“Rachel,” he scolded huskily, “don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not.” She whispered the denial against his lips.
Settling a hand at her waist, Clint knew the instant he touched her that she was lying. Her body was rigid. Pressed close to her as he was, he could feel the rapidity of her breathing and imagined he could hear her heart pounding. He only hoped he could make her forget her girlish fears by kissing her.
He was about to try when a thump came from somewhere beyond the bedroom door. The next instant, an eerie wail echoed throughout the house. Then someone yelled, “Clint! Hurry! Somethin’s wrong with Useless!”
By the time Rachel and Clint arrived in the kitchen, the dog had worked himself up to a full-fledged cacophony, his howls resounding. Instantly aware that the canine’s belly was abnormally distended, Clint dropped to his knees.
“Oh, shit! The yeast dough! The poor bugger ate too much, and it wasn’t done rising.”
Cody gasped. “Is he gonna die?” he asked in a quavery voice.
“No,” Clint assured him. “But I bet he’s got one heck of a bellyache.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Rachel, wishing he could return with her to the bedroom and finish what he’d started. One look into her wary blue eyes told him that it was probably a good thing he couldn’t. It was too soon for a consummation of their marriage. She needed time to get to know him first, and it was his responsibility as her husband to see she got it. He might even have to give her as much as a month, perish the thought.
“It looks like I have to stay up and play nurse to Useless. Care to join me?”
She smiled, plainly grateful to be given a reprieve. “Sure.”
So it was that the two of them prepared to spend their wedding night fully clothed, playing nursemaid to a sick dog. A little after midnight, Matt finally wandered home. After Clint informed him of his marriage to Rachel, Matt joined them in their vigil, taking a spot beside the dog on the floor. Initially things were tense: Rachel openly hostile, Matt sullen. Clint decided then and there that the two of them had to discuss the bad feelings between them, all of which seemed to revolve around Rachel’s little sister Molly.
When encouraged to air her grievances against Matt, Rachel started off by accusing, “You deliberately led my sister on and then heartlessly humiliated her!”
Matt cried, “I did not!”
From there, the fight was on, with Clint playing referee. After the two combatants had vented their spleens, he was able to maneuver them into a more productive exchange, during which it was discovered that Molly had failed to tell Rachel the entire story.
“When she walked up to me on the boardwalk that afternoon, she had cotton stuffed into her dress,” Matt explained.
“Cotton?” Rachel repeated blankly.
“Yeah.” Matt gestured vaguely at his chest. “You know…to make herself look older.”
Rachel’s eyes went round with astonishment. “She didn’t!”
Matt nodded grimly. “Some of the cotton was poking out, only she didn’t know it,” he elaborated. “Above her neckline. Everyone saw it. A couple of the younger boys started laughing. When Molly looked down and saw what was amusing them so much, she started to cry.” In his earnestness, Matt stopped petting Useless and leaned forward to look her directly in the eye. “I did tell her to go home, Rachel, just like she says I did. But I didn’t do it to be mean, and I didn’t intend it to hurt her feelings. It was just—well, she was so embarrassed, I don’t think she’d have had the presence of mind to move otherwise.”
Clearly mortified, Rachel cupped a hand over her eyes. “Oh, dear…Cotton? Why would she do something so silly?” She shook her head. “No wonder she came home sobbing. She must have been humiliated to death. Why didn’t she just tell me the truth? I would’ve understood. Instead, I’ve been blaming you.”
“She was probably ashamed to tell you.” Matt smiled slightly. “When we’re that age, all of us do crazy things in the name of love. I even serenaded a girl under her bedroom window once.”
“That isn’t crazy, it’s sweet.”
Matt laughed. “You haven’t heard me sing!” He glanced at Clint. “Your turn to share, brother. What crazy stunt did you pull?”
Clint chuckled. “Leave me out of this.”
Rachel sighed and nibbled her lower lip. “I guess I owe you an apology, Matthew. I’m sorry my sister made such a pest of herself. It sounds as though she dogged your heels constantly.”
