Chapter 8
Eight
Della lifted the smoking pan off the range and set it on the board to inspect it.
And sighed.
Could this be construed as progress?
Yes, it was smoking. Not the way the pie had smoked last week - that one had filled the kitchen and driven her out onto the porch coughing while Colt teased her from the yard. But it was smoking, nonetheless. A thin blue thread coming off one corner where the pastry had gone from brown to black.
She turned it round. The other three corners were less burned. She picked up Biddy’s book and read the page, although she probably could have recited this receipt by heart. She’d made her own notes alongside Biddy’s careful script.
Went back to the pan. "Well," she said to it.
Della pushed the damp hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, because her hands were floured, and stood for a moment in the heat that came off the range, through the open door. Heat that even in her lighter clothing felt like it was trying to drive her crazy.
She heard the unmistakable sounds of men returning and groaned out loud. She rushed to the window. Sure enough, hand field in. Raucous laughter. Hooves. She spun back to the kitchen. She wasn’t nearly ready enough.
She hurried to the sink.
She thought about the house on Twelfth Street. Mrs. Griffith in the kitchen with two girls under her. Biddy. A butler who had frightened Della until she was nine years old. A man who came only for the boots. A staff of eight to run that house. Her father, brother, and Della.
That was it.
Back in New York, they ate at eight o’clock every evening.
Here, there was no rhyme nor reason to when it was suppertime. Some days, it was dark. Yesterday, it was early afternoon. When the men finished depended on the weather. Or the herd. Or the jobs for that day.
She banged a pan onto the stove, shaking her head.
“How am I meant to know?”
She had been in this kitchen since half past five that morning, and in the short while she had spent on the porch shelling peas, she had fallen asleep sitting up.
Five men. Three meals. Every day.
She raced between the stove, the platters, the table. Poked at the potatoes. Tsked when they were still too hard to serve. A quick look through the window.
How had they finished feeding and watering the horses that fast?
She shook her head. This part of the work had not been in the letters. He had written that he had a house that wants running. She had written back that she could keep accounts and manage a household and sew a straight seam, but that she was not a cook and would not pretend to be one.
He had written nobody out here started off knowing how.
Not once had he mentioned a cookhouse. She knew because she’d checked her letters on the second night after Duke and the others had returned from roundup. Cooking for her husband was fine. In fact, she’d enjoyed the time with Beau. Learning the rhythms of this house, the land. Him.
However, cooking for a team of men was way beyond the limited skills she’d managed to muster thus far.
She had never known exhaustion like it. But she couldn’t stop, not now. Not when hungry men were washing up. And heading to the cookhouse.
Even though the pie was burned and the vegetables were raw.
There was the mending. The cleaning. The sorting. The dusting. The washing. The fixing. There was the garden that could be a garden, if she only had a minute to breathe.
She spotted Beau ambling across the yard, head down. He worked so hard, from dawn till dusk.
Well, now, so did she.
His work was done for the day.
Hers was not. Nowhere near.
Things had to change. She’d speak to him about it. But not now. Now she had to try and get these darn potatoes to boil faster.
The sun had gone down to the horizon and was pooling there, laying the whole kitchen over in orange, when the back door opened, and Beau came in.
He filled the doorway and paused. Dust to the knees and dust in the creases of his shirt.
Covering his forearms where his sleeves were rolled past the elbow.
He shoved his hands through his hair, ruffling his hair that had flattened where the hat had been.
Blue eyes met hers across the kitchen. For just a moment, he smiled.
Awareness of him fluttered in her stomach, her heart giving the same little bump it had done ever since she’d looked up at him.
"Evening."
"Good evening."
“I’ll get washed up and be in.” He hung his hat and disappeared into the darkening evening. She hovered at the table, listening to the splashing. When he reappeared, his face was darker. Eyes bluer.
Altogether more handsome.
She dragged her thoughts back to the matter in hand.
He came over to her and, for one heart-stopping moment, thought he was about to brush a kiss to her cheek. Instead, he shimmied her sideways so that he could inspect today’s pie.
"That's a pie," he said. “I could smell it all the way out across the yard.”
She swallowed when the dimple deepened. Mind on the matter, Della.
“I’m getting better,” she nodded, and crossed to the dresser. She took down two plates.
"How long have these been on?" He held a pan lid in his hand, at the stove.
"An hour."
"Huh."
Della frowned as she walked to him. She peered in. The water in the pan sat there, flat and cold.
