Western Spring Weddings

Chapter Five

Gray faced his foreman across the woodstove in the tiny cabin. “You took that woman away from Caleb Arness?” Ramon slapped the side of his head. “Señor Gray, have we not trouble enough?”

“Yeah, guess I did take her away. And, yeah, we have plenty of trouble all right. More than before, that’s for sure.”

“But, señor...”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Arness is bad news.” Real bad news. Ever since he’d outbid the rival rancher in the auction when he’d bought the Bar H, Arness had been hounding him to sell and making threats. Not idle threats, either—real ones. Not only were his cattle being rustled, but Gray had also found fences pulled down, water holes fouled and his ranch hands had been threatened.

Ramon plunked his mug of coffee onto the stovetop. “You are, how you say, playing with the devil, you know?”

“Playing with fire, you mean?”

“I mean fire. Yes.”

“Heck, Ramon, when it comes to Arness I’m not playin’. I’m fightin’ for my life.”

“Si, that I know. And I am helping, but you don’ need no lady to stir up the hornets.”

Gray clapped the slim Mexican on the back and headed to the house for breakfast. Hornets he could deal with. He could even deal with Arness when it came down to it, and he guessed it would, sooner or later.

Emily met him in the kitchen, a crust of bread in her hand. “Mama can’t walk,” she announced.

“Oh, yeah? Well, that happens sometimes after a long horseback ride.”

The girl propped her small hands at her waist. “It won’t happen to me, ever! I want to ride your horse, that shiny black one.”

“No, you don’t, Emily.” Clarissa’s voice came from the staircase. In the next instant she stood in the doorway, one hand clutching the edge. “I may be crippled, but I am still your mother.”

Gray turned from the stove where he’d set the coffeepot to see a pale imitation of the woman he’d seen last night in a dress that matched her eyes and showed way too much of her chest. “Mornin’,” he said. “You sure look different.”

“Good morning. I am different. I am dead tired and so sore I cannot bear to sit down. And I have a healthy new respect for anyone who can ride a horse for more than ten minutes.”

“Can you cook standing up?” he asked.

She looked stricken. “I cannot cook at all, standing or sitting.”

“I have a proposition for you, anyway,” he said carefully. Immediately he regretted his choice of words, but she took no notice. Probably never heard a remotely suggestive word back in Boston.

“Oh? What might that be?”

“Pretty quick I figure Arness will find out who you are and he’ll come after you.”

She flinched. “Then I must leave.”

“Don’t think so. With him sniffing around, you’re not safe anywhere in town, and now that he’s had a good look at you, he’s not gonna give up ’til he corners you.”

Her hand twitched. “That p-prospect terrifies me.”

“That’s real sensible of you, Clarissa. So, here’s my—uh, here’s one possibility. You and Emily stay out here at the ranch. You need a job and I need a cook.” A small voice in the back of his brain began yammering at him. Are you crazy? Why offer her a job doing something she can’t do? The truth was he wasn’t exactly sure, but he knew he had to do something. She was just a baby rabbit with a chicken hawk floating overhead.

“But...but I would be a terrible cook! The only time I entered the kitchen at home was to ask for a fresh pot of tea. However,” she said quickly, “I am sure I could learn. Perhaps you have a recipe book? With instructions?”

He couldn’t help laughing. She might be hurting, but she wasn’t beat yet. The woman had spirit. Sand his ranch hands would say.

“Maybe you could learn, like you said. And out here, away from town, you’d be protected. Think about it, why don’t you?”

“I am thinking about it. I am thinking about how foolish I was to trust that awful man just because he wrote nice letters that said what I needed to hear, that he would provide a home for Emily.”

“Yeah, well, it’s too late now. You’ve got a real problem on your hands, but how about thinkin’ about my offer over breakfast? Even if you can’t sit down, you’ve gotta eat. So does Emily.”

“Well...”

“How ’bout I pay you a salary, say three dollars a week, to cook for me. In a month or two you could save up enough for a train ticket back to Boston.”

“A month!”

“Yeah. Somethin’ wrong with that?”

“Could—could we stay in your attic bedroom? I feel safe there.”

“Sure.” He stood up, lifted the iron skillet off the hook on the wall and pointed to a red-checked apron hanging on a nail by the back door. “Lesson number one, comin’ up. Emily, you want to help this old cowboy fry up some bacon?”

“Can I have an apron, too?”

“Yep.” He handed her a ruffled Maria-sized yellow garment. “And here’s the one for your mama.”

Clarissa looped the apron around her neck and tied the ruffled part over the dark blue travel skirt she’d put on that morning. Other than the garish green taffeta dress and her bombazine travel suit, she had only three other garments—a striped calico skirt, a white muslin shirtwaist and her nightrobe. Because she couldn’t sit down, she stood by the stove and watched Gray fry bacon and then crack eggs into the pan, then slice bread and toast it in the oven. It didn’t look too difficult, but every step she took made her wince.

