The Bridal Veil Page 4

  It was quiet in here, too, with only the sound of strong, equine jaws grinding on feed, the occasional contented whinny from the draft horses, or a moo from the milk cow. Barn cats darted in and out, never letting anyone get close. Out here, he couldn’t hear Cora blaring like a steam whistle. Even Rose usually lost her snotty attitude in the barn, when she chose to visit. Over the past three years, he’d often escaped to the peace. It was the one place he still felt comfortable, aside from the fields.

  He sat down on a hay bale and leaned against the upright behind him. So, he was married again. But except for the confounding events that had led to this result, he didn’t feel any different. He didn’t feel married, or any less a widower. His new status gave him no pleasure—it felt like the business deal that it was.

  His first wedding day twelve years ago had been a lot different. When he’d stood nervous and awkward before Reverend Ackerman with Belinda by his side, he could hardly believe his good luck. Beautiful, petite Belinda Hayward, the girl he’d loved since the first time he saw her in the Fairdale schoolyard, the only girl he’d ever wanted, was going to be his wife. Just as nervous as Luke, she’d slipped her icy hand into his and suddenly nothing else mattered. Even then, the mother of the bride had sat in the front pew wearing a sour look. She’d wanted someone else, Bradley Tilson, a physician’s son from Portland, to marry Belinda. Luke hadn’t been surprised. Most parents had warned their daughters away from Luke Becker. White trash, they’d called him, when they weren’t calling him something worse.

  As a youngster, his taste for risky adventures had pulled him far to the left of respectability. His friends and younger brothers had been as rowdy as he was, and the sheriff was well acquainted with all of them. Wherever deviltry occurred, he could be found at its center. They never did anything really bad—smoking behind a barn, turning some horses loose, a little petty thievery—none of it seemed serious to Luke. It had all been just for fun, and nobody really got hurt.

  Luke also hadn’t been above rolling in a haymow with a willing girl whose father wasn’t looking, or hadn’t taught her better, but none touched his heart. Except Belinda Hayward.

  Even though he’d been keenly aware of their differences—after all, he grew up in a shack down by the river and his old man had died in jail—he’d wanted Belinda for his own. Back then, what Luke had wanted he’d tried for.

  Cora had blamed him for running off Tilson, but then, given Belinda’s condition, there hadn’t been much choice but to let her marry Luke. She’d needed a husband, and Cora reckoned that even he was better than none.

  His mother-in-law hadn’t worried him, though. Hell, nothing could throw a wet blanket on his spirit that day. He and Belinda, they’d start their new lives together. Then when he found out about the baby, well hadn’t he immediately promised Belinda that he’d be a good father? Damn it, what had happened?

  Absently, he pulled a blade of dry grass from the hay bale and twirled it between his fingers, remembering how he’d believed that life could only get sweeter with a wife like Belinda. He lifted his head and gazed at the dark rafters over him, and a humorless chuckled rolled up from his chest. It was probably just as well that he’d been unable to imagine anything else. But if a fortuneteller had told him what the future held, he wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

  The years that followed hadn’t been as golden as he’d envisioned on his wedding day. They’d struggled, he and Belinda, to make a go of the farm, to overcome their differences. If only there had been more private time to work things out—but in the midst of it all, even though she’d lived at her own place then, Cora had always been around, like a burr under a saddle, always meddling—

  “Luke! This ham is blame near ready to hop back on the hog it came from! We’re setting down to eat. Now.” Her voice carried easily across the yard.

  Sighing, he pushed himself up from the bale and grabbed his coat from the nail, feeling as if he were many years older than his thirty-one.

  Just as he emerged into the cool April drizzle, it occurred to him that Cora had baked a ham for his last wedding dinner, too.

  ~~*~*~*~~

  “It was only a little prank, Luke. Leave the girl be.” Cora turned to her granddaughter as she bustled between the table and the stove. “You’re sorry, aren’t you, Rose?”

  “Yes.” Rose’s mumbled reply was unconvincing.

