The Beloved Wild Read online

  “‘Mrs. Hope, wife to Mr. James Knowles, deceased June 17, 1775, aged nineteen years.’ That was my mother’s mother. Hope.” I sniffed. “All these women could play a part in an allegory.”

  “An ironic one, considering when your grandmother passed away. Hope died fast.”

  “They all do.” I scanned the markers. Hardly a woman buried here lived to see her twenty-first year. “A stranger might gather each married a bluebeard.”

  With his best Scottish burr, Gideon sang softly, “‘Loup off the steed,’ says false Sir John. ‘Your bridal bed you see. For I have drowned seven young ladies. The eighth one you shall be.’”

  “Very nice. Of course, in the tale, the last bride’s brother gallops to the castle to rescue her and dispatches the monster in the process. I suppose, since my favorite brother plans to pioneer in the wilds of the Genesee Valley, I’ll end up like all the others in here: young and dead.” I shot him a sour look. “Perhaps you’ll return for a visit after your first great harvest. You can rest a pumpkin on my little plot as a token of remembrance.”

  He nodded and took a step back, resting a heel on his sleigh. “You are excessively fond of pumpkin pie. Ouch.” He rubbed his arm where I pinched him. “Don’t be dramatic, Harry. Chances are you won’t marry a wife killer.” He waved an airy hand to indicate the crowded little lot. “Disease probably scotched most of the unfortunates here.”

  “Note their ages, stupid. The women obviously died giving birth to their babes.”

  “Well, you can’t blame the poor husbands for that.”

  “Who else would I blame?”

  He looked stumped for a moment. “A drunk midwife?”

  “No.” I slowly shook my head. “Childbirth’s a common way for a woman to die.” I eyed the excess of female appellations on the markers and added dryly, “Particularly in my family. According to Old Nancy in the village, my birth mother was very slight, not made for easy birthing.”

  He gave my back a brisk pat and, as one determined to look on the bright side, said, “But she was also a noted beauty.”

  I grunted. If there was one thing I had learned about Submit Faithful Winter, it was that. Among family and acquaintances, I’d frequently heard about the Knowles women’s famous beauty. Apparently, it was inheritable. Until I came along. I was a typical Winter: spare, pale, and lanky.

  “Cheer up, Harry. I can’t see you suffering the same fate. You’re almost as tall as me—certainly no slip of a girl.”

  I tapped the top of his head. “Almost? I’m just as tall.”

  “But with more bones than skin, as Papa says.” He smirked.

  “He makes me sound like a walking skeleton.”

  “Yes. Rather. But you’ve got a lot of yellow hair and an interesting face,” he said before ruining the already-tepid compliment with “though your mouth is too wide and your eyes too big. And you could better mind that sharp tongue of yours if you tried.” He grinned. “Otherwise, though, I think you’re perfect.”

  I snorted.

  “So does Daniel Long.”

  I glared toward Mount Chester. Mr. Long’s estate was nestled at its foot. “Too bad Mama can’t take a second husband. She holds His Dullness in such high esteem.”

  Gideon smiled at me quizzically. “I can’t understand why you don’t. He’s an honest friend, kind, industrious, fair, generous, intelligent—”

  “Handsome?”

  He refused to rise to the bait. “Sure. Handsome as well. Frankly, I like him vastly better than our brothers. I don’t know why you don’t.”

  I shrugged. How did I explain a reaction I couldn’t entirely reason for myself? Perhaps it had something to do with getting written into someone else’s story, without a chance to tell my own. “I’m handy; that’s all. A practical way to bridge the two farms.”

  “You underestimate Daniel Long.”

  “Is it wrong to want something more than practicality in a marriage?”

  “If you think that’s all he sees in you, you’re foolish.” Then, with a sidelong twinkle: “Not to mention rhetorical.” He started making his way back to the downed hickory.

  “I suppose you, with your frontier ambitions, are the only one of us who gets to choose excitement.”

  “Mr. Long has the best farm in these parts. If I were a woman and he proposed, I’d marry him faster than Luke can tipple a bottle of rum.”

  I smiled. “Faster than Matthew can hazard his new boots at the card table?”

  “Faster than Betsy can spill a sacred secret.”