“Oh, she wasn’t that bad,” Matt said. “Not for the most part, anyhow. Except for when she followed me into the bathing house. Three men smoking cigars dived under the water when they saw her, and I had to buy them all new smokes. I could’ve wrung her neck that time.”
“The bath house? She followed you into the bath house? Oh, just you wait until my father hears. She won’t be able to sit down for a week.”
Matt began to look worried. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell on her,” he suggested. “I don’t want her getting into trouble. She’s just a kid. Kids do dumb things.”
Matt’s attempt to intervene on Molly’s behalf completely won Rachel over. Her eyes took on a suspicious shine. “Maybe you’re right. Being embarrassed in front of her friends was probably punishment enough.” She glanced at Clint, then averted her face. “I feel really bad. After everything that’s happened, and now I learn that Molly brought all her heartache on herself.”
“All’s well that ends well,” Clint assured her.
“Ends well? You’ve suffered dearly for her antics. Here you are, married to me.”
Clint smiled. “Like I said, all’s well that ends well.”
By morning, Useless was much improved, if not completely recovered. Still a little worried, Clint allowed the dog to remain in the house while he and Jeremiah went out to milk the cows and gather the eggs.
When the two older brothers exited the house, Cole and Daniel were already out in the yard getting that day’s stove wood chopped and moved onto the porch. “What’s Rachel fixin’ for breakfast?” Cole called out as Clint passed by him en route to the barn.
“Biscuits!” Clint called back, hoping even as he spoke that Rachel’s second attempt proved more edible than her first. “Since she was up all night, I said we could make do with hot biscuits and sorghum.”
Cole made a face, but he took the disappointment in stride, accustomed as he was to eating what ever he could scrounge.
A few minutes later, as Clint made his way back to the house, Cole yelled, “Shouldn’t’ve left Useless inside! He reared up on Rachel and knocked the gallon of sorghum out of her hands.”
“It went all over everywhere,” Daniel elaborated. “Rachel, the floor, the table. Talk about a mess. To top it all off, she got sidetracked tryin’ to clean up the syrup and burned the biscuits.”
Clint groaned. He entered the kitchen to find Rachel still on her hands and knees. By the looks of her face, he guessed she’d been crying. He knelt to help her, and within a few minutes, the majority of the sorghum was mopped up. Unfortunately, the stickiness had seeped into the unvarnished planks, and their shoes stuck to the floor when they walked across that spot.
“Well, this day is off to a wonderful start,” Rachel said morosely. Then, out of the blue, she started to giggle.
Clint couldn’t see what was so funny. Nothing had gone right since her arrival, after all. Then he realized that was exactly why she was laughing: because they were off to such a bad start. Leave it to Rachel to find some humor in that.
With a weary chuckle, he sank down on a bench. “Well, I guess if we make it through this, we can make it through anything.”
Red in the face and holding her sides, she gave a breathless nod and then managed to squeak, “Oh, Clint! The bench. That’s where I spilled more sorghum, and it wasn’t wiped up yet!”
He reached back to feel and swore under his breath. “Well, hell.” This time it was his turn to dissolve into laughter. He laughed until he ached. Until te
ars rolled down his cheeks. Until he was weak.
“Things have to get better,” he finally managed to say. “They can’t get worse.”
Rachel could have told Clint that, around her, things could always get worse. Bad luck was to her what miracles had been to Jesus, and over the next few days, it seemed that fate was out to prove it. One morning as she walked from the chicken coop back to the house, she didn’t see a piece of firewood one of the boys had dropped on the steps. When she tripped over the wood, she smashed every one of the eggs she’d just collected for breakfast. Since eggs were one of the few things she seemed able to cook without disastrous consequence, it was no small matter.
