The Bridal Veil

by Alexis Harrington

  She glanced at the watch pinned to her bodice and realized the day was waning. Now that her breathing had slowed again, Emily rose from her hard seat and turned toward home. She hoped to clean her dress before dinner so that it would have a chance to dry overnight.

  As she passed the cemetery, she spotted a small, familiar figure sitting on one of the graves beneath an elm tree. The coffee-colored braids, both coming loose, and the flounced calico dress gave away the child’s identity even though Emily couldn’t see her face.

  She entered the enclosed burial ground, passing small headstones that bore carvings of lambs and angels, of lilies and crosses, and approached Rose quietly, not wanting to startle her. The wind carried the fresh scent of the river to these highlands, helping to dispel the lonely gloom of the graveyard. Then Emily picked up the thread of a one-sided conversation. She knew she was eavesdropping on a very personal moment, but she couldn’t pull herself away and didn’t want to interrupt. Rose sat cross-legged on the grave, tracing the carved letters of her mother’s name with her fingertip while she spoke.

  “ . . . don’t know why Grammy acts that way. She doesn’t have anything good to say about her, Mama. She didn’t want Daddy to marry her. I guess I didn’t either. She’s not as pretty as you were and—and I still miss you so much. I’m lonesome without you.” Here her voice quavered with forlorn longing that made Emily’s heart rise to her throat and form an aching knot. She knew what it was to lose a mother and to be lonely. “But Miss Emily smells good, and she knows about things like tapestries and God. She tries to help around the house and Grammy gets mad—a few days ago, she even said she was going to leave.” Rose related to the headstone the commotion about the tablecloth and began sobbing in earnest. “I hate it when Daddy and Grammy fuss at each other! And it just keeps getting worse. They act like they don’t love each other. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  Emily’s heart twisted. She wanted to draw Rose into her arms and comfort her, to reassure her. But she couldn’t do that without revealing that she’d listened in. Besides, who was she to reassure anyone? She was as uncertain and insecure as Rose. Probably more so. Her sole advantage was her age—being an adult didn’t render one’s heart unbreakable, but with years and experience, hers had acquired a harder shell. She realized the only way out of this situation was to back away and make her presence known from outside the fence. Quietly, she stole back to the entrance and acted as if she’d just now come by. “Rose, is that you?” she called.

  The girl whirled to look at her, eyes streaming and nose red.

  “I’m just on my way back from town.” Emily stepped inside the fence and approached her. “Would you like to walk home with me? It must be uncomfortable sitting on that wet grass.” Her offer sounded inadequate to her own ears—how must it sound to a child with a broken heart? She held out her hand and gave her a tentative smile. “I’d like your company.”

  Rose glanced at Belinda’s headstone one more time. She didn’t take Emily’s hand, but she nodded and picked herself up. The back of her calico skirt bore a big damp spot, and a few of last fall’s dead leaves and twigs stuck to it. She brushed at it futilely as they walked toward the road. Her stockings sagged around her ankles and she wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I was just . . . sometimes I stop by to see my mama on the way home from school.”

  Emily adjusted the basket on her forearm. “I went to see my sister one last time before I left Chicago to come out here. It was hard to say goodbye because I don’t know if I’ll ever see her grave again. It’s nice that you can visit here, once in a while.” She put a little emphasis on the last part of the sentence. If Rose came here too often, she would be no better off than Cora with her refusal to let Belinda’s memory rest in peace.

  Rose snuffled and dragged her nose across her sleeve again. Emily cringed, but refrained from asking a teacher’s automatic question: where was the girl’s handkerchief?

  “No one knows about it.”

  Emily looked down at the dark, downturned head. “Knows about what? That you come to the cemetery?”

  Rose nodded.

  “Why? You don’t think your father or grandmother would mind, do you?”

  “No. Just that it’s my secret between me and Mama.”

  Emily understood. She was beginning to believe that Rose thought she had no one to turn to. Emily knew that Luke loved his daughter, and Cora, unpleasant harpy that she was, loved her too. But neither of them seemed to really know how she felt. Well, Luke had freely admitted that, but she’d thought that Cora was closer to Rose. “Kind of like talking to God?”

