Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family]

by Keep a Little Secret

  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!”

  Chapter Nine

  JOHN GRANT 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.

  “Is the fire near the ranch?” she asked worriedly as the truck roared around a tight corner.

  “On or near,” John answered grimly, his jaw clenched and his forehead deeply furrowed with concern.

  “Could it be someone burning a brush pile?”

  “It ain’t. Too spread out.”

  “But I’ve seen plenty of little fires around the ranch,” Charlotte kept on, gritting her teeth as they shot so quickly over a rise in the road that she would have sworn the truck’s wheels had left the road. “It’s probably nothing more than Hale getting ready to shoe a couple of horses or…” She paused momentarily, another sudden, treacherous turn silencing her tongue before continuing. “Or one of the cook fires is smokier than usual. I’d hate for us to get in an accident over something as simple as that.”

  John turned quickly to her, his eyes only leaving the road for a second, but Charlotte could clearly see how serious he was. “I’ve spent too many years ranchin’ not to know when things ain’t right. Lyin’ to myself ain’t gonna make it go away no matter how much I wish it were so.”

  Charlotte opened her mouth to speak but instead fell silent; she wished that there were words she could offer that would lessen his worry and stop their recklessness, but she knew there was nothing that would take John Grant’s foot off the gas pedal. She remembered that they had been discussing wildfires on the way to the Becks’ cabin; it seemed impossible that one could have just sprung to life. Scanning the growing smoke to which they drew ever closer, she could only hope that the rancher’s worry really was for nothing.

  No matter how preoccupied she was with her own safety, Charlotte’s thoughts kept returning to her meeting with Sarah Beck. The thought of the young girl’s burden weighed heavily as unbidden questions pressed for answers she did not have.

  Why are the Becks staying on John Grant’s property?

  Who is the father of Sarah’s unborn child?

  Am I going to be able to teach Sarah enough before the baby comes?

  Charlotte knew that the answers to these questions, as well as many others, would come only when she had the chance to have a long and very honest conversation with John, but now was not that time.

  Crossing the narrow bridge that spanned the gurgling creek as it skirted to the south of the ranch, they raced around a gentle turn, drove down into a depression, and then shot up out of it as the ranch finally came into view. Charlotte couldn’t suppress her gasp.

  “Oh, my Lord!”

  “Damn it all to hell,” John swore beside her.

  Before their eyes, at the edge of the corral pens south of the livery stable and beside the first cluster of worker cabins, bedlam reigned. Within the nearly impenetrable smoke that pulsed and billowed into the blue sky, flickering tongues of red and yellow flame showed through, racing ever forward, with the fences caught in its advance already ablaze. Shapes ran around wildly in the gloom, releasing the stock. As she watched, horrified, Charlotte could hear the unmistakable sound of the fire’s onslaught, a crackle and popping punctuated by an occasional human shout or a horse’s terrified whinny, even over the ticking of the truck’s engine and the pounding of her own heart. John had been right to worry.

  “What… what do we do?” Charlotte asked.

  John grimaced, his hands tight on the truck’s steering wheel. “We damn well better stop it, that’s what.”

  John brought the truck to a skidding halt just before the large barn that housed the ranch’s horse tack. Though she was only a few feet from the open doors, Charlotte could hardly see the saddles, stirrups, bridles, reins, harnesses, and bits that lined the walls, so dense was the smoke. From the Becks’ cottage where John first sensed something was wrong, it had looked as if the smoke was just gently rising up into the sky, but now, down on the ground where the fire raged, swirling, hot winds pushed the flames, choking out the light of the summer sun and gagging those unfortunate enough to inhale it. Charlotte coughed involuntarily, even as she held the sleeve of her blouse against her nose. Carefully, she moved around the truck as John shouted angrily.

  “What in the hell happened?” he bellowed.

  “We ain’t rightfully sure, Mr. Grant,” a man answered. Blinking in the stinging smoke, Charlotte thought that it might have been Dave Powell but couldn’t be certain. “Come up outta nowhere, all sudden like, and ’fore we knew it, it was right on top of us! Been a struggle ever since.”

  “Any idea what started it?”

  “None, sir.”

  “How broad is it? Is it all the way across the western flank of the ranch?”

  “No, sir, it ain’t. From what I can tell it’s in a pretty narr
ow strip, just right here around the pens and barn. Thank the Lord that there ain’t much of a wind or who knows how big a mess we’d have. If the wind was gustin’, I’d be worried ’bout it reachin’ all the way to Sawyer.”

  All around them, men darted about in the churning smoke, frantically shouting instructions. Charlotte felt terror rising within her. Just driving to the tack barn had been frightening, but barreling full speed into the teeth of a fire in dense, choking smoke was crazy! They might run headlong into something or someone they couldn’t see. Frantically, she peered through the blaze for John. His reaction was remarkable; though he was clearly upset, he remained focused on getting control of the fire.

  “Where’s Del?”

  “He was one of the first ones out to fight the blaze,” the man replied. “Got one hell of a burn up his arm for his troubles.”

  John frowned. “Did anyone set about startin’ a backfire?”

  “Hale’s got a group of men over at the well haulin’ buckets back to where the worst of it is,” Dave answered; Charlotte was finally certain that it was he. “Blankets are bein’ doused in the horse troughs and handed out and we talked ’bout that, ’bout startin’ a backfire, but it ain’t done that I know of.”

  “It’s probably too damn late for that anyway,” John said. “The fire’s too close to us out here at the barn for it to do us any good, but keep it in mind if we think the ranch house is in danger.”

  “What’s a backfire?” Charlotte asked.

  “Backfirin’s when you light a couple of small fires in the direction you think the big one is headed,” Dave answered; John’s attention was elsewhere, his determined gaze focused on the fire.

  “But won’t that just make things worse?”

  Dave shook his head. “Nope, it don’t. What a backfire does is take away the fuel that the fire’s got to have in order to keep goin’. If it don’t have nothin’ else keepin’ it burnin’, it’ll peter itself out, or at least make it easier for us to do it. Problem is that Mr. Grant’s right… it’s already too close to the barn and corrals for that. Startin’ a backfire here would just make it worse.”