  “There, you see?

  Emily had heard the back door slam, announcing Luke’s return from the barn, and hurried downstairs. Now she hovered in the hall just outside the kitchen, unnoticed and unsure if she should interrupt the heated discussion taking place in there. After all, she wasn’t really a member of the family. She could see Rose already seated at the table, while Cora, red-faced from the heat of the stove, served the food. Luke paced the length of the big room, around the table and back again. Once, as if from a farmer’s instinct, he glanced at the heavy sky looming beyond the window in the back door.

  He raked a hand through his dark hair, his very posture revealing his frustration. “Stealing isn’t what I think of as a ‘little prank.’ ” He realized that he’d done the same thing in his own youth, but this was his daughter. His own child. He didn’t want her to grow up the way he had. “I can’t figure out why you did it—I gave you money to buy the candy.”

  “Land sakes, Luke, you make her sound like a bank robber or a horse thief.” With short, impatient strokes of a knife, Cora sliced a loaf of bread and piled it on a plate. “Leave it be and let’s have supper!”

  Luke frowned at his mother-in-law, then returned his gaze to his daughter and asked again, “Why did you take that candy, Rose?”

  But the girl only shrugged and kept her eyes on the boiled potato that Cora spooned onto her plate with a neat flip.

  In the hall, Emily shook her head.

  “Go ahead and start, honey,” Cora urged Rose, who already had her fork in her hand. She added with a hint of derision, “I don’t know when Mrs. Becker will find her way down here. Etiquette—hah!”

  “We should wait for Miss Can—I mean, Emily,” Luke said.

  “I’m hungry,” Rose complained.

  “I’ve waited long enough.” Cora settled in her chair like a hen on a nest box and put a slice of ham on her plate.

  “Aw, hell, Cora—” Luke said, and sat heavily in his place at the head of the table, his elbows bracketing his dish. “It’s her wedding dinner.”

  Emily felt her face grow warm and she wondered again if she would be able to overcome her blunder in deciding to come here. She’d had such hope. And after Alyssa’s death and the closing of Miss Wheaton’s, it had seemed as if she’d had no choice but to leave Chicago. But she sensed that she’d be doing battle with Cora Hayward every single day. Battling to be a wife, such as she was, and to be Rose’s mother and teacher. Well, she’d faced worse events in her life and seen them through. Today she’d made a commitment in town and she must stand by it. Lifting her chin, she stepped into the big kitchen.

  “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” she said, clutching to her heart the most basic rules of entering a room. At times of her greatest stress, she clung to the tenets of civilized living the way others sought solace in their faith. In her opinion, good manners were what set humans above the animals, and were all that kept the world from social and moral collapse. If one followed the rules of polite behavior, one could survive. Show no fear was not one of them, but she kept it uppermost in her mind as her skirts brushed the doorframe. “I’m sorry if I was too long.”

  Luke bounced up from his chair. His white shirt sleeves were rolled up and the tie he’d complained of was gone. Once again, his rugged handsomeness dried her throat. Under different circumstances, she knew that he wouldn’t even have acknowledged her. Despite her height, or more likely because of it, she had always been nearly invisible to men as attractive as Luke. “No, ma’am.” He indicated her place at the opposite end of the table. “We’re just now sitting down ourselves.”

/>   Cora’s champing jaws and full mouth belied his statement but Emily took her seat and delicately put her napkin in her lap.

  “You found your room? The nice one at the end of the hall?” he asked, handing her a bowl of green beans. His eyes didn’t meet hers.

  “Yes, thank you. Mrs. Hayward showed me upstairs.”

  Luke only nodded.

  Serving dishes were kept in motion in a circle around the table, and Emily soon found herself with a pile of food that was mostly white: white potatoes, white bread, white gravy. The only color came from a pink slice of ham and the beans. The meat was dry and tough, the beans boiled to a pale, sickly green.

