The Ballad of Hattie Taylor Page 21

  Hattie was happy to make herself comfortable next to her friend. She, Augusta, and Moses had met Nell’s train, but in the flurry of introductions, unpacking, and settling in, this was the first moment they’d had alone since her arrival. “Mostly positive,” she replied thoughtfully. “Being home, being able to ride a decent horse again. And, of course, being with my family and seeing Moses and Doc.” She laughed a shade breathlessly. “Even the townspeople seem less critical. It has felt rather miraculous. I met with the school board, and everyone was cordial. I think that’s mostly due to the influence of Aurelia Donaldson. Did I tell you Aunt Augusta believes it was she who was responsible for our contracts?”

  “I thought you said it was your aunt’s doing.”

  “I believed it was. But she says not.”

  “Well, mercy me.”

  “Oh, and you’ll never guess. Jake is teaching me to drive a motorcar!”

  “No! Honestly?” Nell sat upright, her dark brown eyes wide and just the tiniest bit skeptical.

  Hattie grinned, happy Nell was finally here, astounded she’d actually forgotten how lovely her friend was in the two-plus weeks apart. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” she vowed. She wriggled with excitement. “Oh, Nell, it’s so thrilling! You simply cannot imagine the speed. Why, on a straight stretch of road, provided the automobile doesn’t break down, we’ve gone as fast as twenty-five miles an hour!”

  “My Lord,” Nell said faintly. “I can’t wait to meet your Jake. He sounds a most unusual man.” She studied Hattie’s expression. “Your relationship isn’t as awkward as you feared, then?”

  “He’s not my Jake, Nell. At least, not in the way you mean.” Hattie hesitated, searching for words to explain. “It’s almost as if we’ve both gone back to the way it was before the summer of aught-six—only not quite. He treats me the way he used to, but sometimes he gets this look in his eyes I can’t explain. Except to say it’s not the way a man looks at a little girl. And except for the first day, he doesn’t touch me. As for me . . .” She gave her buffed fingernails a careful inspection. “Most of the time he’s the same old Jake, and I’m so happy to be in his company. But then I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, caught in the aftermath of a bad dream about that night and, oh, Nell, I resent him so much. I want to scream at him in those moments, to accuse and revile him. I want him to know what he’s responsible for.”

  Nell squeezed her hand in understanding, and Hattie met her friend’s gaze. “In the clear light of day, though, I know something in me would curl up and die if he learned about that night. It is so confusing, Nell—and I honestly have no idea where we stand.”

  “Have you seen Roger Lord?”

  “No, and I thank God every day that passes without doing so. But I know sooner or later I will have to face him.” She had spent a lot of time thinking up ways to handle the inevitable meeting. Since the awful night he raped her, she hadn’t left the house without the little razor-sharp dagger Mirabel gave her tucked into her petite leather handbag. She’d also armed herself with a sharp hatpin, which on the rare occasions it wasn’t used to secure an actual hat, she wove into an inconspicuous fold in her skirt.

  But this was their reunion, so Hattie determinedly shook off depressing thoughts. “I am just grateful it hasn’t happened as yet. And changing the subject, what did you think of Moses?”

  It was hard catching Nell’s gaze when she kept it locked on a flower on Hattie’s quilt she outlined with a fingertip. “He seems nice,” she said stiffly.

  Hattie sighed. The meeting between her friends had been pretty disastrous. She’d nagged Moses into accompanying them to the depot, certain once he met Nell he would love her as much as Hattie did. And Nell would love him in return.

  It hadn’t worked that way. When introduced, Moses said, “Nice to meet you,” properly enough. Except he’d all but tugged his forelock in a farm-boy-meeting-the-grand-lady-of-the-manor way. Nell already thought he’d let Hattie down, and his attitude made her poker up. So, Moses had stuffed his work-blackened hands into his trouser pockets and disassociated himself from their small gathering. The sideways look he gave Nell after helping the stationmaster with her myriad trunks had been downright snide, making her grow even more formal and self-effacing. It reminded Hattie of the night she’d first discovered how truly uncomfortable her friend was in the company of men. And she’d wanted to scream. She had finally gotten her two best friends together, and they’d acted so unacceptably stupid she had barely recognized them.

