Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(20)

Pivoting back, she saw the smoke roiling from the oven. There, as well, from atop the burner with its sizzling bacon. Immediately, she dashed back into the kitchen and started ratcheting knobs. One way, then another.

“Looks like Arturo has Lucy under – what the shit?”

She whipped around to confront Duke McClellan. He had paused in dusting his hat against his thigh to glare at the smoke-hazed kitchen.

In one swift stride, he grabbed the dish towel and snatched the blackened pan with its smoking bread from the oven. Then his hands swiftly spun knobs on the range and jerked the frying pan from the stove top to plop on the broken tiled countertop.

He tossed the burnt-black bread in the trash under the open sink. “You’ve never used a toaster?”

Whatever that was, obviously, she hadn’t. She bit her lip, then shook her head.

“Or an electric stove range before?”

Again, she shook her head, unable to summon her usual repertoire of retorts.

He jerked open a counter drawer and tossed upon the counter some kind of pamphlet. Stunned, she stared at it, unsure at what she was supposed to be looking.

“It’s an oven-range manual.”

“Oh. Of course.” Eyes glazed by both smoke and embarrassment, she began leafing through blurred pages.

Braced on a back leg, his fists jammed on his hips, his gaze scanned her. From her bare feet past her bedraggled, flounced skirt, next her begrimed, yellow peasant blouse, then up to her kerchief-bound hair. “Is that my bandana?”

“Uhh, I thought since you weren’t using – ”

“Sunnufabitch.”

“About the manual – ”

“You can’t read, can you?”

Slowly, she hung her head, painfully ashamed. One bare foot overlapped the other, as if to hide all her deficiencies. She struggled to proffer a smile. “Och, I do read a little, enough to get by.”

“Well, it didn’t ‘get you by’ here, did it? Have you never heard ‘The pen is mightier than the – ‘”

“ – mightier than the pigs.” she chirped in.

His groan could have been a damning expletive. “I’ll fix the dinner tonight. But you’re out of here come Christmas, do you understand?”

“I am not hungry.” She had been. But though her stomach protested loudly her lie, she turned on her heel and marched into his bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She flopped on the edge of the spring box mattress, hands clasped between her knees, and tried to figure out what she needed to do next.

She was a wild beast out of place in civilized society. She was ashamed of her ignorance. But by now she knew it would do no good to weep for all that she had lost. For her combative parents and irascible Old Duke. For her twin brother, Luca. And for the unfettered life of her childhood, traveling rarely explored roads and encountering exciting adventures beyond imagination.

Though the rubble of a ranch house might be larger than her vardo, open spaces called to her. In less than a minute, she had the bedroom’s single window jimmied open and was wedging her way through it. The grass, sparse though it was, felt wonderfully cool beneath her feet. Twilight’s cool air woke up her lungs and dried her damp eyes.

She was off and running. The gloaming distorted scraggy trees and underbrush that scratched her calves. Stickers pierced the soles of her feet. Did not matter. At last, she ran out of fury at the same time she realized she had run out of options. Her running gradually slowed to a jog, then to a fast walk, and finally she came to a halt and bent over, hands braced on her knees while she caught her breath – and mulled over her plight.

She had no other place to go, and the silence of the faint silver stars just emerging from the deep blue above offered no help.

She would have to go back. Duke McClellan might not want her, but he had complained he was stuck with her until Christmas. Less than three months. She would have to use all her yarn-spinning skills to delay her return. Until she could afford the voyage fare to Ireland – to her people, the Irish Travelers, and a way of life, a freedom, that was rapidly being stamped out across Germany.

However, on her journey back to the ranch house, strummed music coming from the lit barn, sidetracked her footsteps. Curious, she approached the opened, double-wide doors. One tilted crazily from only its top hinge.

Inside, his back against one slatted stall door, a swarthy young man sloped on the straw-layered ground and cradled a guitar against one raised knee. He idly plucked at the strings. As she drew nearer, she could see that his tired face held the handsome stamp of conquistadores of old.

“Lucy,” he sang softly, “Ya es hora de que dé a luz.”

“Lucy’s calf will come when it is ready,” she said, startling him, “but yuir guitar playing is far from ready.”

He scrambled to his feet, shod by cowboy boots that had seen better days and made him appear taller than he was, topping her by mere inches. “Senorita, mil pardones, pero – ”

“Romy is me name.”

“Y mi nombre es Arturo.”

She was accustomed to Castilian Spanish, not this hidalgo-inflected Spanish, but, apparently, he understood her English well enough. She waved him to sit again and pulled up a milk stool for herself. “Here, give me yuir guitar.”

The tilt of his head, the hunch of his bony shoulders, the way he met her less than half the distance between them to hand over his guitar, told her that he was clearly skeptical.