  Luke pushed around his piece of ham with a noticeable lack of interest. Cora gobbled her food as if she feared it being taken from her, and Rose busied herself by seeing how many string beans she could stack on the tines of her fork. No one told the girl that playing with one’s food, especially at her age, was not acceptable, and only two hours a wife, Emily didn’t feel it was her place to correct her yet.

  She cut her own leathery meat into small, chewable pieces and dabbed them in the gravy to give them some moisture. The meal was ruined and she knew it was her fault. She’d made them late—she’d made them wait.

  But her guilt was short-lived. Cora interrupted her feeding long enough to comment, “Well, at least the ham is still good. I was afraid it would be overcooked.”

  Dear God, this was awkward, Emily thought. She took a bite of bread and did her best to hide her surprise over the taste of the butter. It looked all right, but it had a stale, rancid taste. No one made pleasant small talk, such as asking about her trip, or for that matter, anything else about her. She was an outsider among them, and apparently was destined to remain so, at least for the time being. They showed no curiosity at all. Outright prying would be rude, but a little interest on Luke’s part would be welcome. He simply kept his eyes on his plate. Didn’t he want to know something about his new wife? She certainly wanted to know about him, more than she’d learned from his letters to her sister. Little things, like how much cream did he like in his coffee, or did he like to dance? For a moment, it seemed that it was just the two of them sitting there in uncomfortable silence. Then she remembered that they were not alone, and that it was rude to ignore the others at the table.

  The ability to make pleasant small talk was a basic and vital social necessity. Feeling much less confident than she was willing to show, she plunged ahead into polite dinner conversation. “The landscape in Oregon is breathtaking. I was amazed by the change from near-desert at The Dalles to the lush vegetation here. Have you always lived here, Mrs. Hayward?”

  Cora sopped up some white gravy on her plate with a piece of white bread. In her reddened hand the bread looked like a handkerchief. She answered as she chewed, and Emily had a passing glance of partially masticated food. “I came out here in ’60 with my husband. We left out of St. Joe and followed the Oregon Trail.”

  Sorry that she’d asked, Emily forged on anyway. “Goodness, what an exciting trip that must have been.”

  The other woman shook her head and waved off the suggestion as she chewed. “It was a blame fool idea my man had. We had perfectly good farmland in Missouri but he got some notion that he wanted to come out here. He came into the kitchen one day and said, ‘Pack up, Cora, we’re going to Oregon!’ And just like that, I had to go. We went through every kind of weather God put on this earth, and I had to dump half of my belongings on the trail. Every time we crossed a wide river or climbed a mountain, there went a chair, or a dresser, or a bedstead.”

  Emily glanced around the table, amazed by the force of Cora’s oratory. Luke looked as if he’d heard it all before and more times than he wanted, but Rose jumped in.

  “Grammy, tell about how the ox got sick and died,” she urged, her face animated, “and got all bloated up with maggots because the weather was too hot—”

  “Rose, for God’s sake—” Luke began, but Emily, horrified by the girl’s suggestion and her dearth of table manners, interrupted.

  “Young lady, that is not appropriate table conversation! In fact, it’s not proper conversation at all. It is also not proper to create artistic arrangements of your food.” She indicated the beans stacked on the fork.

  Rose dropped her gaze to her lap, a scowl wrinkling her face. “I don’t like beans,” she mumbled.

  “Then leave them on your plate.”

  “Grammy says I have to eat everything on it.”

  “But you’re not eating them.”

  Rose’s chin began to quiver, and Emily could have bitten her own tongue. She didn’t know what had come over her. Maybe it was fatigue from her trip, or the hard, assessing gleam in Cora’s eyes every time she looked at her. Rose gave Emily a wounded glance from beneath her lashes, then suddenly jumped up and ran from the table, sobbing. Her thunderous footsteps were heard on the stairs and a moment later, a door slammed overhead.

  Aghast at her own behavior, Emily’s gaze bounced from Luke to Cora and back again.

  “Well! Is that how things are going to be around here now?” Cora demanded. “Luke, are you going to let this woman talk to Rose that way?”