  Well, she would be darned if she pretended to either of them the other did not exist. They could just blasted well learn to get along.

  Hattie flipped onto her side and stuffed a pillow under her cheek. “Moses and I had a long talk last week,” she said with dogged persistence. “He told me the reason he wasn’t there for me when Jane-Ellen became ill. And, Nell, it was quite an . . . unexpected . . . explanation.”

  “Oh?”

  Hattie ignored the lack of encouragement in Nell’s voice. “I told you about the time down by the river before I left for school, right? The day I didn’t wear my flannel shirt over my make-do swimsuit, and Jake caught us sharing our one and only kiss?”

  Nell nodded at the bedspread, in which she was apparently greatly interested.

  The long-ago stupidity hadn’t been easy to share the first time around, and what Hattie had to share today was even more difficult. But she thought it was necessary for Nell to relinquish the notion that Moses wasn’t a good friend to Hattie. And when better than now, in the privacy of her room? “Apparently, Moses was fine with me during the days after that. But at night he began having these lurid—um—sexual dreams.” Word for word, she related her conversation with Moses, directing most of it to the bedspread, but glancing up often enough to observe Nell’s face growing pinker and pinker with every word.

  “My Lord, Hattie,” Nell said faintly when her friend finished her tale. “That was . . . He said . . . ? No.” Peering at her friend suspiciously, she perked up. “You are making this up.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You must be. Men simply do not tell women things like that.” Nell fanned her face with both hands. She felt inordinately flushed just thinking about it. Imagine that enormous man dreaming such vivid, naughty dreams, then telling their star the lurid details! She’d known the moment they were introduced he was a bold one. But this was beyond anything in Nell’s experience.

  “You don’t understand,” Hattie said earnestly. “Moses is not a man to me; he’s just . . . Moses.”

  “Not a man! Are you mad?” Aside from once saying he was quite gigantic, Hattie had never really described Moses. Nell had been unprepared and stunned by his physical presence. Even without the added burden of his obvious contempt for her, she would have found it difficult to combat all her old feelings of inadequacy.

  “Well, I know he’s been going to Mamie Parker’s fancy house since shortly after we graduated from high school. But it’s not the sort of thing we ever discussed, except for him to satisfy my curiosity about the place’s furnishings and what sort of fashions the soiled doves wore. It never occurred to me to consider what he actually did there.”

  “My goodness, Hattie, what did you feel . . . how on earth did you react when he told you he’d been having those kinds of dreams about you?”

  “I was . . . flattered. Kind of.” Then she blurted with her habitual honesty, “Oh criminy, Nell, mostly I was embarrassed. So was he. You’ve met him, so you know how fair he is. Well, he was red as the roses in Aunt Augusta’s garden the entire time. We both were. He stammered a lot and I blushed and looked at my toes like they’d sprouted diamonds. I don’t think either of us has been so uncomfortable with the other in our entire lives! It was all we could do to make occasional eye contact. He didn’t want to tell me at all but said it was the only way I would truly understand why he wasn’t there when I needed him.�
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  Nell pulled her heels onto the bed and hugged her knees to her chest, resting her chin on her kneecaps. The fabric of the comforter under them felt luxurious through her thin stockings, and she slid the balls of her feet against it. She tried not to think too closely about what she was hearing, for it made her feel—oh my goodness—rather, well, squirmy.

  “The truth is, he’s right,” Hattie continued, her head rising from her own apparent study of the bedspread. “I never held him accountable the way I did Jake, but I was awfully hurt by his defection. And I don’t believe our friendship would’ve regained its old footing if he hadn’t explained.”

  Nell tried to imagine him embarrassed and couldn’t. She climbed from the bed, swept up her shoes, and sat back down on the edge of the mattress to don them. “Does he still have those dreams?”

