Pocketful of Pearls (11 page)

He sat in his usual chair. She sank into a chair two places down, and balled the dust cloth between her hands.

“So. You’ll be on your own, will you?”

“Just for a few weeks. Until Mom is able to come home.”

“What will you do?”

She did not lift her eyes. What did he mean? “What I always do. Look after the animals. Do the books. Keep the house ready
in case it’s needed for the Lord’s work.”

“I’m glad you’re still thinking about that. I’ve wondered at the depth of your willingness to serve, lately.”

Oh, how she hated him. “I’m always willing to serve . . . God,” she managed.

“Are you? Even now?”

Now? Oh, no. No. Be wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove.
“Yes, now, except that I’m expecting Mr. Nicholas any minute. I’m supposed to go over the paperwork for the grazing rights
with him.”

“Mr. Nicholas.” Phinehas’s tone was thoughtful. “It looks bad, you know, Dinah.”

“What does?” She lifted her eyes.

“You alone, with only the hired man for company. Sleeping here.”

“He sleeps in the barn. And he’s no threat to anyone.”

“I wasn’t thinking he would be a threat to you. Quite the opposite.”

She blinked at him for a moment, trying to understand what he was getting at.

“What do you think God’s people would think of you and Mr. Nicholas all alone out here?”

“I expect they would think he’s our hired man.”

Phinehas shook his head in sorrow. “We hope that God’s people would think the best of each other. But there are always the
cynical few, like the prophet Jeremiah, who see that the human heart is deceitful above all things. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Most people in Hamilton Falls think well of me,” Dinah choked.

“I would hope so. But we don’t want to give them any reason to do otherwise, do we?”

“No.” He was going to override her choice to hire Matthew, to take it away just as her father had taken away her choices and
overridden her decisions all her life. The hatred was a stone under her ribs, pulling her chest toward the table.

“Your aunt and uncle—who mean well, I know—have acted against my counsel. I’m going to think and pray on this matter. There
must be a solution that will enable you to serve your God and King without stirring up any whispers among the worthy people
here.”

She should have known God didn’t really have his back turned. He’d just been waiting for her to feel a little bit secure,
a little bit hopeful, and then he would gleefully whip the rug out from under her feet. The landing was going to hurt. She
knew it.

“Good-bye, Dinah.” Phinehas got up and reached for her concealed hands, sliding his under the rim of the table and gripping
her inner thigh. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

Her stomach turned over with a sickening thud, and he released her. She stood in the doorway and waved as he drove off, not
because she wanted to, but because she had always done so and it would look odd if she didn’t.

Then she snatched her jacket off its hook by the back door and pushed past a surprised Matthew, who was coming up the steps
for his lesson in leases.

“Dinah? What—”

She ignored him and took off for the back side of the barn at a dead run.

SHE HAD ALREADY
disposed of her breakfast by the time Matthew caught up with her. After burying the contents of the white plastic bucket,
she stood the shovel against the wood rail of the composting box and straightened.

“What did he say to you?” Matthew felt slightly out of breath; he had a long way to go before he was as fit as she believed
he was.

“Who?” Dinah set the bucket down and went around the side of the barn to the chicken pen. Matthew followed her.

“Don’t play games. The only person, it seems, that can make you upchuck a perfectly decent breakfast.”

“I told you before, it’s none of your business.”

“Dinah, can’t you see I’m trying to help?”

She threw a handful of what looked like dried corn on the ground so viciously it bounced, and the chickens, who had been dancing
around her with eagerness, scattered.

“Nobody can help. The only thing you can do is the work I hired you to do. My life is my business.”

Matthew took a firm hold on his patience. Her rage was probably all she had to hang on to, the only thing that kept her standing.
She couldn’t help but use it as a weapon against people like him, who insisted on butting in and mouthing platitudes.

But something in her eyes, remnants of the despair he’d seen at the river, made him try again.

“I saw him put his suitcase in the car. How long before he comes back?”

She gathered her skirts behind her knees to keep them out of the dirt and knelt to apologize to the chickens. “Sorry, babies.
It’s not your fault. It’s mine . . . I don’t know. He’s cooking up some scheme so he can stay here, but I just don’t know
what it is.”

“Would it help if I were in the house? Rather like a chaperone?”

A dry glance told him what she thought of that idea. “If my parents and relatives sleeping down the hall don’t stop him, how
do you think you can?”

“I don’t know. I could lie across your threshold with a rifle.”

“Right. And add back pain and concealed weapons to your list of problems.”

“I assume that if you could tell him to stop, you would have done so long ago. What sort of blackmail is he using on you?”

She sighed and stopped fussing with the birds. “Matthew, it’s not your problem.”

“You have to talk about it with someone, and I don’t see your relatives stepping up.”

“I don’t have to talk about it at all.”

“If you don’t want me, there’s One you could talk things over with.”

“Who? A psychiatrist?”

He overlooked her bitterness and spoke gently. “I was thinking more of God.”

For one dreadful moment he thought he had made her cry. She covered her mouth with one hand and whooped, and then he realized
with a shock of humiliation that she was laughing. Not nice laughter, either. Derisive, mocking laughter. Directed at him,
and worse, at his suggestion.

