Chapter Eight
Eight
The attic room was barely larger than a closet, with only one bed and one very small window overlooking the backyard and the street behind Ornetta’s house, where John Avery’s blacksmith shop and livery stable dominated the landscape.
Fortunately, Lizbet thought, with a sigh, there were trees, too, those wonderful silver-leaved cottonwoods that shifted and sparkled in the daylight. Even now, in the early evening, they shimmered, as though lit from within.
They were everywhere, those cottonwood trees, and even though there was an active silver mine nearby—this, too, Lizbet had learned from Ornetta—the town had taken its name, Silver Hills, from the trees.
No one in the community had gotten rich from the mine, though a good many locals worked there; it was owned by a family called Bettencourt, over in Painted Pony Creek.
What she needed to do now, she decided, was to stop gazing at the scenery, go downstairs and see what she could do to get her life and the children’s lives moving in the right direction.
Frankie and Jubal were squabbling about something, and Lizbet left them to it. They needed to learn to work out their differences, and that wouldn’t happen if she constantly intervened.
She’d met the other boarders, including Mr. Avery, the blacksmith and, as it happened, he was in the kitchen, leaning against a counter and sipping from a mugful of steaming coffee when Lizbet arrived.
She took a moment to admire him; John was a quiet man, with strong shoulders and muscular forearms, and Lizbet might have found him quite appealing, even though he had just put in a day’s work and hadn’t had a chance to clean up.
If she hadn’t been so taken with Gabe Whitfield—not just his looks, but his generous spirit, that is.
“Good afternoon,” she said, in a cheerful tone. “How was your day?”
“Fair enough,” John answered good-naturedly. “How was yours?”
“I spent it planning—or trying to, at least.”
John raised a curious eyebrow, but said nothing.
“I need to find work, Mr. Avery. Or is it Reverend Avery?”
He smiled. “I’m just a self-appointed country preacher. I didn’t go to divinity school.” He paused, looking both modest and, somehow, profoundly secure. “What sort of work are you looking for?”
“I’m a teacher by profession,” Lizbet replied. “But it’s been made clear to me that Silver Hills has one school and needs only one teacher. Which it already has.”
John thought for a few moments, took a few more sips from his mug. “You’re willing to do something else?”
“Anything that isn’t immoral,” Lizbet replied, thinking of the Hard Luck Saloon, where there was seemingly a never-ending demand for dance-hall girls.
Although these women weren’t necessarily prostitutes, they went about bare legged, except for fishnet stockings, according to one of the other female boarders, and their necklines plunged.
Lizbet was no prude, but she wanted no part of parading around a grubby saloon in a getup designed to arouse a roomful of drunkards.
John nodded in apparent agreement and smiled. Although he was legendary for giving thunderous sermons on occasion, he was gentle, too. “What do you have in mind?”
“I’d be happy to clean houses or launder clothing or clerk in a store,” she said, but at the moment, her thoughts weren’t really on landing a paying job.
Her thoughts had already turned to Gabe.
She hesitated, and it must have been clear to John that she wanted ask questions, because he prompted her with another nod and a raising of his eyebrows.
“You were around,” she ventured somewhat tenuously, “when Mr. Whitfield lost his family?”
John’s expression turned sober. “Yes,” he said. “It was a hard time for him, as you can imagine.”
She considered the terrible sorrow Gabe carried. She’d sensed it the day before, though she hadn’t been able to define it, when they first met in front of the general store after she had disembarked from the jitney.
Now she felt a deep need to know more, even though Gabe’s business was his own, and none of hers.
“He hasn’t recovered,” she said, almost muttering the words.
Ornetta had told Lizbet a couple of hours before, while they were washing the supper dishes, how his wife and daughter had perished during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.
Lizbet, like almost everyone else, had lost friends and relatives and several students to that dreadful pestilence, and she knew how the grief gouged out space in a person’s soul and put down roots there.
“I don’t know if Gabe will ever get over losing Bonnie and that sweet baby girl of theirs,” Ornetta had commented, while she and Lizbet were setting the kitchen to rights.
“But he needs to accept that they’re gone and move on with his life.
He’s a good man, decent and honest right down to the marrow of his bones, and bless his soul, he has no earthly idea how handsome he is.
