Chapter 1 #2
By the time the men took their seats, MaryAnn had fluffy scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes with onions and peppers, ham steaks, salsa mexicano, and coffee on the table.
She put a stack of tortillas wrapped in a clean dishtowel by Mr. Callahan’s elbow at the head of the table and another stack between her and Roslynn, who both sat on the other side of the boys.
Like at last night’s dinner table, the seat at the other end remained conspicuously empty.
“What’s this?” Carl barked, eyeing the dish towel like snakes might be writhing beneath it.
“Eat your breakfast,” his father said. Mr. Callahan filled his plate then ripped a tortilla in half like it was what he used to chase his food around every morning. The boys grumbled, but finished their stack and were dipping into the other before breakfast was through.
MaryAnn toyed with her food as she watched Roslynn from under her eyelashes.
Mr. Callahan’s sister pulled a tortilla from under the dishcloth, rolled it into a cylinder, then took a bite.
Her eyelashes—they were little spikes darker than her hair—rested against her full freckled cheeks as she enjoyed it.
Then she opened her eyes, gave a slow nod to Mary Ann, and used two more tortillas to clean her plate.
MaryAnn tore up her tortillas to make allies of the animals at her feet.
That night, after dinner, as the wash water heated and the men retired to the porch, Roslynn began to help MaryAnn clear the table.
“You don’t need to do that,” MaryAnn protested as Roslynn wiped off the cutlery into the slop bucket. “Take your leisure; you’ve been working all day.”
“And you haven’t?” Roslynn asked. She motioned to the porch with a butter knife, where the men sat in chair-rocking silence. “Always amazed me how they think guiding a plow with the help of men and horses is harder than hauling wet laundry to the line all by yourself.”
MaryAnn was fine letting them think that as long as it was her they wanted hauling the laundry.
The sun was setting on her first day as the new Mrs. Callahan and already she liked it better here than home, liked the quiet farmhouse to herself most of the day, liked that there was no mark on the home but what she made on it.
The Callahans’ ways were foreign to her, but Roslynn doing men’s chores in poorly-patched overalls and the family sitting down to tortillas as readily as biscuits would be foreign to most people.
Mr. Callahan’s lack of regard for the opinions of others was presumably why he’d made MaryAnn his wife when many looked down on an Anglo marrying a woman with skin as brown as hers.
She wanted to maintain his regard. She wanted to stay. She’d even let him do that again, if he needed to. She didn’t want him seeing his sister doing housework and thinking MaryAnn was useless and send her away. She didn’t want Roslynn to think she was useless, like her parents and siblings had.
MaryAnn was about to protest again when Roslynn said, “Besides, we’re sisters now.” She looked at MaryAnn from under those thick, spiky lashes. “Sisters should get to know each other, don’t you think?”
MaryAnn carried the stacked crockery to the sink, glad her trembling hands didn’t drop it all to the boards.
Over the next several evenings, their words came out in trickles.
Roslynn seemed unused to getting to know someone when she’d known the same people her whole life, and nobody had ever been much interested in what MaryAnn had to say.
Roslynn learned that MaryAnn was the middle of seven children.
MaryAnn learned her husband’s first name was Samuel.
Samuel had been on the edge of manhood and Roslynn just a babe when the Great Flu wiped out the rest of their family.
Roslynn loved blackberries and despised okra; MaryAnn preferred the Virgen de Guadalupe over the man on the cross.
One evening, she was formally introduced to Tucker, the grinning dog with the terrifying canines, and Cat.
“Cat?” MaryAnn asked skeptically, on her knees beside Roslynn as she shook Tucker’s paw.
“Cat,” Roslynn replied, very serious. “I yelled ‘Cat’ a second before the thresher ate her up and she’s been following me around ever since.”
At the summons, Cat came padding across the floor, stood on her hindlegs, and rubbed her head against MaryAnn’s chin. MaryAnn giggled as she stroked Cat’s sinuous back.
Roslynn cleared her throat. “They can be your pets, too,” she said shyly, “if you want.”
MaryAnn blinked away tears as she met Roslynn’s shining eyes.
Sometimes, there were no words at all, just the two of them being together as they cleaned up.