“Matthew,” she said, when she’d finally regained control, “if you can’t come up with something more helpful than that, you’d
better stop trying.”

He mustered his dignity, willing the burning blood out of his face. “You don’t believe God can help you?”

That produced a roll of the eyes and another laugh. “Not likely, when he’s the one who’s been doing this to me. It’s all one—Phinehas,
God, my father. The trinity of misery. The only thing prayer would do is bring me back to God’s attention, and goodness knows
I’ve had enough of that. Attention from him is what makes me glad I’ve got the river.”

Matthew tried to focus his reeling thoughts into words that might have meaning for someone who believed the spirit of love
was an angry old man out to get her. “He loves you, Dinah. He gave the one thing he loves most so that you could have life.”

She waved that away. “I gave the one thing I loved the most, too, so Phinehas could have dinner.”

“But your sacrifice didn’t cover Phinehas with grace and make it possible for him to look into the Father’s face without sin.”

“Oh, great,” she said. “Is that what I have to look forward to? Eternity with Phinehas? But I suppose there he won’t have
to worry about sneaking around. Having girls at his disposal will be his reward. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take my chances
with the river.”

Her dependence on suicide as a source of comfort frightened him more than anything else. “Please don’t talk like that. The
God I believe in doesn’t condone what Phinehas is doing.”

“He’s sure allowing it, though, isn’t he? Whether he’s your God or mine, the result is the same.”

Pain and fear and self-loathing. Those were the results of such belief. He watched her walk away and felt the grief well up
in him again.

“Please help her to see you, Father,” he murmured. “Use me in whatever way you need to bring that about. And Father? If it’s
possible, do it before she manages to get away from me and find her way back to the river.”

HE MIGHT BE
nosy and naïve, but at least he was smart. Matthew comprehended the ins and outs of grazing rights and property lines and
cattle shipments after one explanation and recited how many of the neighboring ranchers’ animals they grazed in each pasture
in a way that told Dinah he probably had photographic memory, too.

He was smart in another way—or maybe it was just a healthy sense of self-preservation. After his ridiculous comments out at
the compost heap, he left the subject of Phinehas severely alone and spared her any more of his philosophy about the love
of God.

It seemed strange to have no one in the house. Well, no one besides Matthew. Even when he was there, he was so quiet she sometimes
forgot about him.

Later that evening, she broiled pork chops for supper and set the platter on the kitchen table.

“I’ll say grace, if you like.” He sounded a little diffident, as if he thought she’d laugh at him again. She was sorry she’d
laughed. She hadn’t meant to embarrass him, but if the man insisted on saying stupid things, he should expect that kind of
reaction.

“You say grace before your meals?”

“Don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course, but . . .”

“But what?”

But the prayers of worldly people don’t even reach the ceiling.
That was what she’d always been taught. Matthew was worldly, true, and Phinehas was chosen of God, but there was a great
gulf fixed between the way Phinehas behaved and the way Matthew did.

“Nothing. Go ahead.”

She bowed her head and at the end of his simple, heartfelt grace—the man still regarded food as if it were the Holy Grail—she
even said “Amen.”

Which was a baby step away from collusion with the world, but still . . .

Dinah passed him the Brussels sprouts. “You have a good memory for facts and figures.”

“I should do.” He took exactly half of them and passed the pot back to her. “I was a teacher.”

“A teacher? What grade?”

“University. Butter?”

“Thank you.” He taught university. The sum total of her ambition in life was to have her own apartment and finish a two-year
degree, and he had run away from independence and a university career. Was the man demented?

“What subject?”

“English literature.”

“What, like poetry and such?”

“Yes. My dissertation was ‘The Embodiment of Love: The Religious in Love Poetry of the Seventeenth Century.’”

“My goodness.” There was love poetry in the seventeenth century? The only love poem she knew was the Song of Solomon, and
she loathed every word of it. If she could, she would tape over the edges of those pages in her Bible, so it would never open
there again.

“What about you? Where did you go to school?”

Now it was her turn to blush. “Hamilton High.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her and mashed butter into his potatoes with vigor. “You haven’t gone on?”

It was very important that she cut her chop into half-inch pieces. “No. There’s no point.”

“There’s always a point to a good education.”

“Not if I’m just going to stay here.”

“Why should you just stay here? Why couldn’t you move to Spokane or Seattle and go to college if you wanted?”

“And who would look after my mother and the ranch?”

“You mentioned your aunt and uncle would look after her till she recovered. And she’s not an old woman. She can’t be much
over fifty. She has a long way to go before she becomes an invalid.”

It was hopeless to explain to a man who tossed over careers as easily as she tossed out compost that Elsie wasn’t capable
of looking after herself. Her father had done it, her husband had done it, and now it fell to Dinah to do it.

“If my mother were left to run the ranch, every animal would wander away over the mountains, never to be seen again. My chickens
would die of neglect, and the house would fall down around her.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see. I suppose it’s rather late to teach her some life skills, isn’t it?”