  “Even faster than Grace can sniffle her way into a hot mustard footbath?”

  Grinning, he retrieved his ax from the trunk. “Even faster than that. Anyway, I’d like to see you good and settled before I leave next March.”

  Before I leave next March. The words stole the smile from my face.

  Gideon was more than the brother who matched me in age, nature, and size. He was my best friend. We’d grown up shadowing each other, collecting tadpoles in the stream, playing one-a-cat, racing our sleds in the winter. We hadn’t been grown long enough for me to forget our childhood games. Contemplating losing him pained me. I turned away to hide the sting of tears, and for a moment the mountains blurred into the clouds above them. I blinked and took a steadying breath.

  But when I could see clearly again, the range persisted in looking strange. Though yet like lolling giants, the rocky formations no longer seemed to guard the faraway lands. Rather, they struck me as a meaner front: the stern keepers of here.

  I shivered. Wishing I’d remembered my mittens to stave off the nip of the March morning, I fisted my hands under the cape and slid them into my apron’s front pocket.

  There I encountered something hard. Taking hold of it, I realized it was the spile Mr. Long had carved for me. I must have stashed it in the pocket and forgotten it.

  I brought the spile out into the daylight, ran a finger over the intricate vine, and turned the spout to find his initials. Just as I was about to stuff it back into my pocket and return to the house, the other set of initials seized my attention. “What? The devil!”

  Gideon, roping the hickory onto the sleigh, looked up.

  I stomped to his side and, borrowing from our older brothers’ vocabulary, muttered a string of what I reckoned must be terrible expletives.

  He took the spile I’d thrust in his face and straightened. Instead of sharing my indignation, he threw back his head and laughed.

  “I don’t find presumptuousness amusing.” I snatched the spout out of his hand.

  As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t an ounce of humor in Mr. Long’s making my last initial an L instead of a W.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Besides warning me to keep his secret to myself, Gideon didn’t discuss his pioneer plans in the following weeks. Silent as he remained on the matter, however, his discontentment with his present situation became increasingly noticeable. He wasn’t sullen, but more and more he found ways to detach himself from the other men’s labors. For instance, he left the splitting of rails to Papa and our brothers and chose to work in the woodlot by himself, felling a fine oak and preparing it for spring seasoning with nobody’s help but that provided by Trouble the ox.

  He chose the oak with floor timbers in mind. For a long time now, Mama had spoken wistfully of a good wooden floor to replace our hard-packed dirt one. Gideon confessed to me he planned to make the oak-plank flooring a parting gift for her. I didn’t want to hear this—nor whatever he had in mind for my farewell present. Nothing could reconcile me to his leaving.

  Winter clung to March. Just as the green spears of daffodils nosed through the ground behind the toolshed and we began to smile hopefully at the cloudless skies and believe the worst of the weather had ended, we woke to a snow thick as a curtain. The spell persisted for the last three days of the month. Mama grew impatient with the men crowding the house, getting in the way of our spinning, and making a mess by the hearth with their tool sharpening.

>   Finally a northerly kicked at the trees, and though the temperature didn’t rise above forty degrees by day, neither did it sink below twenty at night. On a morning in early April, after breakfast, Papa stood in the open doorway, peered at the sky, and held out a hand for a moment as if weighing the wind. He shut the door and returned to his chair. “Sap will be flowing properly now.”

  Sharp freezes at night, free thaws by midmorning: sugaring time. Its arrival, more than all the green shoots and tweeting birds, foretold spring.

  Matthew greeted the announcement with a holler. My sisters cheered. Quite literally, there was no sweeter time: the sap collecting and boiling, then the sampling and celebrating. Sugaring was work, but of a social kind, for some of our neighbors would aid us in the enterprise.

  I didn’t doubt all of us felt the thrill of anticipation. But Gideon stood so quickly his chair tipped over. He pounded across the room and wrenched open the door, apparently to see for himself the day’s conditions.

  When he turned, his face was alive with excitement. “Shall I ride to the Welds place and let them know?”

  “Certainly.” Papa pulled on his boots. “Tell Robert he can take home a tub of sweetening for pay if he joins us.”

