Chapter Three #3
Charlotte rubbed a little salve between her fingers and showed Tucker. “It may soothe the soreness.”
Clay translated on the slate.
Her touch was gentle. Tucker sat very still while she rubbed the salve around his ear and along the side of his neck. When she’d finished, she handed him the second biscuit.
Noah looked at Clay. “You boys eaten?”
Clay could have lied. He had done it before, when younger children at the orphanage asked if there would be enough supper. But Noah’s eyes were steady, and there was no use pretending with a man who could count ribs on an ox from ten feet away.
“We’ve managed.”
Charlotte rose. “That means no.”
“It means we’ve got enough for tonight.”
“Then you can keep it for tomorrow.” She turned toward her wagon. “Noah, fetch the ham.”
Noah gave her a look that said he had heard this order before.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Clay started to protest. Charlotte stopped him with one raised hand.
“You can give us some work in return. I expect you know how to handle an axe.”
Clay looked at Tucker. The boy was chewing his biscuit carefully, as if he feared it might vanish.
“All right,” Clay said. “We’d be grateful.”
They made camp together beside the stream.
Noah and Clay unharnessed the mules and led Nell and Moses down to water. Moses drank slowly now, no longer desperate. Noah checked the raw place on his neck and gave Clay a small tin of grease to keep flies from it.
“Use that morning and evening,” he said. “Don’t let the wound crust over thick.”
Clay turned the tin in his hand. “I can pay you when we reach a town.”
Noah snorted. “With what?”
Clay had no answer.
“Use it,” Noah said.
Charlotte set Tucker to work washing potatoes in a basin. She showed him how to scrub the dirt from the skins with a rag. He did it with great seriousness. When he finished, she inspected each one as though he had prepared a king’s supper.
“Fine work,” she said.
Tucker caught only part of it. He looked at Clay.
“She says you did good.”
Tucker gave Charlotte a smile.
Clay split wood while Noah dug a fire pit. The work settled him. The axe head bit clean through dry pine. Chips scattered over his boots. Each time he looked up, Tucker was near Charlotte’s side, carrying something or watching her hands as she sliced the ham.
The smell of it filled the camp. Ham, onions, and potatoes frying in a black skillet. Charlotte made gravy with flour and grease, and Noah produced coffee from a tin tucked under his wagon seat.
Clay sat down near the fire when the food was ready. He had not known how hungry he was until Charlotte handed him a plate.
Tucker sat between Charlotte and Clay. He took one bite of potato, then another, and his eyes widened.
Charlotte laughed softly. “I suppose that answers whether he likes it.”
Clay smiled. “He’s never been one to complain about potatoes.”
Tucker looked at him, trying to follow. Clay wrote on the slate.
SHE COOKS BETTER THAN YOU DO.
Tucker read it. Then he picked up the slate and wrote, BULLY!
Charlotte pressed her lips together, trying not to laugh.
Noah did not bother trying. His laugh rolled out into the dark. Charlotte laughed then too, and Tucker joined in because he could see them laughing, though no sound reached him.
For a while, Clay forgot the empty cans in his wagon. He forgot the broken tree and the fear he had seen in Tucker’s eyes that morning. The fire held steady. Across the stream, frogs began calling where the water widened among the reeds.
Noah poured coffee into a tin cup and handed it to Clay.
“You brothers or companions?” he asked.
“I thought I was alone, at first.”
“Is that so?”
Clay looked at Tucker. The boy had leaned against Charlotte’s arm without seeming to know it. She kept one hand at his back while she ate.
“Then I discovered I had company.”
Noah nodded as if that was answer enough.
Charlotte looked across the fire at Clay. “Tucker can ride with us tomorrow, if he wants. Our wagon’s a little easier on the bones than yours, and I can keep giving him the salve.”
Tucker was watching Clay already. He had heard none of it, but he knew it concerned him.
Clay wrote the offer on the slate.
Tucker read it twice. Then he looked at Charlotte, at Noah, and finally at Clay. His hand tightened around the chalk.
He wrote, YOU TOO?
Clay understood before he finished.
“Of course,” he said, then wrote it beneath Tucker’s words. WE STAY TOGETHER.
Tucker nodded. He handed the slate back and took another bite of potato.
The four of them sat close to the fire until the plates were scraped clean. Noah told a story about a mule that had kicked a preacher into a pond. Charlotte corrected half the details. Clay listened and watched Tucker’s face in the firelight.
When Charlotte spread a spare blanket over the boy’s shoulders, Tucker did not pull away.
Clay looked up at the black sky beyond the willows. There were stars out now, hard and clear after the storm. He had set out from Natchez believing he was alone. He was glad he was wrong. Clay fed another stick into the fire and watched the sparks rise.