"Rumors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godbersen Anna)

Twelve

THE DINNER ELIZABETH SERVED THAT NIGHT would be far superior to the scarcely touched beans of the previous evening. For one thing, there would be real meat — steaks bought that day in town — and potatoes roasted in a pan over the fire and Waldorf salad. She had gone and purchased these items herself, that afternoon. She’d purposefully avoided the post office, which had previously been her single, obsessive destination.

“Did you get a letter today, Mrs. Keller?” they had asked her at the general store. They believed that she was Will’s wife, which was what she had told them to explain her presence out there alone with two men, and they knew how frequently she asked if there was anything for her or her husband in the mail. She didn’t like this lie — it was against everything she had been brought up to believe to live as man and wife without being married — but it was preferable to publicly appearing to do so.

“Oh, no,” Elizabeth had replied, blushing under her hat. “I’m just here for groceries today,” she added softly.

The other reason was that Will was going to help her with the cooking, which he seemed to know something of, since his living quarters had been so close to the Holland kitchen and because, when he was thirteen and growing so quickly, it had been necessary for him to become good friends with their cook and learn from her. It was Will who insisted they should celebrate. Finding oil meant that soon they would be living at a whole new level, and this made him feel much better about spending some of his savings to have a real dinner. Elizabeth had gone to pick up those necessary things while he and Denny began to put together their makeshift rig, trying to make it just as safe and effective as one of those huge ones the big oil companies used.

On the long walk back to the cabin, she had reflected on Will’s ability to save. He was always working hard, she knew that, but it was an irony she could not fail to appreciate that he had accumulated money while the family that employed him frittered theirs away. And then he had worked to save more while he waited for her in San Francisco. There was money for steak, when it was called for, and she mused in a far-off way about how Will, not Henry, would have been the better person on whom to pin the family’s hopes for salvation.

That hardly seemed to matter anymore, though. Now that she saw how assuredly Will would make her rich again, she found she didn’t even need it. She knew what money would mean for her mother, for the rest of the family, but for her it no longer held any power. It almost made her laugh — she found herself smirking as she pulled back the canvas flap that served as a door to the cabin — how much she had worried over losing her dresses and her objects and all her trinkets and jewels. Now that they were gone, she never thought of them.

She continued thinking about all that constituted the boy she loved until he returned, his eyes bright with excitement and his whole body animated with the work of the day. There was that usual smell of sweat and soap when he came through the door, and a new one — it was something like sulfur, and it reminded Elizabeth of intense industry and all the other things he was cut out for.

“Lizzy,” he said. He took the paring knife with which she had been removing the skins of the potatoes out of her hand and laid it on the table, and then his arms took her up. After the kiss he met her eyes, and his lips were drawn back so far it was impossible to think he might ever frown again.

There was a new shine there and a new buoyancy in his step that reminded her of that time in their lives when they first admitted they were in love. That it was not some childhood game in which they imagined being married as grownups but something far more real. That was when she had ordered a delivery entrance installed between the kitchen and the carriage house so that she could slip down to see him at night. Neither of them had yet turned sixteen, and the complications of their situation had not fully dawned on them.

“Where’s Denny?” She rested her head on his chest and took in a warm breath. He was holding her to him with his hand and had turned to assess what still needed to be done for dinner.

“I sent him into town for whiskey.” Will picked up a piece of chopped apple from the table and put it in his mouth.

“Oh, I could have gotten that!”

“A real lady, buying alcohol like any roustabout?”

Elizabeth pursed her lips. “I’m not sure they have those scruples out here,” she said.

“No, but you do.” He swallowed the apple and then gently tapped her nose. There had been moments since Elizabeth’s arrival in California when she felt self-conscious about all her old manners, which were more difficult to discard than the desire for things or the instinct to marry where money already was. But then there were moments like these when Will put her at ease and when she knew that all the things that constituted her self were as sweet to him as he was to her. He kissed her forehead, and then they continued to work at the celebration dinner without words in the flickering lamplight.