Emily managed to push three blue-flowered plates across the round wood table and plop a jumble of forks and knives at each place. Gray added a platter of scrambled eggs and bacon and Clarissa steeled herself to perch on one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs. When she emitted a little groan as she sat down, Emily brought a soft cushion from the settee in the parlor to pad the hard surface. Very gingerly Clarissa sank onto her backside and picked up a fork.

Through the window over the dry sink, she watched the sun come up, turning the sky peach, then gold, and then such an intense blue it looked painted. She prayed it was a good omen. She was frightened right down to her knickers, stranded in a strange, wild place she didn’t understand or even like and thinking about agreeing to a job she had not the remotest idea how to undertake. She imagined her brother’s laughter. Cook? Sis, you can’t even boil water!

Gray ate without talking until the platter of eggs was empty, then he poured them both a second cup of coffee and answered Emily’s endless stream of questions. “What do horses do at night? Does Missus Maria have a little girl I could play with? How far can you see at night? Do you like red flowers better than yellow ones?”

Finally Clarissa shushed her and asked a question of her own. “Why do you dislike Caleb Arness so much? I know you do, because of the way your face looks every time his name comes up.”

Gray set his coffee cup down and leaned back in the chair. “Well, for starters, last night you saw the kind of man he is. Then there’s my ranch. I busted my—worked hard for almost twelve years to buy it and build it up. It’s the most important thing in my life, and Arness wants it. My land sits between his spread and the river, so he’s hurtin’ for water.”

“Go on,” she said quietly.

“Arness has nasty ways of tryin’ to drive me off. He’s cut fences and poisoned my well so now I’m havin’ to dig another one. My hands find dead cattle on the range—poisoned, the sheriff says. And I suspect the rustlers that plagued every mile on my drive to Abilene work for Arness. Cows disappear from my herd here at the Bar H, too. I’m losin’ stock and money, and I’m getting stretched pretty thin. If I can’t stop it, I’m gonna lose my ranch. And I’ll damn well die before I lose this ranch!”

She listened in complete silence, not drinking her coffee, just looking at him, her face grave and her eyes soft with understanding. Made him feel kinda warm inside.

“So,” she said after a long silence, “I could help in a small way by being your cook.”

Gray stared at her. Yes, it would ease things a bit—maybe a lot—but mostly he was touched by her recognition of how important the Bar H was to him. Even Emily seemed to grasp what was at stake.

“I’m gonna plant a garden an’ grow ice-cream cones,” the girl announced. “That would help, wouldn’t it, Mister Gray?”

Gray’s throat was suddenly so tight he couldn’t answer.

Chapter Six

Clarissa opened the front door to find a beaming Maria standing on the porch. “Señorita, I bring gift.” She held up the headless body of a chicken.

Clarissa recoiled. “Oh, I, um, thank you, but I don’t think—”

“Is nice fat hen,” the Mexican woman explained. “Make very good dinner.”

Clarissa gasped. Dinner! Oh, heavens, she’d forgotten her agreement. If she worked as Gray’s cook, then of course she must do just that—cook! And that meant not only breakfast but midday dinner and supper each evening. And not next week or tomorrow, but now. Today.

She stared at the bird clutched in Maria’s brown hand. “Maria, wh-what do I do with it?”

“Is easy.” Maria lifted her hand and folded Clarissa’s slim fingers around the scaly yellow legs. “First chop feet off, then take off feathers. To do this, boil water and give bath, then—”

“Chop off...?”

“Feet,” Maria reiterated. “Then pull out pinfeathers and clean out insides. You know what are pinfeathers?”

“Maria, might I borrow your cookbook?”

“Que? Never have I used a book of cooking, señorita. I have learn everything from my mama—tortillas and frijoles, even flan and pan dulce. The rest—American food—I teach myself.

Clarissa swallowed hard. Could she do that? She must have frowned because the Mexican woman suddenly reached out and patted her hand. “Do not worry, señorita. You will learn.”

“Th-thank you, Maria. I will try.”

Chop off the feet? A shudder went up her spine. She retreated to the kitchen, plopped the bird in the sink, and stared at it. I haven’t the faintest idea how to do this.

On the back porch she found a small hand ax, laid the chicken on the back step, closed her eyes tight and whacked off the legs. Then, recalling Maria’s instructions about the bath, she filled the teakettle and set it on the still-warm stove. Finally she shoved more wood into the firebox. At least from watching Gray she knew how to make a fire and heat water!

When the teakettle sang, she dumped the boiling water over the bird and discovered she could strip off the wet feathers quite easily. But the smell made her gag, and she tried not to breathe. When the naked bird sat looking at her, she thought about Maria’s next direction—clean out the insides.

