Prairie Rose (32 page)

“Good thing that feller’s been learnin’ how to talk,” Bridger said. “It ain’t halfway hard to understand him now.”

“Mr. Rustemeyer is a good man,” Caitrin put in. She was sliding the letters into the cabinet of wooden mail slots she had talked Mr. Bridger into hauling all the way from Topeka for the mercantile. “He’s a very hard worker.”

Rosie chuckled. “I used to think that was enough in a man.”

“Ain’t a hardworkin’ man good enough for you women?” Bridger asked. “Surely you don’t figure to get good looks, a charmin’ personality, manners, education, and all that out of a prairie farmer, do you? ’Cause if you do, you’re gonna be in for a long wait. Here’s your letter, Miss Mills. Looks like it come all the way from Kansas City.”

Rosie held her breath as she took the letter. She recognized the handwriting at once. “Mrs. Jameson,” she whispered. She tore open the envelope, and a scrap of paper that had been tucked inside fluttered to the floor. Scanning the letter, she absorbed the information.

“What is it?” Caitrin asked.

Rosie lifted her head. “I’ve been offered a position at the Christian Home for Orphans and Foundlings—where I grew up. The director writes that she has purchased a one-way coach ticket to Kansas City at great expense. I’m to be the head cook and earn three dollars a week plus room and board.”

“Three dollars a week?” Caitrin exclaimed, sweeping the stagecoach ticket from the floor. “Why, that’s highway robbery, so it is! You can make twice that in an hour with your bridge tolls. And the mercantile—”

“You don’t understand, Caitie,” Rosie said, taking the ticket. “They need me at the Home. They need what I have to give. Money is not, and never has been, the reason I work. I want to do God’s will. I want to go where I can be most useful. And the children need me, Caitie, truly they do.”

“
We
need you!” Caitie said. “We all do. Don’t we, Mr. Bridger?”

“Hate to lose you, Miss Mills,” Bridger said. “You sure have brightened up the prairie since you came along. Well, take a gander at this letter. Maybe it’ll change your mind. Looks like it went all the way from here to Topeka and back again. That figures. It’s from that German feller. Rustemeyer.”

“From Rolf?” Rosie took the note and scanned it silently. English and German words were jumbled together, but the meaning was perfectly clear.

“Well, what does he write?” Caitie asked. Her green eyes flashed. “He doesn’t want you to cook something for him, does he? The man eats like a horse, so he does.”

Rosie looked again at the letter—so well-meaning and earnest, just like Rolf. These words would demand an answer. Confusion overwhelmed her, and in the end she could only chuckle and shake her head. “As a matter of fact, he does want me to cook for him—and wash his clothes, tend his garden, and have his babies. It’s a formal proposal of marriage, Caitie.”

“To that great
glunter
? Well, well, well. So you
are
needed out here after all.”

“And in Kansas City, too. As a cook in both places.” Dismay mingled with humor at the situation into which she had stumbled. “That skill seems to have emerged as my greatest offering to the world.”

“What are you going to do, Rosie? Will you go and look after the fatherless children? Or will you marry that big hungry galoot? Or will you let me organize the harvest feast for you and Seth Hunter?”

Rosie slipped the letters into the pocket of her apron. “You can plan the feast, Caitrin,” she said. “What I’m going to do is pray. In two weeks, I’m sure I’ll have my answer.”

CHAPTER 17

A
FTER his return from Topeka, Seth had made up his mind to focus on his farming. His fields demanded his constant attention. And farming was a good way for him to spend time with Chipper. In the two months since their trip, the little boy had become his shadow. They plowed together, planted together, even hoed side by side down the crop rows. With three good rains and plenty of sunshine, it was beginning to look like Rosie had chosen a good name for the place. “Hope” was thriving.

But in his heart, Seth felt the coming of winter. Dormancy. The end of growing things. The long silences. The cold.

Would Rosie go away? Would she marry Rolf Rustemeyer? As Seth knelt to check his turnip crop, he turned the situation over in his mind. Rolf had insisted that Rosie was going to become his wife. Though Seth had doubted the German at first, he now felt sure it must be true. One day he had spotted a scrap of paper lying below the hook where Rosie hung her apron. As he picked it up, his eyes fell across the message. A marriage proposal from Rustemeyer. Had Rosie answered? Why not? She had nothing to turn to but a life in the orphanage where she’d grown up. She deserved more than that.

