Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(40)
“Look, all I ask is you take care of your duties, so we can get through this year with the least amount of trouble.”
And keep out of his way. Nevertheless, she prodded, “But the weekly reading and writing lessons, they will continue?”
He sighed and hitched his shotgun upright, resting its barrel upon his shoulder carelessly. But she knew better. He was never careless. “Yeah. I’ll also keep to my word about that.”
A chancer she was. But if you didn’t push for what you wanted, if you just settled, well, you had yourself a rut that was an open-ended grave.
And, thus, she pushed on, saying, “Duke, dunna ye see, we could be friends? We’re stuck with one another for a year. And, blessed saints alive, I dunna want ever to marry – and ye, well, ye want to marry someone. Someone who make a real home for ye and who will – ,” she made a swallowing noise, “ – who can give ye children. So, I can be of help to ye. Really. I mean it.”
“Do we have to go through this again?”
“I’m just saying that ye’re a right good looking man. Ye could have yuir pick in any litter. For all that I may look the runt of the litter, I still am a female. I understand me sex and I be telling yuir stubborn self that I could help ye find yuirself a wife. The best of the litter for yuirself.”
“With your Gypsy hocus pocus, naturally?”
She ignored that insult. “Yuir pick should be the best of all the women who’d readily share yuir bed. I can assist you in this decision process. Now, mind ye, best suited to yuir temperament is Charlotte, but best suited to yuir goals is Sally.”
He shook his head, as if she had stretched his credulity. “So, you’re saying I should give each a trial run in my bed? Is that it?”
She could feel a summer’s day heat blistering her skin. Her imagination began to play out a moving picture’s romantic scene, frame by frame. Duke’s suntanned face, lowering over hers, his lips – lust! Why, she was lusting after this Texan!
Never would she have imagined herself lusting after anyone. Giorgio could hardly be counted; he was more a screen projection of her girlhood’s imagination.
“Nay,” she said, crisply and emphatically, “I am saying only we have Charlotte and her daughter over for Thanksgiving dinner. Bud told me that people do that here. Invite friends to celebrate and give thanks.”
At the mention of Bud again, he frowned, and she hurried on. “Then, we can invite Sally and her father for Christmas dinner. See how Charlotte and Sally – and their families – fit in with yuirself, the S&S, and our ranch hands.”
“Our ranch hands?”
She displayed her disarming smile. “Well, I mean we hired help here at the S&S.”
Pondering, he looked down at his enormous scruffy boots – as if her earnest suggestion was a production of mammoth size and complexity. “Thanksgiving is the day after tomorrow. That doesn’t give Charlotte much leeway.”
“Oh, ye ask – Charlotte will come.”
§ § §
Trooping behind Arturo, sombrero in hand, Jock, Bud, Skinny Henry, Glen, and lastly Micah shuffled in from the kitchen’s back door stoop. The ranch hands stood around the long table that afternoon, as if at parade rest for the Gypsy gypper’s orchestrated Thanksgiving dinner.
And orchestrated it was, including the radio music she had selected, which drifted from the parlor – the NBC’s popular A&P Gypsies, sponsored by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.
Duke restrained from shaking his head at this latest ploy of hers. And yet he had gone along with it, wearing his best Sunday white shirt and only that morning even suffering her to clip with the kitchen scissors the overly long hair at his nape and in front of his ears.
She had tugged him down onto one of the mismatched kitchen chairs and begun shearing him like a sheep. “A woman of Charlotte’s ilk will be wanting a clean-cut man, not a lion with a messy mane like yuirs.”
She had no idea, as she circled him, how her small breasts had been poking his bicep like branding irons. “And while we’re at it, Duke McClellan, no five o-clock shadow at this afternoon’s table.”
“And while we’re at it, Romy Sonnenschein,” he’d gruffed, “remove all your stockings you hung up to dry in my bathroom.”
The sight of her damp and holey stockings and knitted underwear were an intimacy as unsettling as the tawny tuft he glimpsed beneath her uplifted arm as she ruffled fingers through his freshly shorn hair for a finished effect. Ridiculous, but his pulse leapt madly at the sight.
Come dinner time, one by one, he introduced the ranch hands to Charlotte and Clara. The eight-year-old, who, like her mother, wore eyeglasses, peered through their thick lenses at each of the men and settled on Romy, who was placing on the table a large wooden bowl heaped with steaming, mashed sweet potatoes.
“You’re the restless refugee?” Charlotte’s daughter blurted.
Romy, blushing as red as her headscarf, glanced from Clara to Charlotte, who also blushed.
“I shared with Clara about your escape from Germany,” Charlotte explained gently, “and the courage it must have taken, not knowing how to read or write in English proficiently.”
Those gaping teeth bestowed an infectious grin. “I dunna do that – read or write so good – in any of the seven languages I speak.”