The River Widow(31)

Chapter Eleven

Within three weeks, Adah had managed to secure four customers—the large family, elderly couple, and bachelor, whom Florence had mentioned, and another family, one of freckled redheads who lived off the main road on a small farm. The matriarch of the redheaded family had taken sick and couldn’t do either her laundry or her household chores. Adah didn’t tell the Branches that she did that household’s laundry for free. She couldn’t bring herself to charge those who were down on their luck, and often she did a little cleaning and cooking for that family, too.

Now her days were filled with hard work. It took most of a day to do one family’s laundry, and she took over the duty for the Branch family as well so they could save the money they’d been spending on their washerwoman. Electric washing machines had become popular, but the family hadn’t purchased one yet, so Adah did the work using three galvanized tin tubs: one for scrubbing the clothes on the rub board and the other two for rinsing. She boiled the whites in a cast-iron pot set up in the backyard on bricks with a fire under it. She starched the shirts. When the washing was completed, she hung everything on the line and ironed the previous day’s laundry, folded it, and prepared it for return to her customers. Mabel often watched out the window.

It was honest, pure labor that pumped her heart, opened her lungs, and strengthened her arms and shoulders. She took pleasure in making soiled things clean, hanging clothes on the line with the sun on her back, and folding the scent of fresh air into the items she carefully placed in baskets to return to her customers. Wearing her wraparound housedress, apron, and oxfords, she walked the roads, shifting the basket from one hip to the other to better tolerate the weight. At night, she let a satisfied sense of exhaustion take her away into sleep, blocking the worries that she often was too tired to contemplate.

Of all her customers, Adah most enjoyed visiting the older couple and often sat with them for a spell on their front porch, watching birds flit about and squirrels climb their large dogwood tree. The old man still wore his overalls every day, and the woman wore a dress and old pumps with square heels. They told her about their grown children, who were providing support, and their grandchildren, who came to visit every Sunday. Sitting side by side in rocking chairs on the porch, the couple still held hands and gazed at each other lovingly.

Foremost in Adah’s mind were always her thoughts of keeping Daisy close and wondering what Buck had told Manfred Drucker. What were they planning? It wasn’t long before the gears in Adah’s head started to crank out an idea of her own. Now that she had been banned from going to town, she would have to find an intermediary to go see an attorney for her. She couldn’t send a letter—she didn’t know the exact addresses of any attorneys, and even if she did, no one could have written her back at the Branch farm. Mabel checked the mail every day and wouldn’t hesitate to open anything that came for Adah, especially if it came from an attorney.

Thinking through her options, Adah realized she couldn’t do anything to disturb the peace of the loving couple she had grown to care about. Her next thought was to ask Florence Wainwright, but she daren’t ask someone who had already confessed to being fearful of getting on the Branches’ bad side. She couldn’t implicate the two families, either. She wouldn’t have been able to forgive herself if she were ever found out and the Branches learned who had helped her.

Thus her thoughts fell on the bachelor, name of Jack Darby. He was a strong, silent, and solid type who rarely spoke to her when she either picked up his laundry or returned it. His hands revealed him to be a man who worked his own farm without much help, and they’d seen a lot of sunlight. He held them steady and still at his sides as if he bore no pretense. She’d never heard much about him and guessed him to be something of a recluse.

So why would he stick out his neck to help her? Her sense was that maybe he would. When she’d first introduced herself to him, his jaw tightened just ever so slightly when she said her name was Adah Branch . And one day when she’d been walking away, down the gravel drive that led to his farmhouse—a small single-story house, painted white with black shutters and with the obligatory front porch—his basket of dirty laundry on her hip, she’d looked over her shoulder to find him standing on his porch, watching her as she walked away.

The day after her decision had been made, she walked to his farm—a forty-five-minute stroll through powdery sunshine that poured warmth on her shoulders. With no laundry to return to him that day, her goal was to befriend the man.

His truck was gone, and so she sat on his porch steps and waited. Soon she began to lose heart as she lingered alone, a desperate woman seeking an accomplice. The sun had crossed the sky and hung well into the west, spilling bright beams of light.

And then he pulled up and stepped out of his Huckster truck cab. For a moment, he held there in silhouette, but then he removed his hat, which was made of soft felt, sweat stained, and curled around the edges, and he came straight up to her.

“Mrs. Branch?” he said.

She had guessed his age to be about forty, as there were fanlike folds at the corners of his eyes. He had china-blue eyes set in a face bronzed by the sun and topped by dense waves of windblown caramel hair, and a hard-set jaw. A crescent-shaped scar arched over his left eyebrow, and the scent of wood smoke and horsehair bled from his clothes and skin. His nose was just slightly off to one side, as if at one point in his life he’d been in a fistfight.