It was into this pleasant silence that Denny Planck returned. Elizabeth turned and acknowledged him with a small smile and nod as he came through the door and thought, as she often had before, how he might be handsome if it weren’t for the skin of his cheeks, which were pitted with smallpox scars, and his somewhat oversize ears. For his height gave him natural advantages, and there was a sweet willingness to follow others in his brown eyes. He was heavier than Will and less articulate, but Will liked and trusted him, and that was enough to make her like him, too.

“Smells good,” he said with a grin.

“Denny!” Elizabeth’s laugh rang out. “We haven’t even started cooking yet.”

Will went over and threw an arm over his friend’s shoulder. Elizabeth wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her sweetheart in such a state of conviviality. There was confidence in his every movement and a looseness in his limbs.

“Looks good, then,” Denny replied, wearing the same grin. “Here,” he went on, removing a bottle wrapped in paper from the crook between his arm and his side. “I brought the whiskey.”

“Bravo!” Will took the bottle and unwrapped it and threw the paper into the fire. Grabbing three of the little mismatched mason jars, which had once held small amounts of jam or sardines, he poured them each a finger of brown liquid. Then he passed the jars around and raised his high. “To our success!”

They clinked their glasses and drank. Elizabeth had been known to drink a moderate amount of champagne at balls in New York, but she had never tasted whiskey, and it burned her tongue. She didn’t mind, though. It all felt like part of the lucky new sunlight that had fallen on them.

“To our success,” Denny seconded as he placed the little jar back on the table. “Oh, and Will, there was this for you at the post office. They told me Mrs. Keller”—here Denny winked in a way Elizabeth would have preferred he’d not—“might have missed it on her earlier foray into town.”

Elizabeth pretended to go back to mixing together the walnuts and apples and celery in the chipped blue tin bowl as Will set down his glass. He moved away to rip open the sealed yellow telegram, and she turned to watch him even as Denny sat down at the table and picked up a handful of walnuts, which he began shoveling into his mouth. She wanted to stop wondering what the contents of the telegram said, but found that she couldn’t bring her attention back to the salad. After a moment, Will looked up at her and she saw that the celebration had gone out of his face.

“Oh, Liz,” he said.

“What is it?”

Will looked at Denny, who was absorbed in pouring himself a second glass of whiskey, and back to Elizabeth. He tilted his head toward the door, indicating that she should follow him. “Denny, we’ll be right back, all right?” Then, summoning some of the previous gaiety: “Slow down with the whiskey or we won’t have anything left to celebrate with.”

Denny acknowledged this comment with a laugh, and then they left him and went out into the darkness. They walked for several moments, away from the low light of the cabin, before either of them spoke. All of the orange had gone out of the sky while Elizabeth had been inside, and where the purple up above had turned to black, pins of light had started to emerge.

Will’s voice was the first to break the quiet. “I knew this would happen,” he began quietly. “I just didn’t think it would be so soon.”

“What did it say?” The look on his face provoked a feeling of dread, and she could barely even whisper now.

“It was from Diana. She says she needs help, and that your mother is not well.”

Elizabeth felt the cold sweep over her body. “Is it serious?”

Will shook his head firmly. “It just says that she’s ill, Lizzie. It’s pretty brief, and you know your sister isn’t a realist. There’s no way to know exactly what’s happening.”

All of a sudden Elizabeth flashed on a vision of her mother, broken and bedridden. The thought of her so reduced was more terrible and heartbreaking than she could have begun to anticipate. “I have to go to her.”

Will’s eyes were wide and watchful as he nodded. “I’ll go with you, then.”

Elizabeth put her hand over her mouth and tried to keep herself from crying. There was that bruised feeling in her chest that always preceded tears, but she told herself that would be very selfish, that her mother was too far away to see how she felt and she would only be crying over her own guilty behavior. “Oh, Will. The oil.”

“It’s been there a long time.” A smile wavered on his lips, and then he reached out for her. She felt the whole spread of his palm against the small of her back; his other hand lightly brushed the hair back from her face. “It will be there when we come back. The train leaves San Pedro at noon tomorrow.”

Elizabeth let her body relax into his. All of her fears for her family, which she had been keeping at bay, were back with her now. She wondered if she would be able to sleep that night, or any night before she was with them again. She tried not to think the worst, but already her fretful imagination had gotten away from her.