Longshadow's Woman. Bronwyn Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ she didn’t dare take him with her. Poor Emma had seen enough misery over the years, having outlived a husband and a whole slew of children. Living alone, with the rheumatism so bad she could hardly hobble around on damp days, the last thing she needed was to come face to face with a wild Indian in her own home, even though renting him had been her idea in the first place.

      Although Carrie had to admit that cleaned up, he didn’t look quite so fierce. He still wore those same old ragged clothes, but then, her own weren’t much better. His hair, the color of polished mahogany, was long enough to be tied back with a piece of string, while hers had been hacked off with a butcher knife back in the spring, when she’d caught a fever and Emma had said she had to stay cool. Instead of the neat braids she had always worn, her hair had grown in thick and curly, reached a certain length and stopped growing. Emma said it was because of what she ate—or rather, what she didn’t eat.

      She ate as well as she could when half the time Darther forgot to leave her enough money even to buy salt, much less bacon and flour. She needed a damn-blasted cow, was what she needed. She’d taken her nanny goat to Shingle Landing and traded her for a supply of tinned milk, but tinned milk didn’t make butter.

      Once her corn crop came in, she vowed, she would get herself a fresh cow and six more hens, and maybe a pig. Maybe even two pigs.

      She got through the day without cursing more than once, when Sorry deliberately stepped on her foot. It was something she was working on—not cursing. Something else she was working on, she amended. Today they had cleared out all but the last few stumps and dragged them over to the edge of the field to burn. Carrie watched the sky, unwilling to risk setting a fire unless rain was in the offing. According to Emma, her cabin had once been a tenant house, the big house having been burned when Colonel Draper and General Wild had led their Union forces on a rampage though Camden and Currituck counties, burning more than a dozen homesteads.

      Carrie thought it must have been something like the Indian raid that had taken her own family. Years had passed, the sharpest pain had faded, but the memories would be with her until the day she died. Looking back, the home she remembered as a child had seemed large, but it couldn’t have been too much larger than Darther’s small cabin.

      At any rate, a small cabin was enough for her needs, as long as the land was still fertile. Emma said it had once grown cotton, the bolls as big and as white as snowballs. Carrie didn’t want to grow cotton. She couldn’t eat cotton, wouldn’t know how to harvest it even if she could grow it. But corn…

      It was going to be so beautiful. Row after row of tall, green stalks. Enough to grind for meal, to save for seed, to feed her stock and still have some left over to trade for cloth, salt, side-meat and calico. And then, she would clear more land and grow still more corn.

      The air was lavender with dusk as they headed home from the field. Sorry plodded along behind her prisoner like a faithful hound. Carrie could have chosen to be jealous, but instead she felt only satisfaction with the amount they had accomplished. It would have taken her until Christmas to get this much done alone, even with two good hands.

      She was smiling when she happened to notice the way her prisoner was walking. He was exhausted. They both were. His stride was hampered by the heavy irons, but it was more than that. Her smile gave way to a look of concern. He was limping. If he was injured—if he could no longer work, she would have to return him, and then she’d be right back where she’d been before, only now she owed Emma two dollars which she was fairly certain the jailer would refuse to refund.

      Biting her lip, she shifted the heavy rifle to her other shoulder. She no longer even attempted to keep it turned on him. It was almost impossible to manage when they were working together, anyway. They both knew that.

      He was definitely limping. It had to be the leg irons. The heavy things allowed him to walk, but not to run. If the jailer hadn’t warned her not to remove them, she’d have been tempted to unlock them before this. He could work twice as hard if he could clamber in and out of stump holes more easily. But in that case, she’d be the one who was handicapped, with the gun in one hand and a bandage on the other. Besides, she suspected he knew she would never shoot him.

      By then they had reached the yard. Uncertain how to proceed, Carrie came to a dead halt. “Whoa, there—you, too, Sorry.”

      Jonah winced from the indignity of being addressed in the same manner as she addressed her mule. At least she hadn’t sworn at him the way she did Sorry. The mule was neither deaf nor stupid, but somewhat slow to make up his mind whether or not it suited his interests to obey.

      Scowling, she stared down at his feet. Pride would not allow him to acknowledge his pain, just as pride would not let him reveal his understanding of her language. Caught in a trap of his own making, he had endured days of pain and humiliation, wondering why the stubborn woman couldn’t see the truth before her eyes—that a man couldn’t work in irons. That if she wanted to get her money’s worth before his parole ended, she’d do better to release him, sit on a stump with her rifle pointed at his head, and let him get on with clearing her field. If he had to follow the Plow Road, he’d as soon get it done as quickly as possible.

      “Leg, um—hurt?” She pointed to his ankle, her pale eyebrows knotted in concern. Jonah had heard the jailer tell her she must return him in good condition. She was obviously worried about her investment.

      He knew she carried the key in her pocket, along with the napkin in which she had wrapped two chunks of bacon and cornbread, which they had devoured at noon, sitting in almost companionable silence in the shade of the hedgerow. For a few moments he had felt almost as if they might be…not friends, yet not quite enemies.

      To his astonishment, she dropped to her knees before him. When he felt her hand on his foot he stopped breathing, but he couldn’t restrain a soft oath when the irons dug into his raw flesh as she folded the two halves back on their hinges.

      Seeing the blood caked with dust until it looked like mud, she crooned in dismay. “Oh, my mercy, oh, sweet Jesus, you’re torn all ragged.”

      Closing his eyes against the fresh pain, he willed his mind to escape to another place, another time. For once, it didn’t help. With harsh, shallow gasps, he waited for the pain to recede. Yesterday he had torn strips from his shirt and tied them around his ankles to pad the irons, but the cloth had only stuck to his blood and dried, tearing away still more flesh when he moved. Crossing her line in the dirt floor of the barn, he had found a jar of hoof dressing and plastered both ankles with that.

      “You’ll have to let me wash it and dress it with turpentine and sugar. Emma—that is, my friend who knows about these things, says that’s the best medicine.”

      Still on her knees, she gazed up at him, her eyes dark with concern. Jonah felt as if he’d swallowed a fish bone. It had not yet pierced his gullet, but he was afraid something irreversible had just happened.

      Her hand was still resting on the top of his dusty bare foot. Her own feet were bare, too. He had seen her wearing boots but once. They were worn through on the bottoms, good only for trapping rocks and sharp pine seeds against her naked feet.

      His own feet were bare because the men who had come to arrest him had not allowed him to take away anything, not the papers that would prove his innocence, not his boots, not even the freedom papers he had received from Lieutenant Pratt.

      “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know you can’t understand me, but I’d never have had this happen, not even to a wild animal. I saw a wolf once that chewed his foot off to get free of a trap, and…”

      A wolf. He was no more than a wild animal, caught СКАЧАТЬ