Oh, God, how did one do that? She paced around and around the kitchen, steeling her nerves. Then she grasped a butcher knife and made a tentative incision at the thickest point of the chest, between the two wings. No entrails. Then she poked the tip of the knife between the drumsticks, and voila! She slashed in under the skin and—oh, Lordy—she couldn’t bear to look. All kinds of awful, ropey-looking things tumbled out. Hurriedly she looked away and gulped in air, then sucked in a deep breath and steeled herself to pull out all the innards and plop them in a bucket.

She would never be able to do this again. Whatever had she been thinking to agree to employment as a cook? Tears rose in her eyes. She had made another impulsive, ill-advised decision, like traveling out West to marry Caleb Arness, and now she was paying the price. She hated the West and everything in it—especially chickens!

She studied the eviscerated chicken on the counter. She’d already done the hard part—hadn’t she?—cutting off the legs and stripping off the smelly feathers. And pulling out the—she shuddered again—guts. How much more difficult could it be to shove it in the oven and bake it?

She rinsed the bird out, sprinkled salt and pepper over the skin, and laid it in a deep-sided pan. After an hour, the kitchen began to smell surprisingly good—so good, in fact, that her stomach rumbled. And by eleven o’clock, Emily was alternately dancing about the kitchen and complaining about being hungry.

“Just a few more minutes, Emily. Why don’t you set plates on the table, and then we’ll have dinner?” In the pantry off the kitchen she found a mason jar of green beans and the remains of a stale loaf of bread in the bread box. Tomorrow she must think about learning how to bake bread, even though she could not imagine herself in the kitchen with floury hands. Still, it could not possibly be worse than cleaning a chicken, could it? She gave an involuntary shudder.

Promptly at noon, Gray tramped through the back kitchen door and sniffed the air. “Mmm, somethin’ sure smells good!”

“It’s a chicken!” Emily shouted. “All baked ’n’ everything. Maria showed me chickens are nice.”

Clarissa set the platter holding the roasted bird on the table next to his elbow and handed him a sharp knife. “Would you please carve it?” she pleaded. “This chicken and I are not exactly friends.”

“Oh, yeah?” It did look kinda odd, the skin over-brown and stiff as parchment. When he stuck in the knife, he heard a crackling sound. Still, roast chicken was roast chicken, and he was plenty hungry. When he slid the knife in to slice off a drumstick, it was so dry it was like sawing through wood.

He set the knife down and shot a look at Clarissa’s tense face. “What happened to it?”

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth in a way that made him uneasy in an unexpected way. “Maria brought it over this morning. I did everything she said, but...” Her voice choked off and she swiped a sheen of tears off her cheek.

Emily stared at her mother with round blue eyes. “Mama, are you crying?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. “It’s quite warm in here.”

Gray studied her face, then looked down at the platter. “Looks pretty well overdone,” he said. “But heck, it’s only a chicken, Clarissa. Nothin’ to cry about.”

“Oh, y-yes it is. You hired me to be your c-cook, and I can’t!”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t cook.”

“At all?”

“No,” she sobbed. She looked so heartbroken, he wanted to laugh, but he figured that would just make it worse, so he clamped his jaws together. “Listen, there’s worse things than overcooking one chicken.”

“Oh?” Her lips were still quivery, which made him feel downright funny inside.

“Yeah. You could be overcooking a chicken in Caleb Arness’s kitchen.”

She gave a strangled cry and buried her face in her hands. Emily scrambled out of her chair and smoothed her small hand over Clarissa’s dark hair. “You could learn, Mama. You learned lots of things before we got on the train, remember? How to iron my dresses and pack up all our stuff in one suitcase. Lots of things.”

Gray wanted to hug the little girl. “Listen, I have to ride into town this afternoon. How about I bring you back a cookbook from the mercantile?”

Clarissa’s face lit up like Christmas. “Oh, c-could you? You can deduct it from my earnings.”

Gray studied the woman across the table. “What did you do before you learned to iron?”

“We— My brother had servants. He was gone at sea for months at a time, so his wife and I always had servants and plenty of—”

“Money,” he supplied. “Maria told me about your sister-in-law dying. And then your brother didn’t come home, and you lost it all.”

“Yes, I lost everything—the house, the bank account, even the furniture. The lawyer said we had nothing left and we had to move.”

“Didn’t your brother have a will? Some way to provide for you and Emily?”

“Apparently not. At least they could never find one.”

He spooned some green beans out of the blue ceramic bowl, but he was fast losing his appetite. How could a man just forget about something as important as providing for his sister and his child?

“That why you agreed to come out to Oregon and marry Arness? You had no money and no home?”

She was quiet for a long minute. “Emily, why don’t you go upstairs and bring me my shawl.”

