I Shall Be Near to You(13)

Back in the kitchen, I eat my supper at the table, across from his empty place. I wash dishes and make everything clean so no one can say I ain’t doing my wifely duties. When there is nothing else, no other chores, I straighten our bed one more time. I go to the chest of drawers and take out a work shirt Jeremiah left, burying my nose into it. I lie down, holding that shirt, feeling how we will be together again because he has been bound to me almost since the first I knew of him.

And then I see the map, still on the bedside stand. I sit on the edge of the bed and unfold it carefully. Jeremiah has made a heart at Flat Creek and a star at Herkimer. But in the Nebraska Territory he has written, I shall always be near to you.





CHAPTER

4


WAKEFIELD FARM: FEBRUARY 1862

All night I play over one memory from the Summer. I was standing at the barn well, my back to the field, working to fill the jug with water because Mama’s lemonade don’t last longer than a lightning bug’s flash. The buckets for the horses were already as full as I dared make them, if I wanted to make one trip. But then there were legs swishing through the rye grass behind me.

‘I came to see if you needed help,’ Jeremiah said.

‘That bucket is ready for taking,’ I said, nodding at it sitting at the base of the pump.

He came round to take the bucket while I kept pumping.

‘I’m almost done, but the horses’ll be thirsty in this heat,’ I said.

‘This one’ll hold a little more,’ he said, looking me full in the face before he bent to move the jug and put the bucket under the spigot. I slowed my pumping so as to waste less water, my breath coming hard from the work or the heat or both. The warm wind coming off our hill blew loose hair from my braid into my face where it stuck to my sweat-damp skin, working its way into my mouth. When he’d got the bucket set, he went back to watching me. I didn’t know what he was staring at until he reached for my face and trailed a work-rough dry finger down my cheek, pulling the hair loose. I was still sweating and my face got hotter, but my arms turned goosefleshy and there weren’t a thing I could do to hide it.

Jeremiah smiled and ducked to take the buckets. He pushed the jug back under the pump and then I stared after him walking, the weight of the buckets on his arms tilting him like a wind-crooked tree. He didn’t look back even once, and when he disappeared over the hill I was still standing at the well forgetting to even pump.


IT HARDLY SEEMS worth building a fire and setting breakfast oats to boil when there is only me to eat them. The rest of the day stretches out before me and there ain’t a thing in it that seems pressing with Jeremiah gone. But I know this feeling, I have seen it before with Mama, and the only thing for it is to keep moving.

The sun is full up when those first chores are done and breakfast eaten. I am drying the last dish when footsteps come loud across the front porch and then there is knocking. Maybe it is Jeremiah coming back to say good-bye like he should have, but when I fling open the door of course it is Jeremiah’s Ma calling, a basket in her arms, the cold rosy across her cheeks.

‘I came to see how you were faring,’ she says.

‘Come in,’ I say, even though she ain’t the company I want. ‘I’ve just been laying out plans for my day.’

‘Oh? And what are those?’ She moves past me to the middle of the kitchen, taking measure of the house I keep.

I say the first thing that comes to my mind. ‘Thought I might start making soap.’

‘Good. At least you keep a tidy house.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I try.’

‘I brought along some mending, needs doing,’ she says, and sets down her basket. Inside are chambray shirts and trousers and woolen socks.

‘I can do that,’ I say, even though there is nothing I hate more.

She gives me a pointed look and then acts like I ain’t said one word. ‘The men discussed it and Mr. Wakefield thought you might be of help with the sugaring.’

‘I’d like that better than mending,’ I say, thinking of being outside, tapping the maple trees and collecting the syrup. ‘I can drill taps—you only need tell me where the tools are kept—’

Jeremiah’s Ma frowns. ‘That’s work for James and Jesse. The mending needs doing. And it’s the sugarhouse tending you’d be best suited for, since you don’t have anyone else to mind.’

She wants me indoors, is what, sewing or else working over the sugarhouse stove, boiling sap down, keeping all hours. She is reminding me of Alice and Sarah with their homes full of children to watch and husbands to feed. All I have is an empty house and it ain’t enough.

‘I can tap the trees easy. I’d like doing it.’

Her mouth goes tight. ‘You’d do better to remember you’ve come up in the world and do what you’re asked.’


THE MENDING AIN’T much. Split seams. A hem come undone. Socks rubbed threadbare at the heel. From the kitchen window the trees’ empty branches sway in the wind, and I try to prove myself with my smallest stitches. But I get tired of hearing my own breathing and the pull of thread through fabric.

Out on the porch, the weak sun feels nice, but that ain’t where I want to stay. I am down the steps and into the fallow cornfield, heading for the woodlot. I pass the tin-roofed sugarhouse, moving along the creek, walking where Jeremiah must’ve gone when he left, seeing things the way he saw them. Trees send out new tips to their branches, and ice crusts the banks of the creek. I tuck the hem of my skirt up in the waistband of my apron to keep it from dragging in the mud.