Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(42)
From this mite of woman, a balls-to-the-walls reaction to his earlier unthinking and insensitive comment wouldn’t have surprised him. That should have eased his concern. Except she was a magician in concealing her feelings.
“Look, I’m sorry about what – ”
“Dunna be,” she replied in a matter-of-fact voice. “We both know me cooking isna to yuir taste. Besides, today was for getting a clearer idea in yuir noggin about the woman ye want to take to wife.”
He scrubbed his mustache. “I think I need a new noggin, putting up as I seem to be with this matchmaking nonsense.”
“Next month, at Christmas,” she went on blithely, “we’ll audition Sally Kirtley for yuir wife.”
Sally was like him, one of his own kind who was quite content stuck out in the brush, miles from nowhere.
“Meanwhile,” Romy went on, “what do ye think about taking Bud with ye on that trip to Galveston next month? Give him a chance to practice his tennis on one of those fancy city courts?”
That trip – for which, originally, he had sworn he would haul her back to the good rabbi in exchange for an ordered swamp cooler he was to pick up.
He took the weighty cast iron pot she lugged over and began drying it. “You know, tonight you were the only one who didn’t share a Thanksgiving memory. You let it slide by with some kind of generality about a German celebration.”
With diligent attention, she began scouring a grubby skillet. “Well, traveling about as Old Duke and I did, it would be no surprise to find us on the road at special times, like Christmas or Easter.”
“Claptrap.”
Her hands gradually stopped, like a clock running down. Her delicate profile betrayed a finely sculpted jaw clenching. Without looking at him, she said in a hushed voice, “Duke, we canna go back in time, so why try?”
He set aside the dried pot. “Beats the shit out of me, Sunshine.”
She must have had more than her own share of unhappiness. No one escaped this life without tasting sorrow and horror, but the point of all that pain . . . well, as crassly arrogant as he was, he wasn’t arrogant enough to think he had an answer.
But he did know the greater the distance he kept between himself and her the next eleven months the better . . . better for him, and most certainly better for her, now that he had incredibly, foolish, stupidly, let things get out of hand, despite, and damn, his agreement with the rabbi and Johnson.
§ § §
With some pride that afternoon, Micah, axe in one hand, helped Glen drag into the parlor the scrubby mesquite Romy had persuaded the ranch hands to chop down.
“Ejoli,” Arturo said, “eet ees not much for a Christmas tree.”
“At least, it’s taller than your stubby self,” Skinny Henry shot back.
“Laddies,” she reproved, “tis Christmas.”
The next day would see Sally and her father joining the S&S crew for the Christmas dinner, and she shared the ranch hands’ excitement over the holiday celebration she was staging.
“In the corner, over there, by the radio,” she directed them. The radio took up nearly one entire corner of the parlor. That significant and new piece of communication was almost as important as the bloody kitchen telephone.
“Not yet,” Jock said. “A wee pruning at the tree’s bottom and top is needed if we mean to stand her upright, and then we’re whole hog to go.”
“Auh got it, Miss Romy,” Micah said, stepping forward with his pocket knife to make short shrift of the offending branches.
“All right,” she told the five, “back to your duties.”
Duke, who had driven to Galveston to pick up the ordered swamp cooler, had taken with him an excited Bud – along with his tennis racquet.
Once the men had filed out, she set to decorating the tree. Lately, as the crisis with Germany and growing tension in Europe had been mounting, she had taken to listening to Edward R. Murrow on the ‘CBS News World Roundup.’ But late that afternoon she had tuned in to The Campbell Playhouse and Orson Welles’s “A Christmas Carol.”
Standing on the kitchen stool, she looped the mesquite’s top prickly spines with strands of corn she had popped along with pieces of strung tin salvaged from the chicken coop. Skinny Henry had used wire cutters to clip the tin into snow-flake-sizes.
The room’s scents made her almost dizzy. She loved the sweet smell of mesquite burning in the fireplace those cooler mornings. And she was ever grateful for Duke, who arose at dawn to start the aromatic coffee that still lingered in the air an hour later to be combined with her super-fried eggs and burnt bacon.
As she added tufts of chicken feathers for what she imagined could pass as cherubs’ wings, her shouted name caused her to whirl abruptly, arms out flung and toppling. Feathers went flying. At the last moment, she balanced herself.
“Damn’t, you have the radio so loud,” Duke snapped, “you wouldn’t have heard a Panzer tank rolling through.” Both his arms toted large, brown paper bags – like the toaster, another novelty that still amazed her, the way the sturdy sacks folded so compactly.
Climbing down from the stool, she turned off the radio and trailed him into the kitchen. She began helping put away the grocery items from a list she had laboriously scrawled – soup, peanut butter, applesauce, oranges, bread, and more.