  Betsy studied Gideon with a sly smile. “I’m sure the pretty cousin staying with them also might like to earn a sugar bucket. We can always use some help tending to the stirring and boiling.”

  Mama nodded complacently. Already my older brothers were rushing to catch up with Papa, shrugging on their coats and mumbling about checking on the firewood supply in the sugarhouse. I rose hurriedly, too.

  Gideon’s reaction to Betsy’s comment, however, stopped me in my tracks. She’d meant to tease him with the reference to Robert’s cousin, and I could tell she’d succeeded. He looked irked and flushed, like she’d guessed something he wanted to keep private.

  I stared at him dumbly. Another secret? I tried to dredge up a recollection of this new neighbor. She hadn’t been in Middleton long enough for me to meet her more than once, and that had been at meeting. Since the Welds family sat in a pew behind ours, I’d failed to get a good look at her. I only vaguely recalled a dab of a girl, red-cheeked and curly-haired. Yet I suspected from Gideon’s expression that he’d attended to her much more closely.

  How closely? Had he seen her since then? If so, was she a passing interest or more than that? And just how did she figure into his frontiersman scheme?

  * * *

  It took a whole week to get some answers. Half of it we spent at our farm, the other at Mr. Long’s. But whether at our sugarhouse or his, the days matched: the men, bundled in coats and fur caps, disappeared into the woods, driving their ox-pulled sleds, and every few hours returned, their barrels brimming with sap. They’d stop at our bonfire to drain the contents into the cauldron, then head back to the woods.

  Mostly, the womenfolk stayed near the kettle—me, Mama, my sisters, and the Weldses’ cousin, Rachel. Stirring the sap and adding wood to keep the fire going for a steady boil didn’t require much focus; I was given the freedom to imitate nosy Betsy and, during the few times when Gideon’s and Rachel’s paths crossed, examine the subjects’ faces to see what kind of romance was brewing between the Winter and Welds households.

  But whenever Gideon made a visit to contribute his full barrel, he neither stole more than a searing glance at this girl nor uttered a single word. It was impossible to determine their degree of familiarity.

  Still, during the week, I had plenty of time to examine our new neighbor. I decided I couldn’t like her.

  She was missish.

  Her responses to Betsy’s inquisitions invited this conclusion. Running the long-handled ladle over the bubbling surface to skim the sap, my sister would ask questions: “So, from what parts did your parents come, Rachel?” “Have you any siblings?” “Do you like Middleton?” “Isn’t your cousin Ed the most half-witted fellow you ever met?” “Did you leave behind a beau?” “Would you settle in this country for good, do you think?”

  We didn’t call Betsy the Intelligencer for nothing.

  Rachel’s answers disclosed that she was an orphan, with no nearer relatives than the Weldses. During the year after her parents’ passing, she’d stayed in Massachusetts, working as a spinning girl for the prosperous family that owned the mill before saving enough to pay for her stage fare and traveling to the Weldses. The new living arrangement, she confided, was a happier circumstance, since the Weldses, though poor, were a cheerful bunch. “And I do love caring for the babes, cuddling their precious persons, telling them fairy tales, and teaching them games. They’re the dearest things, round and romping. Full of juice! I adore children.”

  Her glowing recital happened to coincide with one of Mr. Long’s appearances, so he was present when I grunted and remarked, “You’re in the right place, then. The Welds house veritably teems with brats.” Ten in all: the four youngest of whom made for a daily hell of snotty noses, soiled diapers, sticky hands, cries, accidents, and constant demands. I shuddered.

  Catching my expression, Mr. Long’s mouth quivered. But he mostly attended to the cauldron, ladling sap and watching it closely as he poured it back in a slow trickle. He handed Betsy the wooden utensil. “Too thin yet.” Then, to Rachel: “I’m sure Mrs. Welds appreciates your help.”

  Rachel, blushing prettily, gave a modest little shrug.

  Mama, who’d been bestowing an approving smile on the paragon of would-be motherhood, turned to Mr. Long. “A large family’s a blessing. Just wait until all of those Weldses grow up. So many helping hands would make short work of this business.” She tilted her head to indicate our sugaring. After casting a sidelong peek my way, she inquired innocently, “Do you think you’ll be wanting a big family yourself, Mr. Long?”