  “Yeah, sort of.” Rose watched a flock of geese pass overhead, honking as they winged their way toward a distant pond.

  “I still miss my own parents. My father died when I was a very little girl, younger than you are. Then my mother remarried a nice man, Mr. Cannon.” Well, he had been nice enough, and he hadn’t treated Emily badly. But she’d always known that he didn’t love her. Alyssa had been the one he doted upon.

  “And your mama?” Rose asked.

  Emily swallowed. “There was a fire . . . she passed away about nine years ago.” She couldn’t think about it any more today. If she did, she might actually break down in front of Rose. She understood a child’s grief, and she would offer support to Rose in any way that she could. Still, for years she’d struggled to keep her emotions under control, to bury her own grief and not look back. Social custom put a great premium on the rituals of mourning and Emily had followed them unstintingly. But she felt so alone here, so friendless, that to ponder her losses would undermine her strength. She changed the subject. “How was school today?”

  Rose gave her a sidelong look. “I got in trouble.” The word again seemed to hang between them, unspoken but implied.

  “Why? What did you do?”

  “I pounded the tar out of Billy Reed.”

  “Mercy!” Emily stopped in her tracks and stared at small, delicate Rose. She couldn’t hide her alarm this time. “You fought with a boy? Whatever would make you do such a thing?”

  Rose stopped too, apprehension crossing her small features. “He said my dress looks like I got it from a carnival sideshow.”

  “Oh, dear.” Billy Reed was right, in Emily’s opinion. Belinda’s skill with the needle must not have come from Cora. Rose was a beautiful little girl, but the woman dressed her in the most ghastly costumes, and they were so poorly made—seams crooked, hem fraying, and ruffles, ruffles, ruffles. The dresses looked as if a child had sewn them. Emily’s heart went out to Rose—enduring merciless teasing as a youngster had been a daily occurrence for her. She could almost understand why Rose had reacted as she had. In her girlhood, she too had been dressed in well-made but unflattering clothes. Alyssa had gotten the pretty colors and enhancing styles. Robert Cannon had felt that considering her size, the less attention Emily drew, the better. So Alyssa had gone about as pretty as a flower, while Emily had worn the plumage of a plain brown wren.

  Still, Emily couldn’t condone Rose getting into a physical fight over it. She started walking again, and the girl followed, scuffing her shoe against a rock in the road.

  “Rose, ladies don’t even acknowledge that kind of insult. And they certainly don’t engage in fisticuffs.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my teacher Miss Simmons said too. But she didn’t make him stand in the corner like I had to. Why should he get away with saying those bad things? How come can’t I stick up for myself?”

  Emily was about to recite a platitude regarding forbearance and propriety, then recalled her own experience earlier with Fran Eakins and Clara Thurmon. Why, indeed? Why should a person have to pretend that she was as insensate as a lamp or a doorknob when others made rude or unkind remarks, or played cruel tricks? She realized the path of her thoughts. God above, she was questioning the very principles which she had clung to for years. For a moment, Emily’s orderly, idealized world tilted sharply. Then it righted itself again.

  �
��But Rose, if we ‘pounded the tar’ out of everyone who said a bad thing, what would happen to us all? We would have chaos and constant wars.”

  “Well, maybe it would teach ’em not to talk that way and then everyone would be nice.”

  For a moment, she thought that Rose might have a point. Reconsidering, she eyed the girl. “Do you remember how you talked about me the first day we met?”

  The corner of Rose’s mouth turned down but she said nothing.

  “I let it pass, didn’t I? We have to live together in a civilized manner.”

  “So I just have to let Billy say those things?”

  “When people like Billy Reed or Fran—like Billy Reed break the rules we live by, they suffer far more than we do.”

  Rose’s dark eyes glinted up at her, disbelief written in them as plainly as the letters carved on her mother’s headstone. Even worse, for the first time, in her secret heart Emily doubted her own words. There was no comfort in the hollow bromide and she knew it. She tried another approach.

  “What do you think your father would say about what you did?”