Her cooking…It wasn’t just bad, it was awful. Since she still hadn’t worked up the courage to tell anyone how blind she was, Rachel had no idea what Clint must think. That she was the stupidest creature ever born, she supposed. And she couldn’t much blame him. One time she misread the labels on the storage barrels and accidentally used salt instead of sugar in an apple pie. Another time, she used three times the soda called for in a cookie recipe. It got so bad that Rachel wanted to duck every time anyone took a normal-sized bite of anything she cooked. Unless she remembered to taste things herself as she went along, she could never be sure she hadn’t misread a recipe or mistaken one ingredient for another.
Unfortunately, her failures didn’t occur only in the kitchen. In addition to being unable to follow a simple recipe accurately without her spectacles, Rachel soon discovered another flaw in her character: extreme absentmindedness. No matter how important the chore, if she allowed herself to be distracted midway, it was a sure bet she would forget whatever she had been doing, oftentimes with catastrophic results. On one such occasion, she had put a laundry tub full of white clothes on to boil over a fire out in the yard. As she stood there, stirring away and gazing off into a blur of nothingness, she heard Cody crying and abandoned her post to go find him. He was horribly upset, and she soon discovered why. Clint’s birthday was coming on July sixteenth, and Cody had nothing to give him as a present.
Unable to bear seeing the six-year-old cry, Rachel applied herself to the task of cheering him up. Since they had an oversupply of old newspapers and plenty of flour, she suggested they make Clint a gift from papier-mâché. They had decided that a bowl to hold his pocket change would be an ideal gift, and Rachel was just mopping up Cody’s last tears when a shout came from out in the yard. In a twinkling, she remembered her laundry. But by then it was too late. To say that it had gotten scorched was an understatement. Incinerated, more like.
Failure…It might not have been so hard to take if only she hadn’t come to care so deeply, not just about Clint, with whom she strongly suspected she was falling in love, but about Cody and Matt and all the others. Each of Clint’s brothers had become special to her in some way: Cody because he so desperately needed a mother, Matt because of his tendency to drink, and Cole because he needed help with his spelling, something Rachel was able to assist him with by having him spell out loud. The list went on and on. For the first time in her life, Rachel felt needed, truly needed. She wanted so badly to stay with the Raffertys, to feel as though she belonged with them, to know she wasn’t just a temporary fixture. Instead, because of her continual bungling, she half expected Clint to send her packing. She certainly wouldn’t have blamed him if he had.
To ensure that he didn’t, Rachel made plans to bake him a special cake for his birthday—chocolate with fudge frosting—according to Cody, his absolute favorite. On the big day, everything went perfectly. The cake came out of the oven looking divine. Her frosting was flawless, exactly the right consistency. When everyone gathered around the table to eat, Rachel was so proud of herself she had tears in her eyes.
Then Clint took his first bite of cake. Though he was far too polite to let on, Rachel knew something was wrong by the way his eyes darkened.
“What?” she cried.
He waved a hand and tried to smile. “It’s nothing,” he managed. “Really, Rachel.”
She didn’t believe that for a second. She took a bite to see for herself. Salt. The frosting was delicious, but the cake itself tasted awful. Rachel nearly gagged. She couldn’t imagine how Clint managed to sit there, pretending it wasn’t so bad.
Suddenly, it was all just too much. In a twinkling, she remembered every disastrous mistake she’d made since coming there. Now, to add insult to injury, she had ruined Clint’s birthday. Even Cody looked at her with accusing eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular. “I’m so—sorry.”
The final blow occurred when Rachel turned to flee the house. Useless was lying on the floor behind her, and with tears blurring her already poor vision, she mistook him for a rug, tripped over him, and sprawled face first on the floor. Matt reached her first. He was the one to help her stand, the one to check her hands for scrapes and brush her off. The others hovered around, all of them making sympathetic noises, none of them saying what she needed to hear. What that might have been, Rachel didn’t know. She just knew she was humiliated to the marrow of her bones.
Looking up at Matt through her tears, she remembered his saying that he’d once advised Molly to run along home, not because he wished to hurt her, but because she needed the prompting. For different reasons, Rachel wished he’d given her the same advice. Anything to have avoided this.