Seth longed to give Rosie a new life. A better life. Did he dare? He ran his fingers over the bright green leaves of his turnips. What kind of a future could he offer Rosie? Not much better than what she would have at the orphanage. Hard work. Children to mind. Clothes to wash. Meals to cook. Only real difference was that she’d have a house to call her own.

He looked up at the little soddy he had built. Not much to speak of there. A house made of dirt. No glass in the windows. Not even a real wood floor to sweep. When winter came, the place would be snug and warm enough. But there would be no idle pleasures— no trips to church or visits to a row of bright shops. Nothing but sitting by the woodstove and quilting or darning socks.

“Whatcha think of them turnips, Papa?” Chipper asked. “You been studyin’ long an’ hard over ’em.”

Seth looked up at his son and realized the boy had been examining the crop as diligently as his father had been lost in thought. “I reckon we’ll be pulling these turnips in a couple of weeks, Chipper. What do you think?”

“I think so, too. I bet Rosie’ll put ’em into a big stew for us.” He sobered for a moment. “A long time ago, Rosie told me she’d be goin’ away in the fall. Is that true, Papa?”

“I don’t know, Son. There’s not much to hold her here.”

“There’s me!”

“Yep, there’s you. Rosie loves you an awful lot. But she’s got to think about the rest of her life. She might not want to call a prairie soddy home, you know.”

“I reckon she wants a family. And out here she gots me. She gots you, too, Papa.”

Seth scratched the back of his neck. “I doubt I’m much of a catch, Chipper. I don’t have a barrel of money to offer, or a big fancy house, or a carriage and team. Truth is, I’m about as poor as the dirt this turnip’s growing in. So if Rosie had her druthers, I kind of doubt I’d be her first choice.”

He stood and slapped his hands on his thighs to brush off the dust. As he and Chipper started toward the soddy, Seth glanced in the direction of the barn. Silhouetted by the setting sun, Rosie stood on tiptoe taking laundry off the line. Her slender hand reached for the pegs, plucking them one by one and dropping them into her apron. Across the field, Seth could hear her humming a hymn—something she did all day, every day. He tried to remember how it had been around his place before Rosie. Mighty silent, he recollected.

Lord
, he breathed, lifting a prayer as he had seen Rosie do so many times when she thought he wasn’t looking.
Lord, I’ve been awful angry with you. The grasshoppers and Cornwall and all. But I reckon Rosie was right when she said love took faith. Faith in you. Lord … I love that woman. I think … No, I know I love her enough to take the risk that I might lose her one day the way I lost Mary. But, Lord, dare I ask Rosie to take on this hardscrabble life? Show me. Somehow teach my heart the truth. Would Rosie want to mother a child who’s not her own son? Could she love a man who is secondhand goods? And the house? Lord, could she ever come to feel that a dark, dusty, cramped soddy was a home? Her home?

Seth sighed deeply and lifted his head. As he studied the little house he had built, he spotted something he had never noticed. Outlined by the pink sky of sunset, a large cluster of bright purple flowers nodded in the evening breeze—flowers growing on the soddy roof.

“What’s that up there, Chipper?” he asked. “Up on the roof. Looks like some kind of weeds or something.”

“It’s purple coneflowers,” Chipper said. “Don’tcha remember? You gave Rosie a seed head on our trip out to the prairie. She put it in her treasure bag that she wears around her neck. Back in the spring, she planted the seeds on the soddy roof.”

“On the roof?” Seth gazed in amazement at the simple, natural beauty of the dancing purple wildflowers. “Why did she plant them on the roof?”

“So the soddy wouldn’t be a house anymore.” His voice took on a note of disgust. “Don’tcha know
anything
about Rosie, Papa?”

“Maybe not.”

“She says you got to have flowers,” Chipper said. “Rosie says flowers make a house into a home. That’s why she planted them, Papa. ’Cause now we don’t just live in a house anymore. We live in a home.”

“Exquisite!” Caitrin Murphy crossed her arms and stepped back to admire her latest transformation. “Miss Rose Mills, you are a true beauty!”