  “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry!” Emily put her napkin by her plate and began to push her chair out. “I’ll go to her—”

  Luke stretched his hand across the table toward hers as if to stop her. His expression showed no anger, only weariness. “No, let her sit up there for a while. She has a lot to get used to. We’ll just give her some time.”

  Stricken to the heart, Emily repeated, “I truly am sorry. I didn’t mean to upset her so. I guess I’m not used to hearing stories about dead oxen and—and so on.”

  “Oh, boo-hoo! Doesn’t anything die in Chicago?” Cora snapped. She glared at Emily with her hard blue eyes.

  Emily paused a moment before answering. “Yes, Mrs. Hayward. My sister died,” she reminded her. “And my parents before her. In fact, I have no family left at all. If you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I’m not very hungry.”

  ~~*~*~*~~

  Mrs. Becker? Hah! Cora Hayward sat in the darkened parlor, her jaw tight, her slippered foot pushing the rocker in which she sat at a brisk pace. She let her gaze follow the line of the furniture and Belinda’s keepsakes, still on prominent display. Her sewing basket sat in the corner, its lid opened to display her gold-handled embroidery scissors, her sterling silver thimble, and the last piece of stitchery she had been working before she died. The linen sat there, folded neatly, half-finished, and looked as if Belinda might walk in any moment to take it up again. Cora herself had no patience for the kind of fine needlework that her daughter had done—life was too hard and too busy for that kind of froufrou or gewgaw. Fancy was good for people who had nothing better to do. Get the job done and move on to the next, that was what Cora did.

  And they’d been getting on well enough here, she and Rose. Her granddaughter almost made her forget that horrible night that Belinda had died, thanks to Luke Becker. If it hadn’t been for him—

  But they’d managed just fine here at the farm. Then Luke had to bring in Miss Fancy Manners and stir up everything. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done that. Whenever Cora thought she had things in place, Luke came along to upset the applecart. She’d wanted Belinda to marry that doctor’s boy, Bradley Tilson. He’d worked on one of the neighboring farms that summer all those years gone now. But no, Luke Becker, the wildest boy in town, had sweet-talked her and run Bradley off. Oh, Belinda had defended Luke and told Cora that she was wrong, but Cora knew better. Those Beckers were all alike, living down in that shack by the river, their father no better than the drunken logger that he’d once been, their mother nothing but a foolish, browbeaten female. Belinda could have had a soft life in Portland married to a doctor, because Bradley was studying medicine too. Instead, she’d had to marry Luke and end up here.

  Cora looked around the room. Well, it wasn’t a bad house. Luke had done better than she’d expected. She h
ad to admit that he worked hard, too. But she knew her girl had never been happy here, no sir, never. Cora had visited often enough to know. She’d tried to get Belinda to take Rose and come home. When she finally had, it was too late. Too late.

  So now Cora had Emily Cannon to deal with, in a house that Cora had come to think of as her own. Luke claimed Rose needed a mother—well, what was she, the girl’s own flesh and blood, if not a mother? Better her than a stranger from Chicago with a lot of blame fool ideas about how people ought to act and talk and eat and dress. She’d already made trouble and this was only her first night under this roof.

  Cora hoisted her considerable bulk from the chair and adjusted the bun on her head. If the new Mrs. Becker thought that Cora was just going to roll over and play dead, she had another thing coming.

  ~~*~*~*~~

  Luke lay in his bed in the darkness, his body deep in the feather tick. The clouds had finally begun to break up and the moon cut a long white slash across the quilt.

  God, what a lousy damned day this had been. He was dead tired but sleep wouldn’t come to him. He’d tossed and turned so much the bedding was wadded into a lump. Tension wound itself around the Becker house like fence wire pulled tight, and he felt it.

  Rose had closed herself in her room for the rest of the evening. Eventually, he tapped on her door, carrying a glass of milk and a lopsided sandwich that he’d made. But his girl wouldn’t answer him, so he left the food outside her room. When he came up to bed, he noticed it was gone.