When the girl’s footsteps faded, Clarissa leaned toward him. “Part of being, well, overprotected all one’s life is that it makes one naive. I realize now how foolish I was to accept Mr. Arness’s offer of marriage. All I could think about was making a home for Emily.”

“Even if it meant marrying someone you’d never met? Clarissa, seems to me that’s more than foolish—that’s downright stupid.”

Her face changed. “But thousands of women travel out West every year as mail-order brides. Surely you are not saying that all of them are—”

“Stupid. Yeah, I am sayin’ that. Marryin’ anybody, even someone you’ve known all your life, is—”

Her eyes got big. “Stupid?”

“Yeah. Why tie yourself down to someone whose guts you’re gonna hate in a few years?”

She bit her lip. “Did that happen to you?”

At that moment Emily clattered down the stairs. “Here’s your shawl, Mama. Are we havin’ any dessert?”

Clarissa looked blank. “Oh. Dessert. How about we have, uh, some cookies with our tea later? After I consult a cookbook,” she added under her breath.

“Okay. Can I go play with Maria? She has a dolly.”

“That’s news to me,” Gray said when Emily had streaked out the front door. “Well, it’s turning out to be a real interesting day, wouldn’t you say?”

He rose, gave Clarissa a grin and strode out the back door.

* * *

“Señor!” Ramon waylaid him on his way to the barn. “Where you go?”

“Town.”

“Why because? We need to fix all that fence that was broke last night.”

“Later,” Gray said.

Ramon caught his reins. “But, boss, cows will get out.”

“Yeah, I know. We’ll chase ’em in the morning.”

Ramon shook his dark head. “You do things your way, always. Not always best way, señor.”

Gray chuckled. Ramon was right most of the time, but he’d always done things his own way, and Ramon or no Ramon, Clarissa needed that cookbook. He started to rein away.

“Señor, why you not listen to Ramon?”

“Because I like to do things my way.”

“I think you are wrong.” Ramon doggedly pursued him.

Gray leaned over the saddle horn and stared down at him. His foreman had a point. Over the years of struggle to keep this ranch going, maybe he’d become too convinced he was the only person who knew best. Or maybe he was just stubborn. But he wasn’t wrong about riding into town. He hadn’t been able to stomach the chicken Clarissa had roasted to within an inch of its life, but he’d liked even less the bereft expression on her face. A woman in tears made his belly hurt.

He spurred Rowdy forward and trotted over the cattle guard and through the Bar H gate.

Chapter Seven

Now, Clarissa reflected some days later, how difficult could it be to bake a cake? Some flour, a little sugar, an egg or two and...what? She could ask Maria, but after her roast chicken disaster she was hesitant to admit to an even greater lack of knowledge about what she’d been hired to do.

She studied the woodstove in the kitchen and let out a deep sigh. She prayed that Emily was right—she could learn to cook, couldn’t she? And she must do it as quickly as possible.

She flipped over the page of Mrs. Beeton’s Household Hints. Aha! A recipe for something called Plain Yellow Cake. “Take two good handfuls of flour...” What, exactly, was a handful? Would it be a large hand, like Gray’s? Or a small one, like hers? What if Emily wanted to bake a cake with her tiny little hands?

She gazed out the window over the kitchen sink into the grove of willow trees behind the house. In the clear spring sunshine the new leaves looked like green glass, but now the light was fading. Face it, Clarissa, you don’t belong out here on a ranch in the West. She felt inept. Foolish. Out of place in this godforsaken land, and what was even worse, she felt a kinship with no one. At least she didn’t feel at odds with the man who had rescued her from Caleb Arness, or with down-to-earth, understanding Maria. But everything else out here was like being on a different planet.

With a groan she tried to focus again on Mrs. Beeton’s book. She simply must stop feeling sorry for herself. She’d gotten herself into this pickle, and she would have to get herself out of it. Besides, thousands of women were surviving—even thriving—out here in this rough, untamed country. A month ago she’d even thought she might become one of them, but one look at Caleb Arness had told her how wrong she had been. Now she realized how foolish and misguided it would be to be any man’s wife, mail-order or not.

Back in Boston she’d been an acknowledged spinster at twenty-four. “On the shelf,” everyone said. But even so, she had a life in Boston. She had fit in. There were concerts, afternoon teas, even happy hours spent in the library. On fine days people walked along the streets and in the lush, green parks, stopping for a soda at the candy store or the creamery. She missed it all.

She marveled that Emily was not lamenting the lack of ice-cream sodas. But her daughter seemed to revel in every new and exciting thing she found in the West—horses to pet, Maria’s cornhusk dolls to play with, spring wildflowers to pick, even the nightly tall tales Gray spun to lull her to sleep. Even now she could hear his low, gravelly voice coming from the parlor where he sat with her daughter cradled on his lap.