Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(41)



“Shall we eat?” he interrupted, pulling out the chair for, first, Charlotte, then Clara.

Arturo, mimicking him, hastened to squeakily scoot back the out-of-kilter chair for Romy, her customary place at the opposite end of the table from Duke. He glanced back at Romy, his speculation centered on her freckled face and more especially those lively eyes. Had she added yet another conquest with her crazy-ass appeal?

Amazingly, she had succeeded in manifesting a meal without burning any of its dishes, and the afternoon passed most agreeably, to his immense relief. She was eating little, pushing her food around on her plate and then surreptitiously passing bits to Ulysses, hovering beneath the table at her feet.

“Romy,” Charlotte prompted, “is there a similar day to Thanksgiving in Germany?”

“More like a harvest time celebration, Erntedankfest is.” She shifted about in her chair, as if uncomfortable with the subject, and looked from one ranch hand to another. “What about yuir Thanksgivings?”

Glen captured a hot butter-glazed roll from the chipped crockery plate being passed. “Hey, many years, I ate my Thanksgiving meal on a sawhorse at the Chicago Mission. That’s where Skinny Henry and I met.”

“What about yuirself, Jock?” she prodded.

“Auld Bob Kleberg, the manager of the King Ranch,” Jock replied between bites of the buttery garlic green beans he was shoveling in, “he made sure the lot of us Kine?os got our bellies filled at Thanksgiving. And afterwards the Kings would host team roping, horseshoeing and rawhide braiding and such.”

Bud confessed, “I actually watched the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade. I remember seeing a giant balloon that was Felix the Cat.”

Clara’s eyes rounded. The girl reminded Duke so much of Charlotte at that age. “Oh, that must have been swell,” she said. “What is New York like?”

“Big,” he told her with a fourteen-year-old’s superior tone. “Like a giant maze. You could get lost in it and never find your way out.”

Duke looked at Micah. The quiet black man sat silent at the table’s far end, on Romy’s right. He, too, had been slipping Ulysses scraps that he thought Duke did not notice. “What about you, Micah? Any Thanksgiving memories?”

His spoon of creamed onions paused mid-way to his mouth. “Auh – uhh – Auh,” he stuttered, set down his spoon, and swiped his broad lips with the back of his fist. “Uhh, Auh can remember only one time. Mah mammy wrung the neck of a hen – and, uhh -- hung it on the clothes line for me to pluck its pinfeathers. Lordy, did it stink.”

“And yuirself, Duke?” Romy coaxed.

He could have contributed that last Thanksgiving, when his old man had drunk too much and picked up the baseball bat. “My ma made the most delicious pumpkin pie for Thanksgivings. Until the Great War, when the local food board urged sugar reduction. But no one could cook a Thanksgiving meal like she could.”

At the room’s sudden silence, he glanced from the tender turkey tidbit on his upraised fork to see Romy’s deflated expression, the merry eyes dulled, the gulp in her slender white throat.

“I think we each imagine our mothers were the best cook ever,” Charlotte interjected softly. “Whether true or not. And speaking of mothers, this mother needs to get her little one home to bed.”

In the brisk evening’s growing dark, with Ulysses padding behind, he walked her and Clara to their 1931 Model A, opening the door for each. Belatedly and ashamedly, he realized Romy had been right. She deserved the opportunity to learn to drive. If Charlotte could, why shouldn’t she?

He braced his palms on the driver’s side of the rolled-down window frame. “It was like old times tonight, Charlotte. You and Clara are welcome anytime at the S&S.” He bent his head to peer past her to her daughter. “Arturo can give you riding lessons, Clara.”

“Gee, that’d be swell, Duke,” the girl piped.

Charlotte said, “Don’t be a stranger in town, Duke. Our friendship, our relationship, means more to me than you most likely know.”

“The same goes for you, traveling this direction.”

She smiled up at him. “Well, you know the saying, ‘It’s a fur piece, friend.’”

He smiled, tapped the Ford’s door in farewell, and, thumbs jammed in his jeans pockets, slowly and thoughtfully strode back into the house to face another female.

He knew he had amends to make. Damn’t, this was exactly the sticky mess he knew he was opening himself to when he had agreed to hire on a female cook. If one of his hired hands had a problem with another ranch hand, he did not sulk eternally or weep or go off on a caterwauling tirade the way females did. No, he’d throw a few punches, letting off steam, and that’d be it.

In the kitchen, Duke found her vigorously scrubbing a scummy cast iron pan with steel wool, a monotonous task he had done all too often before he had left home. She didn’t look around as he entered – and he had to wonder if she didn’t hear him, as, curiously, happened occasionally – or if she was ignoring him.

He snagged a clean dish towel, its pattern duplicating the feed sack that now hung in pairs from the kitchen window.

At that point, she must have sensed his presence. She glanced up at him, and he scanned that small, angular face and tried to read the quicksilver thoughts hidden behind it. That green-eyed gaze was clear, without rancor.

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