To the men, it would look like two women learning to work in concert and live in harmony.
To MaryAnn, it was exquisite torture, a growing demand inside her taking up so much space that there was no room for words.
Roslynn there, right there, in her newly-mended overalls with MaryAnn’s neat crosshatches down her fulsome thigh.
There, with her small, rough hands moving out of the tepid soap water a second before MaryAnn’s could enter it.
There, smelling like grass on her skin and sun in her hair, the animals moving around them and weaving them closer together.
When Roslynn explained how her brother allowed her to work beside him as he built his five acres into ten, then fifty, then into enough parcels for his adult sons to have something to claim as their own once they’d earned it, MaryAnn understood how much the woman loved her brother.
“I was happiest out there, and useful, so out there is where he let me stay,” Roslynn said. “His first wife Berta didn’t mind. But the next two…they worried ‘bout what the neighbors would say.” She humphed. “As if the neighbors had any right gossiping about the most prosperous land in the county.”
She was tamping down the coals in the stove. When she looked toward MaryAnn, the dying embers limned her red hair in gold. “My brother is a good and worthy man,” Roslynn said, solemnly. “I’d not shame him for the world.”
That good and worthy man sat out on the porch reading The Progressive Farmer, his sons in town and absent, while MaryAnn burned to unhook Roslynn’s overalls.
To do what, she hadn’t the foggiest, but there’d been rumors about two tías in the colonia who’d come to Kansas City as sisters-in-law with photos of long-dead husbands, who’d occasionally look at each other in way that dried all the spit in MaryAnn’s mouth and made her want to weep.
At night, burning in a bedroom her husband provided, able to touch herself for the first time in her life because she no longer had to share a bed with sisters or cousins or ninos, she began to figure out how she might touch Roslynn.
Would she like spit-wet thumbs rubbing over her nipples like MaryAnn did?
She imagined the insides of Roslynn’s thighs were silkier than her own.
Did her little pebble get as hard? Were her folds just as wet?
Her body became Roslynn’s and she learned how to give it unearthly pleasure. Every night, she bit the thin skin of the back of her hand to muffle her moans, and every morning, she woke up burning and relieved and worried. And alone.
Mr. Callahan—Samuel—still hadn’t returned to MaryAnn’s room. Should she say something? Do something? The thought alone made her skin crawl. They shared no intimacies; the only words they exchanged were about the chores. Her only opinion of him was shaped by his sister.
But if the man didn’t desire her, would he send her away?
The advent of the calving season brought a new rhythm to the household: Three of the Callahans slept in the fields, keeping close to the birthing mothers in case one fell into distress.
One exhausted Callahan came home every night to eat, wash, sleep in their bed, and recover their energy.
MaryAnn kept the home fires burning, seeing to the barn animals and making up the dinner pails that the refreshed one would take away.
Carl was the first to return home. He gave a grateful grunt over the batch of dinner rolls she served him then ignored her.
The next night, her husband inquired about provisions and whether that coyote had come back to harass the hens.
Then they ate a silent meal at the table and he retired to his room to fall asleep so fast and hard his snores shook the beams, keeping MaryAnn awake in anticipation of a visit that never came.
Alone with Adam, he took not-so-sly peeks at the front and back of her dress then, when the two of them sat at the table, said, “You and Aunt Roslynn sure do get along,” making MaryAnn drop her fork.
She picked it up without looking at him. “You’d rather have us at war?”
“Pa’s other wives didn’t think too much of her,” he drawled.
MaryAnn clamped down on the fury trying to grow and met her stepson’s insolent grin. That grin faltered when he saw the look in her eyes.
“Never mind the thoughts of two young women who unfortunately weren’t around long enough to learn better.
What do you think of her? What do you think of the woman who’s been by your side every moment of your life and who helped your father grow this place into something you and your siblings can be proud of. ”
His handsome face grew mulish. He was so young. He’d been so young when he’d lost his mother. “If she wasn’t always in the way, Pa’d give me more to do,” Adam grumbled into his corn. “He’d see me as the man I am.”
“It’s not your aunt preventing him from seeing that,” MaryAnn said.