“That you are, Rosie!” Little Erinn O’Toole fingered the ruffles on the deep claret-colored gown her Aunt Caitie had loaned away for the evening. “You look like a fairy princess.”

“Snow White,” four-year-old Colleen announced. “Rosie looks like Snow White.”

“Where are the gloves?” Sheena asked. “Cait, you must let Rosie wear your gloves. The white kid ones with all the buttons. Where are they?”

Rosie stood in front of the stove in Sheena’s house and stared down at the rippling, purple-red silk gown. Her waist, cinched tightly with a borrowed corset, curved inward and then out into the billow of a great hooped petticoat. She took a step forward. The skirt bobbed and swung. Beautiful! Oh, it was beautiful!

“Now the garnets,” Caitie said, snapping her fingers. “Erinn, pass me the garnet necklace.”

Rosie gasped as the chilled metal slipped around her throat. A narrow cascade of deep red garnets dripped down her bare skin to the delicate point of her bodice neckline. She had barely accepted the reality of wearing her first necklace ever, when Caitrin began screwing a pair of dangling earrings onto Rosie’s lobes. Earrings! What would Mrs. Jameson say to such luxury? Such extravagance!

“Now my shawl,” Caitie said. “The black one. Not that. The one with the fringe, Erinn dear.”

Caitrin draped the soft wool shawl around Rosie’s shoulders and gave a gentle squeeze. “There you are. Perfect. If only we had a looking glass, you would see you’re a very queen tonight. Sure, your hair will be enough to send poor Mr. Hunter straight over the brink.”

“You look like Snow White,” Colleen said again.

“I think she looks like Cinderella,” Erinn said.

“How do you feel?” Caitrin turned Rosie around and around on the packed dirt floor of the O’Toole soddy. “Do you feel like a queen?”

Rosie nodded—but not too hard. She was afraid her hair might fall down. Caitie had done it all up in loops and braids and curls. Then she had piled it so high and stuck it with so many combs and jewels and
shingerleens
that Rosie feared the slightest breeze would send the creation crashing like a great Christmas tree, scattering ornaments left and right. She wove her gloved fingers together. “I feel very … very wonderful.”

“And you look it!” Caitrin clapped her hands together. “Now for the grandest surprise of all. A gift to you, Rosie. Can you guess who sent it? Seth! It’s from Seth himself, so it is. He said, ‘Give this to Rosie when she’s getting ready for the dance. I think she’ll like it.’”

“Seth said that?”

“Every word of it.” Caitrin set a small flat box on the bed and gave Rosie a quick kiss. “We won’t stay to see you open it. Sure, the rest of us must hurry over to the mercantile and join the guests. Rosie, you’re to make your entrance at seven o’clock exactly. Not a second sooner. Erinn, the moment she walks through the door, you’re to gasp loudly, so you are. Do you remember how we practiced?”

Erinn let out a loud gasp. “How’s that?”

“Perfect. And, Colleen, what are you to say?”

“I’m to say, ‘Look at Rosie! She’s magni … si . . fi . . shent. Magnishifent.’”

“
Magnificent
. Oh, just say she’s lovely.” Caitrin smoothed out the flounces on her own gown of deep blue. “Come along then, everyone. Rosie, we’ll leave you here. Be sure to study the time. Don’t be a moment late. Seven o’clock!”

Rosie stood, half-afraid to move, as the O’Toole women traipsed out of the house toward the bridge. She gingerly took a single step toward the fireplace. The clock on the mantel read six thirty. Half an hour to wait. She eyed the package on the bed. But she couldn’t sit down to open it. If she did, how would she manage to keep from flipping the hoop straight up to the ceiling?

Rosie bent over carefully and picked up the flat box tied with a pink ribbon. For two weeks, she had watched the world turn upside down around her. Caitrin and Sheena—and even Seth himself—had slowly altered the character of the barn. While the two women were busy filling the front with lanterns and tables and paper decorations sent in the mail from Topeka, Seth was piling the back with radishes, lettuce, collards, cauliflower, carrots, and cabbages. His biggest cash crop would be the beets he was just beginning to harvest, and Rosie knew he had great hopes for them.