  “No. Mercy, what a relief, huh? Moses and I . . . Well, we’ve always shared a special friendship. But it was never that kind of a friendship. Our one venture into romance nearly ruined it entirely. So, no matter how mortifying that conversation was, I’m glad he told me what drove him away.”

  “I suppose he squires quite a few women to the local events,” Nell said casually, extending her leg and rotating her foot the better to admire her new half boot.

  Hattie sat up and admired them as well. “Those are pretty,” she said. “Is that what your mama bought you for graduation?” At Nell’s nod, she returned to the prior conversation. “I don’t think Moses is squiring anyone at the moment. At least no one he’s mentioned to me.”

  “Hmm,” Nell said. And changed the subject to their upcoming school year.

  26

  Hattie chose teaching because she wanted a measure of independence and knew there weren’t a great many options available to a woman. Given free rein, she’d choose working with the Murdock horses. But fat chance Jake would turn that over to her, even if the herd had been substantially reduced these past few years. Teaching struck her as the next best thing. She found the process of learning exciting, and generating a thirst for new ideas in others was more appealing than the prospect of being a salesgirl, librarian, or typist.

  She was nevertheless apprehensive about her ability to perform her job satisfactorily. At night during the week before the start of the new school year, she lay wide awake in bed, fretting. Was she prepared? She was going to have fourteen students. What if she failed to command their respect or control her class?

  The school had three classes. Nell got the younger children, whose ages ranged from six to nine; Hattie had the ten- to thirteen-year-olds; and Jack Dalton was assigned the older students since he had the seniority, experience, and additional education required to teach high school.

  The Friday before school opened, the teachers, along with Mirabel; Jack Dalton’s doting landlady, Mrs. Wilson; and a ranch hand Jake sent over, moved the desks out into the yard and cleaned the three-room schoolhouse top to bottom. They knocked down spiderwebs, swept and scrubbed floors, whitewashed the walls, washed windows, blacked the potbellied Wetter’s Comfort stoves, cleaned blackboards, and pounded erasers free of chalk dust. Mirabel left early to prepare dinner, and by the time Hattie and Nell trudged for home, they were exhausted but pleased with the results. Their sparkling classrooms were ready for occupation.

  The big barn doors of Armstrong’s Livery stood open as they passed by, and on impulse, Hattie grabbed Nell’s arm to pull her to a halt. “Let’s say hello to Moses,” she suggested.

  Nell was horrified at the prospect and glanced down at her grubby apparel. She wore her oldest dress, and her arms, hands, and probably face as well were smudged with dirt. Half her hair had slid out of its neat pompadour. But Hattie hadn’t waited for an answer and was across the courtyard by the time Nell gathered her wits about her.

  Hattie turned at the big double doors. “Come on!” With a sigh, Nell grudgingly followed.

  They found Moses at the forge, pounding out a long piece of iron with a glowing red end. The heat was overwhelming and he’d removed his shirt, wearing only a leather apron to protect his chest from flying sparks. Sweat plastered his hair to his head and trickled down his sides, back, and chest. His forearms above his grimy leather gloves were blackened with soot, and his muscles flexed and slid smoothly with every movement beneath the oiled sheen of his skin. Nell stared in fascination while he was still unaware of their presence. Lord above. She had never seen such a virile man.

  Her inspection was cut short when he set aside his mallet and shifted the iron from the anvil into a bucket of water by his side. Hattie moved forward. “Hey,” she said.

  Moses’ head swung around, a white smile splitting his face. “Hiya, Hat.” His smile grew wider yet when he saw her disheveled appearance. “What in tarnation y’been doing—cleaning somebody’s chimney?” Then he spotted Nell in the shadows behind her, and his smile dimmed as he suddenly became aware of his filthy appearance. He reached up and tugged a lock of his hair, inclining his head. “Afternoon, Miss Nell.”

  “Moses,” she said coolly, stepping forward with her regal posture, her chin elevated.

  “We spent the entire day being scullery maids,” Hattie explained. “We’ve been preparing our classrooms, and, oh my, do they shine!”