She looked at the damper. She had shut it down at five to keep the oven off the pie, and she had never opened it again.
"Dang it," she said.
"Language, Mrs. Hawkins."
"I have picked it up from a very poor influence."
Beau made the sound that in a less serious man would have been a laugh. “Leave it,” he said. “The pie will be just fine.”
“You can’t have pie without potatoes.”
“I can have whatever I want,” he sliced into the crust. “It’s my house. Here,” he slid a plate towards her.
“I’m not hungry,” she muttered at him, annoyed, ashamed, frustrated. She got the damper open and shoved a stick of wood in and shut the door on it harder than was strictly required.
“Della,” he said around the food in his mouth. “Eat.”
She ignored him, fighting back the tears. She fussed at the pan that remained stubbornly cold. She hadn’t heard him move, but when his hands slid over her shoulders, she jolted.
“The pie is delicious. Will you come and eat something?”
Alarmed by the physicality of having him this close, she shook off his touch. “I told you in my letters that I was not a cook. I said it plainly, because I did not wish to arrive under any false colors."
He watched her carefully, eyes shuttered. "You'll get there.”
She folded her arms. This is not how she envisioned the conversation, but she simply had to say something.
“I shouldn’t have to,” she said. “When your father ran this place with eighteen hands, who cooked?"
“My mother.”
That stalled Della, but then her eyes narrowed. “You said your mother passed when you were still a boy. And your father started out just Duke and himself.”
“Ma still cooked,” he hedged.
“For this house. Not for the whole cookhouse either, I’d wager.”
He didn't answer straight away. He'd got the water dipper in his hand, and he drank, and put it back, and wiped his mouth. “No, not always for the whole cookhouse. Jack Two Shirts cooked for the ranch until last year.”
That gave her pause. “What happened last year?”
His jaw slid sideways. “Just some changes.”
"I would like to talk to you about hiring a cook."
His eyes flicked over her. “No.”
"I need somebody in the cookhouse for the hands.
Or at least someone in here to help me. I need ten hands to do the amount of work now that roundup is over.
Then I can get to the rest of this house, and be of some use to you instead of standing in one room for fifteen hours failing at pastry.
" She spread her hands. "There must be a girl in Grand Springs who'd come.
Twenty dollars a month and her board. Perhaps less. "
“We don’t need one.”
Della threw her hands wide. “I am not asking to be relieved of the work I promised to do. I am asking to be relieved of work that neither of us mentioned. Not once did you say I had to feed five other men, one of whom can eat the same amount as another five men."
His eyes held hers, glittering, though he remained mute.
She could feel her own temper coming up, and she took hold of it.
"Beau. I am not complaining of hardship. I am telling you that your house is being run at a quarter of what it could be run at, because the person running it spends her entire day boiling potatoes she has forgotten to boil. Your men need to be fed well. You all work so hard. You can’t live on burned pastry and raw potatoes! "
"They can eat what they get."
"They do eat what they get, and they are extremely nice about it, which is worse." She took a step towards him, but then stopped when his eyes flashed. “The biscuits I made yesterday were hard enough to hammer a nail into a hoof. It’s not fair to me, or to your men, Beau.”
“I said no.”
“I asked Denny when he made his delivery earlier. He said there were plenty of young girls in the town who’d jump at the chance of some work right now. We’d be helping?—”
“I said no!” He shouted it this time.
“It’s twenty dollars a month,” Della pressed, incensed by his cavalier attitude.
“I would swear on anything you like that it comes back twice over in what I could do with the time.
If you just let me look at what this household spends.
Let me see the book for the flour and the coffee and the dry goods, and I will find you the twenty dollars myself?—"
“I can’t afford it!” He bellowed.
Della shrank. Not least because of the vehemence in his voice, or the fury coloring his face. His chest pumped like bellows.
"Beau—"
"There ain't twenty dollars," he said. His voice had dropped so low she could barely hear it. "Right now, I’d say that there ain't even two dollars spare."
And then he took his hat off the peg and went out. The back door clapped twice behind him. She was still standing in the middle of that big, old kitchen when she heard the horse ride off fast out of the yard.
There ain't even two.
She thought about the windows stopped with board and the broken gutter. She thought about a mercantile that had sent four sacks of flour instead of six and a shirt with mismatched buttons.
She had thought what she was looking at was neglect. As a house without a woman in it and a man who didn't notice these things.
Just another thing she’d been wrong about in this place.