  For heaven’s sake. I flared my eyes at her.

  He answered blandly, “Oh, without a doubt. I should guess ten or eleven children.”

  “Eleven,” I gasped. So I was to be a broodmare? Not if I could help it. I glared at him. “Why not make it a round dozen?”

  His mouth curved for an instant before straightening. “Good thinking.”

  Grace began moaning by the stacked wood, complaining about a bellyache.

  Mama glanced distractedly her way. “What now, child?”

  She whimpered and rubbed her stomach. “I don’t feel at all myself. What if I’m getting a touch of the influenza?”

  With a frown, Mama hurried to her youngest and relieved her of her armful of wood, while Betsy exclaimed into the cauldron’s steam, “Fiddle! Miss Lazy needs a touch of the switch; that’s what she ought to be getting.” She passed me the ladle and strode, arms folded, to Mama’s side, sneering, “I’d like to know how many times she’s spilled syrup onto the snow for sampling. Bet she made herself sick on candy.”

  Rachel smiled indulgently at my obnoxious sisters.

  Mr. Long, used to their squabbles, was looking at the sky, his expression content. “As long as we keep getting these light snowfalls, the sap will run. We might be sugaring off into next week.” He tugged on his mittens and winked at me. “Keep stirring, Harriet Submit Winter.” He pronounced my name succinctly, as though he was savoring every single syllable.

  I gripped the ladle. How gratifying it’d feel to thwack him over the head with it.

  “Oh.” Rachel fixed me with her round blue eyes. Those eyes annoyed me. They were so perpetually surprised. “Is that your full name? Very pretty.”

  I muttered a thank-you and said to Mr. Long’s parting back, “Yes, Harriet Winter, not Harriet Linter. Too bad your spelling isn’t as good as your whittling, Mr. Long.”

  He turned to flash me a grin. “Perhaps you can stitch me an alphabet sampler, and I can work on my letters.”

  “I hate stitchery.”

  “I imagine you’d rather be hard at work distilling strong spirits.” He delivered a sigh in the new girl’s direction and explained, “Miss Winter plans to open a tavern when she grows up. Someday.
Hopefully.” His expression clarified that the last two words modified the growing, not the tavern opening.

  I shook the ladle threateningly in the air.

  Rachel, ever wide-eyed, made a perfect O with her mouth, then said doubtfully, “I wonder your parents would let you.”

  He clucked. “Yes, well, she’s their cross to bear. If only she’d give needlework a try. Most girls happily submit to that labor.” He shook his head and ambled toward the sled.

  I growled, but before I could lash him with a retort, he’d started talking to his young cousin, Jeb.

  And Rachel was chattering again.

  “So you dislike stitchery? Do you mean that truly? I find plying a needle a very productive activity. Quite soothing, too, and almost as pleasant as singing.” She bent to nudge another piece of firewood into the flames. When she straightened, her hand fluttered up to smooth a curl from her forehead. “I’ve never known a Linter, but back in Juneville, I knew a Linton—many Lintons, in fact. Rather friendly, the Lintons—or Mrs. Linton, at least. I would have rather hired myself out as her dairymaid than as Mrs. Walkley’s spinning girl, except the Lintons got the notion to make the great trek westward. The morning they departed, Mrs. Linton gave me a gift of some fine lace and made me promise, when I was finally in the position of exploring the legendary Genesee Valley myself, that I’d indulge her with a visit, and she said I’d be welcome to stay as long as I liked. I nearly joined her then and there, for to see a whole caravan readying for departure—the wagons weighted with furniture and farm equipment, the livestock tethered and nervous, the dogs yapping—oh, it filled me with such great excitement, and I—”

  “Did you say the Genesee Valley?”

  “Yes. Wondrously rich land, I hear.” She glanced around, as if to ensure no one was eavesdropping, then added in a near whisper, “Cousin Robert and Cousin Ed are keen on the notion of journeying there as well.” A small frown creased her forehead. “Nothing official yet, of course. They haven’t even told their folks—avoiding their mother’s tears and opposition as long as possible, I imagine. I learned of it by chance, actually. But they’ve extended the invitation to me, and I couldn’t be more grateful.”