  Moses smiled at her with affection but shuttered his gaze into something more mocking when he turned to Nell. Looking her over from her shining black topknot, sitting askew on the crown of her head, to the scuffed toes of her shoes, he paused deliberately at every smudge in between. Hoping to hell it would erase this god-awful yearning in his gut. “It’s a right proper look for you, Miss Nell. Scullery work suits you.”

  Nell was tired to begin with and uncomfortable in his presence. It was overheated and stuffy in this corner of the livery and smelled of overworked man and horse. The sight of so much unclad muscle and skin was unnerving, and to her abject horror, tears rose in her eyes. Blinking rapidly, she turned without a word and left the livery.

  Moses felt sick at the sight of her tears. He turned from watching her retreating ramrod-straight back and looked straight into Hattie’s contemptuous eyes.

  “My God,” she said softly. “It’s one thing if you simply don’t like her. I suppose I can learn to live with that. But I have never known you to be deliberately nasty.”

  He shrugged his big shoulders uneasily. “No one in their right mind would ever believe that girl was designed for scullery work. Even in dirt and rags, she looks like some princess come to inspect the stable boy’s work. Can’t she take a joke?”

  “Oh, were you joking? Forgive me, I guess I missed the punch line.” She slugged him in the arm. “You listen to me, Moses Marks, and pay attention because I’m only going to say this once. Nell isn’t some rich society woman working for a lark, and she’s not looking down her pretty, patrician nose at you, so you can just save your ‘Aw, shucks, I’m nothing but a country rhubarb’ routine for someone who actually deserves it. It’s not only not funny, it’s cruel. She doesn’t have two pennies to rub together and she’s shy around men. It took me a long time to convince her just because she’s inordinately tall for a woman, it doesn’t mean she’s unattractive.”

  Moses looked at her incredulously and Hattie said, “That’s what she used to think, you know—at least around men. I’m surprised at you. You have been too good a friend to me for too many years to make me believe you made a value judgment based on her looks. If that was the case, why didn’t you run screaming from me when the entire town condemned me as a loose young woman of easy virtue? After all, they formed their theory based on the way I looked.”

  “I knew you,” he muttered.

  “Well, heaven forbid you should get to know Nell. If you did, you just might have to justify it to yourself when you let loose that mean streak. If you’re bound and determined to be a bully, Moses, then go pick on someone your own size. Leave my friend alone.” She turned on her heel and strode for
the door.

  “Hattie.”

  She halted at the sound of his voice but didn’t turn to look at him. “What?”

  He stared at her rigid back as she stood in the open doorway, her hair beneath its coating of dust blazing in a shaft of sunlight. He admired her defense of Nell and was shamed by it. She had more guts than ten men put together. She’d stood up to him the way he should have stood up to others on a number of occasions when it had been Hattie under attack. “You’re the best of friends,” he said softly. “And I’m sorry, girl.”

  “Good—but don’t tell me.” Glancing over her shoulder, she met his contrite gaze with a steely one of her own. “Tell Nell.”

  27

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1908

  Hattie sat behind her desk, watching her students as they filed through the doorway. Her nervousness began to melt away as she observed them. Not much had changed, apparently, since she was a student here.

  The children from Mattawa’s first families were easily identifiable by their fashionable clothing. The rest of her students could be classified into one of two groups: those from town and those from the outlying ranches and farms. All were scrubbed clean, but the farm kids tended to wear clothing that had seen a little more service than their town-bred counterparts, and their complexions were ruddier from a life spent more outside than in. In the few moments before the bell rang, conversations buzzed, two farm boys horsed around in the back of the room, and several girls sat with their heads together, whispering and occasionally giggling.

  Out in the schoolyard the bell rang. Hattie rose from her chair and crossed the room to close the door. Hearing footsteps thundering down the hall, she paused and was nearly bowled over when a large boy threw his shoulder against the closing door and barged into the room.

  “Sorry, miss,” he said, his tone both belligerent and contrite.