” She’d paused a moment there, drying a just-washed skillet with a dish towel.
“Practically every unmarried woman is this town is after him, but he’s apt to back off whenever one of them gets too close. ”
Lizbet had taken all that in, but it was still something of a jumble in her brain—she’d have to sort through it later.
Ornetta had been right, saying Gabe was a good man, though. That much was plain.
“He’s come quite a way, Gabe has,” John said, after the silence between them had stretched to the point of awkwardness.
“It hasn’t been easy, of course. He takes a few steps forward, falls a few steps back and then tries again.
Gabe loved Bonnie very deeply, and that little girl was precious to him, of course.
” The minister/blacksmith paused, shook his head sadly.
“Letting go takes time. A lot of it, usually.”
Lizbet’s mind drifted back again.
Earlier, after unloading the firewood—she wondered now if Gabe might have taken her help as an attempt to woo him, like the other women he shied away from, and felt a pang of embarrassment—he’d brought her and the children’s baggage up from the sidewalk and piled all of it at one end of the tiny room.
There was kindness in Gabe Whitfield, as well as sorrow.
“I’d better go and wash up,” John said, interrupting her reflections, though just briefly.
When he left the room, via the back stairway, Lizbet resumed her pondering, though she did manage to send it in another direction.
With supper long over, the house was settling down for the night, just like the people inside it.
Lizbet continued to review the day, as was her tendency.
She was a person who mentally weighed and measured her experiences, and the people she encountered along the way, hoping to learn more about herself and others.
She had liked shy Sam Ernshaw, a bank clerk and therefore an employee of Henry Middlebrook.
Sam hadn’t said much at supper, but he’d offered to clear the table after the meal—chicken and dumplings—was over, though Ornetta had chased him off, flapping her apron at him good-naturedly and saying she didn’t need some gosh-darned man under her feet.
Miss Ellie Moore, who ran the town library, was a sweet woman who, by her own admission, would rather read a book than breathe.
She shared a room with her niece, Nelly, who was twenty years old, somewhere between plain and pretty, with a lively personality.
She earned her living waiting tables and cleaning rooms at the Statehood Hotel, and she wanted a husband.
It was obvious from the first that she had her cap set for Sam, who dodged her politely and carefully avoided any conversation beyond, “please pass the butter” and blushed whenever she looked his way.
Which was often.
John Avery hadn’t been back from work in time for supper, and Lizbet had learned little about him during their chat in the kitchen, except that he was a loyal friend to Gabe.
A nice-looking man with light brown hair and blue eyes, muscular shoulders and forearms, and small burn scars on both hands, he was bound to make a good husband to the woman he planned to marry.
Much to Nelly’s consternation, Mr. Avery was engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Mabel Dunsworthy, who lived with her parents in Illinois.
She was a seamstress and milliner of considerable skill—again, this information was dispensed by Ornetta, who seemed to know a great deal about everybody—and both she and John were saving practically every cent they earned so that Mabel could join him in Montana and they could get married.
Stella MacIntosh, another boarder, worked in the general store by day and played the organ at church every Sunday for the grand sum of one silver dollar.
She was young, maybe still in her teens, and she’d said little during supper, though after the meal, in the front parlor, she’d read a chapter of Great Expectations to Frankie and Jubal, much to their delight, and seemed to enjoy the exchange as much as they did.
Stella was quite pretty, but, unlike Nelly, she was no extravert.
Ornetta’s conclusion—and Lizbet agreed—was that the girl was “scared half to death,” hiding from someone or something.
She’d shown up in Silver Hills about a year earlier, jittery as a cat in a room full of swinging pendulums, and as far as anybody knew, she never sent or received letters.
Never placed a call on the only telephone in town—it was right there in the store, along with the switchboard—except for the private one in Henry Middlebrook’s office at the bank, and nobody used that but him.
Stella was a mystery, as far as Ornetta was concerned, and she probably needed somebody’s help, though it wasn’t likely she’d ask for it, given the way she kept things to herself.
Mulling all this over, Lizbet returned to the attic room.
Frankie and Jubal were already asleep, their little bodies pushed close against the wall, to make room for their big sister.