  Rose’s head came up. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

  “I guess that means he wouldn’t like it either.”

  Her shoulders drooped. “No.”

  “I won’t tell him. But maybe you should.”

  She pondered this, then replied, “No, I don’t think so. Daddy is unhappy enough.”

  Emily’s heart gave another little twist in her chest. How much of Luke’s unhappiness was she responsible for?

  “Here.” She reached into the basket on her arm. “I seem to remember that you have a sweet tooth.” She smiled at Rose and handed her one of the strawberry drops. “But please, promise that you won’t get into anymore fights. It’s just plain wrong. And you could get hurt, you know.”

  The sage green Becker farmhouse came into view ahead, and Rose started to scamper toward it. “Naw, I’m bigger than Billy.”

  Despite her worry and disapproval, Emily felt a bubble of laughter rise in her chest that she knew she had to suppress. She couldn’t very well encourage Rose’s behavior.

  The girl ran ahead a bit, then stopped and turned. “Thank you for the candy, Miss Emily.” She was off again like a tree swallow, lithe, agile, and full of energy.

  For the second time since she’d come to Fairdale, Emily’s heart felt lighter. She smiled at the pretty little girl with tangled dark hair and sagging stockings. “You’re welcome, Rose.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Luke came out of the barn after feeding the team and flexed his stiff shoulders. It had been a long day but a satisfying one. He stood at the corral, one foot on the bottom rail, and lifted his gaze to survey the arrow-straight furrows in the fields, tinged green with seedlings reaching for the sky. This section held the corn that he’d planted earlier in the month—it needed a long growing season in this part of the country where there were often more rainy spring days than sunny. It was usually that way until mid-June.

  Of all the things that had gone wrong over the years, he’d been damned lucky with this farm. Oh, it hadn’t come to him easily. He’d worked his fool head off in all kinds of weather, reached into laboring cows up to his shoulder to turn calves that didn’t know which end was out, and fought the punishing east wind that blew through this river gorge and weakened fence posts and permanently bent some trees to the west. He’d sat up nights with the horses when they fell ill with a malady that threatened to carry them off, and dosed the hogs with Bob Cook’s sovereign remedy for the scours when their insides had turned to water.

  But still, he’d been lucky. The place had thrived and he hadn’t been plagued by the multitude of disasters that could occur on a farm: accidents, fires, floods, pests that ate crops right down to the dirt, diseases that wiped out whole herds of livestock. He was proud of what he’d accomplished. Not bad for a kid who’d started his life in a shack down on the river, a kid everybody had expected to fail, especially his old man. If Luke wasn’t happy, well, hell—who really had much happiness? He didn’t think about it too often, although he had to admit that he’d hoped Alyssa Cannon would bring a little with her.

  In the end, maybe it didn’t matter. He knew what his job was—to make a decent home for his girl. He’d learned by his old man’s example what a man’s job wasn’t. He wasn’t supposed to lie around, drunk half the time, in jail the other half. He shouldn’t tell his sons that they wouldn’t amount to a pile of horseshit, or his daughters that they’d better not end up pregnant and crying on his doorstep. A man wasn’t supposed to make his wife so miserable that the only way she could escape was to die, the way his own mother had.

  The way Belinda had.

  Luke glanced at the oak tree in the front yard, the low afternoon sun gilding its top branches. There was no going back, and there seemed to be no going forward. There was just the farm and Rose and Cora. And now Emily. He sighed and flexed his shoulders again, then unhooked his boot from the bottom fence rail. Dragging his mind away from the painful memories, he headed toward the pump behind the house, intent on getting washed up for supper. It would probably be another stiff, uncomfortable meal, with Cora continuing her war of silence. Since the episode with Belinda’s tablecloth, when she’d threatened again to go to her own home and he’d called her bluff, she’d tried a different tack—instead of harping, now she rarely spoke. But her wordless demands for an apology were as loud as shouting. Damn it, he wouldn’t apologize. She’d treated Emily like a stray cat, and he was tired of living this way.