With agonized movements, she retreated toward the door. With each step she took, all their faces became less distinct. Except for Clint’s, of course. His, she decided, had been carved in her heart, never to be forgotten, never to blur, no matter how far away she was from him.
With a low sob she couldn’t stifle, she jerked open the door and fled. She couldn’t go on like this. It wasn’t just she who was suffering; all of them were.
Nine
For at least a full minute after Rachel fled from the house, no one spoke. Then everyone tried to say something at once. Clint held up his hands.
“I’ll go get her.”
Cody ran up to hug his leg. “Tell her it don’t matter. We can make another cake.”
“Sure we can!” Daniel agreed.
“She just needs more practice cooking,” Jeremiah insisted.
Glancing around at all their faces, Clint realized that his brothers were as hopelessly in love with Rachel as he was, albeit in a different way. He ruffled Cody’s hair. “I’ll bring her back, tyke. Don’t you worry.” Glancing at Jeremiah, he added, “This could take a spell. While you guys are waiting, why don’t you whip up another cake real fast?” He glanced meaningfully at Cody. “A birthday party just isn’t a birthday party without cake.”
Jeremiah nodded. “Sure, Clint. Just don’t expect much. My cake may not taste much better than Rachel’s.”
Clint nearly said that anybody’s cake would taste better than Rachel’s, but he bit back the words. The less said, the better, he decided.
He found Rachel hiding in the barn loft. She was weeping copiously, her sobs deep and tearing. Just listening to her was enough to break Clint’s heart. Swinging a leg over the top ladder rung, he stepped off into the loose hay and made his way toward her. Where bales were missing, there was no bottom to the softness, and he lurched. Dust particles seared his nostrils.
The instant Rachel sensed his presence, she held her breath to stop crying. Crossing his ankles, he dropped to a sitting position beside her, propping his elbows on his knees. After a long moment, he said, “You know, Rachel, none of us care if you can cook.”
With a catch in her voice, she cried, “What do you mean, you don’t care? That’s why you brought me here! To cook and clean and make the house nice.”
“And you’ve done that.” He recited a list of things she’d done. “Seeing Cody all cleaned up for supper every night, havin’ flowers on the table and the place all shiny clean, those are the things that matter. You bein’ a great cook doesn’t.”
“You’re just saying that!” she said shakily.
&nb
sp; Clint turned his hands to gaze at his palms. As he listened to her stifled sobs, he curled his fingers into tight fists. “Rachel, I’m not just saying it. You’ve no idea what it was like around here for the boys before you came. Daniel and Cody used to have terrible dreams almost every night about our folks dyin’ and the hard times we went through after. Now they hardly ever wake up crying.” He waited for a moment to let that sink in. “Your bein’ here has given them a sense of security, that everything is okay in their world. And—” His throat went tight. “And, all that aside, I think I’m falling in love with you.”
She went instantly silent and turned to look at him. Clint met her gaze steadily.
“You’ll stop thinking so the minute you hear the truth,” she informed him in a tremulous voice. “I’m not just a bungler, like you think. I can’t see.”
“Can’t see what?”
“Anything! I’m nearly blind. To see, I have to wear spectacles over a half inch thick.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have poor eyesight.”
She cast him a look that spoke volumes. “That wasn’t a lie. My eyesight isn’t poor, it’s downright awful.”
Clint regarded her for several long seconds, remembering all the times she’d looked up at him just as she was doing now. Before, he’d always believed she was enthralled and hanging on his every word. Now he realized she looked at him with that wide-eyed intentness because she was trying to see him.
“My God…” he whispered. There had been so many signs. Now that she’d told him the truth, he couldn’t believe he’d been so blind. “Why haven’t you been wearing your glasses then, sweetheart?”
“They got broken. I always carry them hidden in my skirt pocket and only sneak them out when I have to. When I fell in the church, they got shattered. At home I have extra pairs, but here I don’t.”