Chapter 13
Eleanor set the boy to the meanest work on the place, and she saw to it that he knew why.
Wood was his, all of it, split and stacked before the hands were up.
Water was his, hauled from the spring in two pails that were too big for him.
His shoulders stood up in knots under the too-big coat.
He cleaned the hen house. He mucked the stalls the hands did not care to muck.
When the hired girl wanted a floor scrubbed, she called for Harry.
When the foreman wanted a fence post dug, he called for Harry.
Nobody ever called for him to do anything a person might have wanted to do.
He ate in the kitchen after. What was left when the hands had done, he ate. He stood at the end of the table with his plate, because Eleanor had not said he might sit.
And he was watched. That was the coldest corner of all, colder than the tack room.
From the porch, Eleanor watched him, from the window, from the yard.
Her gray eyes went over him as they had on the platform.
She counted the wood he stacked. She counted the eggs he brought in.
When a hammer went missing from the barn, she had him turn out his pockets in front of the foreman.
The hammer turned up in the tack room, where the foreman himself had left it. Nobody said a word to the boy.
The tack room was a plank lean-to against the barn wall.
Saddles hung on pegs. It smelled of leather and horse.
It had a pallet in the corner and a nail for his coat.
That was all. It was hotter than the barn by day and no cooler by night.
Samantha had looked in once, when nobody was by, and stood a moment in the door.
It was a good deal like a loft over a kitchen.
He was trusted with nothing. Not the horses. Not the house. Not so much as the key to the smokehouse, which the hired girl carried and he did not.
Samantha saw all of it. She could not have failed to. Every day of it went in like a splinter.
Harry met it the only way he knew.
He went sullen. What he was told, he did, exactly that and not one thing more. He did not say yes ma’am unless he had to. He looked at no one. His face stayed shut like a door, as it had been on the platform, and behind it he watched.
And his hands were quick. Samantha saw that too, and understood it before Eleanor did.
A heel of bread went from the kitchen table when the hired girl’s back was turned.
A ball of twine went from the barn. Once, a tin cup from the bunkhouse step.
Small takings. Nothing that mattered. But they went, and Samantha knew where they were going, because she had done it herself.
Under the pallet, in the tack room. Against the day they threw him out.
A child who has been passed over on every platform does not believe in a home. He believes in what he can carry.
His hands blistered on the pail handles the first week.
The blisters broke. He said nothing to anyone.
Samantha saw them when he took his plate.
She said nothing either. But the next morning there was a little pot of salve on the end of the table where he stood.
It was the kind she had made for the hands on the West farm, out of tallow and comfrey.
She did not say whose it was. He looked at it a while before he took it. He took it, though. That was something.
She said nothing to Eleanor. She said nothing to anyone.
But she began, where she dared, to reach him.
It had to be where she dared. That was the hard part.
She could not take him into the house. She could not sit him at the table.
In front of Eleanor, she could not do one kindness a respectable stranger would not do.
Not for a Society boy in the yard. So she did small kindnesses, quietly, as Amos had once done them for her.
A full plate. That was the first. Not the scrapings after the hands had done. A plate she filled first and set aside under a cloth, so that when he came in there was meat on it. She said nothing about it. She only set it down at the end of the table where he stood, and went back to the stove.
He looked at it. Then he looked at her, quick, hard, the way a dog looks at a lifted hand.
“Eat it,” she said. “It’ll spoil else.”
He ate it. He ate it standing, fast, with one eye on the door.
A warm word, when nobody was by. Not much. Good morning, Harry. That wood’s stacked neat. She never made a fuss of it. She had learned from Amos that a fuss was what a marked child could not bear, because it drew eyes.
The riskiest was a chore quietly done, and she did it anyway.
Eleanor set him more than a boy could finish by dark.
Samantha knew the old woman would dock his supper for it.
So she went out in the last of the light with her sleeves rolled and stacked wood beside him.
Neither of them spoke. When the pile was done, she went in and washed her hands.
Eleanor came out to count, and the count was right.
Harry looked at her across the yard, once, after that. She could not read the look. She was not sure he could have read it himself.
He did not trust it. She had not expected him to.
None of it did he trust, the plate nor the word nor the wood.
He was braced for the kindness to turn, as all kindness had turned on him before.
She could see him waiting for it. He tested her like a beaten dog, coming a little nearer and flinching back.
He took the full plate and did not thank her.
The warm word he took and gave nothing back.
Once, when she set the plate down, he knocked it with his elbow so the meat went on the floor. Then he looked at her, and waited.
She picked it up. She put it back on the plate. Without a word, she went back to the stove.
No pushing. No flinching. That wariness she knew from the inside, every inch of it. If she pushed, he would run. If she flinched, he would know the kindness had been a lie all along. So she did neither. She only went on, day after day, doing the small mercies and asking nothing.
It had taken Amos a winter to reach her. She could give the boy a summer.
But every mercy was a risk, and she knew it.
She knew it every time she filled the plate.
A bride who defended bad stock too fiercely invited exactly the question she had crossed a country to escape.
What was Miss Bree to a Society boy? Why should the handsome, respectable stranger with no past to speak of care whether a train-child in the yard ate meat or scrapings?
Respectable women did not. The wives in the parlor did not. Eleanor did not.
What she was doing had no explanation. And in that house, what had no explanation would be explained, sooner or later. A woman with cool gray eyes and a great deal of patience would see to that.
So she watched herself as closely as Eleanor watched the boy. She let nothing show that she could help. When Eleanor was in the room, she did not look at Harry. To him she spoke only to give an order. At supper the old woman said the boy was surly and would want a firm hand.
Samantha said, “Yes, ma’am,” and passed the bread.
She thought she was careful. She was careful.
But she was not careful enough, and she knew that too, lying awake in the blue room.
Because there was no such thing as careful enough.
A woman could hide what she was for twelve years and never slip.
She could not hide what she felt for a boy who was herself at eight.
It came out of her in spite of all her care.
In the set of a plate. In how she stood beside him at the woodpile in the last light.
It was in her face, when she thought nobody saw.
Somebody saw.
Eleanor missed nothing. She never had.
Of an evening, she sat on the porch with her mending, upright in her black silk.
From there she watched her son’s bride cross the yard to the woodpile with her sleeves rolled.
The plate going under the cloth, she saw.
The warm word through the kitchen window, when the girl thought the house was empty, she heard. Nothing was said. It was only filed.
It did not add up. That was what held her attention.
A respectable young woman with no people and no past did not mother a Society boy in the yard.
Not as if he were her own kin. Nor did she stack wood beside him in the dusk with a look on her face that Eleanor had seen only once before.
On her own face, in a glass, thirty-five years ago, bending over a cradle.
Tenderness. That was what it was. A tenderness no stranger should feel for such stock.
Eleanor turned it over, as she turned every question over, without haste. She did not know yet what it meant. She had a good notion. But she was a woman who preferred to know rather than guess, and there was a letter coming from the north that would tell her.
It was late. Letters from Iowa were slow. But it was coming. She had written carefully. She had asked the right questions.
Waiting was nothing to her. Forty years she had waited for most of what she wanted, and been right in the end.
So she sat on the porch in the warm dusk. The swallows went over. The needle went in and out. She watched Miss Bree carry a plate to the boy in the yard. And she waited, with her cool small smile, for the letter she knew was coming.