  He kicked at a dirt clod, frustrated by the situation. He sensed that Rose was still the pawn in the tug-of-war between himself and Cora. Rose already had enough to get used to without giving her the added burden of losing her grandmother. At least for now. But he hoped that after Emily settled in and the girl got used to her, he could tell Cora to go home. For the time being, he felt like a bogged calf, stuck in the morass of Cora’s bitterness.

  When he rounded the corner, he halted in his tracks, unprepared for the sight ahead of him. Emily stood at the wash tub, her sleeves rolled up to expose slender pale arms. She worked hard, scrubbing something white up and down the washboard. Her dress front was wet from neck to waist and molded itself to her upper torso. The same low rays that turned the oak to gold made her hair gleam like the sun itself. Behind her, the pair of clotheslines held the black dress she’d worn to the chicken coop and some white unmentionables. The chemises, petticoats, and a corset flapped in the breeze with scraps of pink and blue ribbons dangling from them. Mixed in with them were his own clean shirts—he supposed that Cora had done those earlier because they looked dry.

  Luke thought it was a homey scene, one that he realized he’d missed. The hot water in the tub raised enough steam to stick strands of curls to Emily’s face and make them coil at the back of her neck. She didn’t look nearly as stiff and formal as the woman who had met him on the dock in town.

  Suddenly, Luke’s throat was as dry as a field in August, and he swallowed hard, completely captivated by Emily’s appealing dishevelment. He stood and watched her as she worked, scrubbing, wringing, rinsing.

  She looked up. “Mr. Becker! I didn’t see you—I didn’t know you were—what are you doing?”

  “I just came around back to wash up for supper.” He nodded at the pump to her left.

  She glanced at the pump, then looked over her shoulder at the clean wash hanging in plain view. Obviously flustered, she plunged the garment in her hand into the water again.

  He smiled at her modesty. “Trust me, you don’t have anything there I haven’t seen before.”

  Even though she puckered up as if she’d been sucking a lemon, her cheeks turned a most becoming shade of pink. “That may be, but you have not seen mine.”

  He chuckled outright and she blushed harder, apparently realizing how that had sounded.

  “No, ma’am, that’s true. I haven’t.” He stepped closer, enjoying this softer side of her that he’d n
ot seen before. The day in the chicken coop didn’t count—she’d been frightened and Cora had pulled a rotten trick on her. This was different. This Emily was beguiling.

  “Well, please don’t let me keep you from your intended task.” She held the chemise under the wash water as if she were trying to drown it.

  He nodded and smiled again, and began unbuttoning his shirt.

  She looked at him with wide eyes. “Mr. Becker, you are disrobing!”

  He opened the shirt and pulled it off. She averted her gaze. “There isn’t much point in washing if I’m going to keep this dirty shirt on.”

  He went to the pump and picked up a sliver of Cora’s acrid homemade soap where it sat on an old piece of toweling that he kept with it. Like everything she made, the soap was crude and not very good—this stuff could strip the hide off a buffalo—but it got the job done. He went about his business, pumping the cold water over his head and working up a lather.

  He felt Emily’s eyes on him and an old spark of a long lost feeling ignited in his belly. Suddenly he wished he could strip down to bare skin and sit in that hot washtub in the low, golden sun, and let her scrub his back until all the dirt and all the pain of the last few years was washed away. He could easily imagine her strong, smooth fingers working at his stiff shoulders, massaging his scalp as she washed his hair, and then leaning back against her soft breasts while she hummed to him with that sweet voice he’d heard in church.

  It was such a pleasant reverie that he forgot to rinse the soap off his face before opening his eyes. The suds scalded them like liquid fire, and he let out a string of curse words that he hadn’t used in mixed company in years.

  “Mr. Becker, really!” The daydream came to a rude and abrupt end.

  He splashed vigorously, actually worried for a moment that Cora’s lousy soap had blinded him. God knew it was possible, even though he wasn’t sure just what she put in it. “I’ve got soap in my eyes, damn it!”

  “Oh, no, let me help!” He heard the pump handle work and then felt Emily’s hand, cool and soft, on the back of his neck bending him forward, as she splashed more water into his face with her other hand.