alive than I remember.
Stonefield’s unspoken words float over the water into my head. What are you doing, water nymph?
He watches as I swim to a log jutting across the middle of the creek. A giant bullfrog sits there with its back to me. I’m a cottonmouth snake, gliding up behind it slow and quiet. I strike, sweeping the stunned frog off its perch, and hold it up for Stonefield to see.
“Catching some supper. Throw me the gunnysack.”
He grins and throws it to me. “I should’ve known naiads would serve something like frog legs for supper.”
I hunt down more bullfrogs while Stonefield watches from the bank. He hums the tune he sang in the cane field, the one asking the girl to come live in the wild with him and be his love. They’ll make their clothes out of leaves and feathers and sleep in beds of flowers.
I smile to myself. The song reminds me of my wild work. I’ve never shown it to anyone before, but maybe I will show it to Stonefield. Maybe tomorrow. My heart beats faster at the idea of sharing my secret with him.
It takes me a while, but I catch four more fat frogs to put in my sack and swim back to the willow tree. As the cool air hits me, my whole body tingles, but it’s not just the breeze over my skin, it’s Stonefield’s gaze that makes my breath come faster. Under the canopy, I hum Stonefield’s song and smile at him as he watches me wring out my hair and tug my clothes on over my wet skin. Before I can do up all my buttons, his strong arm shoots through the branches and hooks my waist. Stonefield yanks me through the curtain into the sunlight, just as easy as I snatched the bullfrogs out of the water.
“I caught the biggest one.” He loses his balance from pulling me toward him and we both fall down on the mossy creek bank, laughing. I like the firmness of his arm around me and the rise and fall of his chest on my back, and the moss under my side. I lie against him, feeling his heart beat under his bones and skin. It’s the same rhythm as mine.
“Stonefield.” I turn to face him. “When you walked toward my gun in Papa’s field, were you wanting a bullet to stop your heart from beating?”
Stonefield stays quiet for several moments, thinking. Waiting to hear what he says is torture. I’ve never wanted to know someone’s thoughts as much as I want to know his.
He props himself up on one elbow. “I didn’t care about the bullet,” he says. “There was something I wanted more.”
“What was it?”
“The same thing you wanted when you pointed the gun at me.”
“I wanted you not to go,” I say.
“It was the same for me. I would rather you had shot me dead than have to leave you behind.”
“Stonefield, I feel as if I know you.”
He nods. From ages ago, he says to me without his voice. He moves a strand of wet hair away from my eyes. “I think I must have been looking for you.”
I smile. The things he’s telling me are so similar to what I feel, it seems as if he’s speaking my own thoughts for me.
He plucks a little pebble from the bank and turns it over in his fingers.
“What do you have?” I uncurl his fingers. The creek stone has a tiny hole through its center.
“I think it’s a magic seeing stone. It finds the beauty in the world, no matter where you are.” He lifts it to his eye and smiles as he looks at me through the opening. “Yes, this is definitely a magic seeing stone.” He hands it to me.
I lift it to my eye and squint through the opening. Everything else in the world disappears at once except for Stonefield’s earnest face framed in the circle. His tangled hair hangs in his eyes, and his grin is the happiest, most peaceful thing I ever saw. I place the image, the moment, into the treasure box of my memory. In the future, whenever I raise it to my mind’s eye, I’m certain everything else will vanish just as it does now.
I rummage in my deep pockets to find a piece of yarn and thread it through the pebble’s hole. When I lift it to my neck, Stonefield takes the ends from me, and I hold up my hair so he can tie the necklace for me in the back. As I let go of my hair, it falls over his arms like water. He gathers it gentle and lets it run through his fingers, his hands trailing slow down my shoulders as if he doesn’t want to be done with his task.
I close my eyes, wishing I could feel it all over again. When I turn back to him, the world seems to have shifted just a speck, like I can see things I’ve never noticed before. Everything seems different, clearer, now that his seeing stone rests over my heart.
“Listen,” I whisper.
For a moment, all we hear is the rush of the water and our own breathing, coming fast and heavy. But then I hear it again—a voice in the distance calling my name.
“It’s Effie.” I get to my feet. “She’d skin you if she saw you running around so soon after having a fever. She thinks you should sleep for days.”
Stonefield waves the idea away like he’s shooing off a fly. “I can sleep when I’m dead.” He smiles, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up. I want to touch his face.
Effie calls my name again, closer this time, and Stonefield gets to his feet.
I pick up the gunnysack. “I’ll go first, and you wait here a few minutes. I’ll get her to the kitchen so you can get back into bed.” Water from my hair drips down my forehead to my lips. I lick the bead and taste the wet earthy tang of river and grass on my tongue. I don’t want to go. I say the words to him without speaking.
Neither do I.
Feeling him say it sends a thrill up my spine. He takes my hand. “But adieu, sweet water nymph. Until we meet again.”
When he kisses my fingertips, the whole world trembles. No, it’s just my knees shaking. Lord. I turn and run back through the woods, my wet hair slapping my back and my heart pounding my ribs like
a fist against a door.
Effie’s hands are on her hips when I get to the yard and she frowns at the undone buttons on the old shirt of Henry’s that I always wear and how I never bother wearing any underclothes beneath it. “Catrina, Henry’s home. He’s putting away the wagon.”
“Already? Seems like I just left.”
“Where have you been? I could have finished having dessert and tea with my father and sister by now if I’d gone home for supper.”
“You can have dessert here—I made shoofly pie the other day.” I try to catch my breath. “I bet your sister doesn’t even know how to make shoofly pie.”
Effie doesn’t seem impressed. “I could be playing ‘Heavenly Bliss’ for them on my father’s pianoforte this very minute.”
Lord, she’s crabby today. I wish I could make her happy as I am, make her feel what I feel—like I’m flying in a sky of sunshine. “You can still have some music after supper, Effie—I’ll play the fiddle for you.” I laugh as I imagine Effie and Stonefield dancing a jig.
She sighs. “Catrina, there’s no butter churned or linens washed for the table. Sometimes I wonder if you ever think of anybody but yourself.”
The heaviness of her words hits me like a blow to the heart. I want to tell her I’ve been thinking of Stonefield ever since I first saw him and there’s been no room in my head for anything else. But I swallow up my excuse and say, “I’m sorry, Effie,” and give her a peck on the cheek as I hurry past her into the house to make it up to her. I start whistling “Oh! Susanna” and grab the slop bucket and a knife.
Effie follows me in and crosses her arms over her chest. She raises an eyebrow when the sack moves. “Catrina Dickinson, what in Heaven’s name are you making for supper?”
6
At the supper table, Henry and Effie keep glancing at Stonefield like he might steal the spoons or sprout another head when they’re not looking. And Henry won’t stop badgering our guest about his memory.
Stone Field Page 3
