The Gazebo. Kimberly Cates

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      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 in a trap. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he did know that if she didn’t take her hand off his foot, he might do something they would both come to regret.

      Leading the mule into the small fenced paddock, Carrie forked him a ration of hay and then led her prisoner toward the cabin. He was no longer shackled or chained, which meant that if he were going to escape, it would be now. He could knock her on the head, grab the rifle from her hands and take off through the woods.

      Yet, something she’d seen—or fancied she’d seen—in those clear gray eyes of his, told her he wouldn’t try to escape. Not yet, at any rate. Without thinking, she had knelt in the middle of the lane to examine his injuries, just as she would have stopped to examine any wounded creature in her care. But the instant she’d touched his warm flesh, the strangest sensation had come over her. She had looked up—he had looked down—and for one brief moment something tangible had passed between them. Her only comfort was that he’d been as startled as she was.

      Now she tried to think of a way to make him understand what needed to be done. “Now listen carefully,” she said in slow, measured tones. “I will help you.” She placed her hand over her heart. “You must not try to escape.” She pointed to the road and shook her head vigorously. “If you run away, you’ll die.” And then, all in a rush, she blurted out the fearful consequences. “You’ll end up with the blood poisoning and die out there in the woods all by yourself, and then the jailer will come after me and hold me responsible, and I’ll end up in jail in your place.”

      But of course he couldn’t understand a word she said. Shaking her head, she said, “You sit.” She pointed to the three-legged milking stool she’d brought inside when the cow had gone dry and she’d traded her to a farmer in Snowden for a rooster, two hams and a side of bacon, and said, “You sit.”

      He sat. They were both dirty after a day in the field, but he had rid himself of vermin. She’d broken off branches of wax myrtle and told him in words a child of three could understand how to use them to keep the fleas from his straw bedding. Evidently, he had taken her meaning.

      “This is going to hurt,” she muttered. Lifting his foot in her hand, she felt again that peculiar awareness—like the quivery feeling of the air just before a lightning storm. Embarrassed, she glanced up to see if he had noticed anything.

      He felt something, all right. His lips were clamped together and his eyes had the strangest expression. Maybe this was the way Indians looked when they were hurting. She’d never seen one up close before, not since the night they had come a-whooping and a-hollering into the settlement near Redwood Falls. Those had been Sioux. The sheriff had called this one a Kie-oh-way heathen. It had been more than ten years, but he looked different from the Indians she remembered. He was taller, for one thing, and his features were…

      “Well. Enough about that,” she said decisively, earning a puzzled look from the man whose ankles she had just cleaned, treated and wrapped with strips of an old bed sheet. She was tempted to see what he would do if she asked him to help her rebandage her hand. Some things were hard to do one-handed, and the old bandage was in tatters after a day’s work. “I don’t reckon you could…?” Shaking her head, she answered her own question, “No, I reckon not.”

      Jonah had learned long ago to lock away all emotion. He could not afford to think of the woman as anything more than a means of escape. A means of eventually clearing his name so that he could return to his land and his horses. She made it difficult, however, first by treating him with such disdain he wanted to shake her until her teeth flew in all directions—then by treating him not only with kindness, but with sympathy. It was enough to undermine his determination.

      He told himself she was crazy. For all she knew he could be a murderer, yet she had brought him into her house and tortured him with her careless kindness. She had stared at his naked body that first day. She knew well that he was a man. She had scrubbed his wounds with her lye soap and mopped them with turpentine until his eyes watered with the pain. She had shared her food and water with him, sat beside him to share a patch of shade, yet she considered him less than an animal. A wolf caught in a trap. Not only deaf, but stupid.

      The woman was crazy.

      Chapter Three

      Together the next morning they set fire to the pile of stumps, some of which were dry, a few still damp from the earth. When flames whipped through the heap and spread to the bigger stumps in the middle, they turned to one another with a look of shared triumph. Then, almost as if they were embarrassed, Jonah began gathering dead branches to toss on the fire, and Carrie began stepping off the length and breadth of the clearing for perhaps the hundredth time. The ground was hard, baked dry by weeks without rain. Scrubby vegetation had flourished once the tall trees had been cut down, allowing the sun to reach the ground. Those would have to be cleared next. Even as they worked, they both watched the burn pile carefully to see that the flames didn’t spread. When a finger of flames spilled out and began creeping through the dry grass, they both rushed to beat it out with tote sacks wet from the nearby creek.

      With the fire once more under control, they stared at each other, sweaty, sooty, and triumphant. And there it was again. That shimmering awareness that made the world go utterly silent for one endless moment.

      Silently, Jonah called himself a fool for staying as long as he had. He had meant to slip away at the first opportunity, but here he still was. Now, in exchange for food, a clean place to sleep and the occasional smile when the woman forgot herself, he was going to have to follow that damned plow and turn the earth so that she could plant her corn. He had not meant to linger so long.

      She didn’t even know how he was called. The sheriff had called him Kie-oh-way. He had heard him call her Adams. Miss or Mrs. Adams? There was no man in her bed or at her table, but a man’s coat and shirt hung from a hook on the wall. Perhaps she had once had a man and he had died. Or perhaps he had thrown her away, as a Kiowa did if one of his wives displeased him. He could easily see how this woman could displease a man.

      Yet he could also see how she might please a man….

      “Now this,” Carrie informed him the next morning, “is what we call a plow.”

      “It is also what I call a plow,” he wanted to say, but held his tongue. It had angered him at first when she forgot he was only an ignorant savage and spoke to him as if he were slightly more intelligent than her mule. Now it amused him.

      Using pantomime to illustrate her words, she said, “What I aim to do is harness it to Sorry so that he can do the pulling, the way he did with the stumps.” Placing the worn СКАЧАТЬ