Smoke River Bride (4 page)

T
he tiny pantry off the kitchen held a barrel of flour, sacks of sugar, rice, dried beans and potatoes, and a hanging slab of moldy-looking bacon. No carrots or peas or turnips or herbs. No fresh fruit, either—only a lone tin of peaches and a bushel basket half full of apples. What could she make out of such a conglomeration?

Hours later, footsteps boomed across the front porch and Thad walked in with Teddy at his heels. At the stove, Leah froze with her back to them.

“Somethin’ sure smells funny, Pa.”

“Looks different, too, son. Kinda…shiny.”

Teddy clambered up the ladder to the loft and an instant later let out a squawk like an
enraged rooster. “My bed’s all diff’rent! And my rocks—somebody’s been messing with my rocks!”

His head appeared over the railing. “She did it! I hate her!”

Thad ignored his son and gazed around the cabin. Clean windows. Scrubbed floor. No dishes in the sink. Looked as if a cyclone had blown through the place. He began to frown before Teddy finished yelling. He liked what Leah had done. But for some reason deep inside he didn’t
want
to like it. It seemed disloyal to Hattie.

But Hattie is gone
. And Leah was here. He could hardly believe Leah was his wife now, and he had to admit his reaction to the state of his house had nothing to do with Hattie. He couldn’t bear to think about it too closely.

The cyclone was standing at the stove. Apparently she was a fastidious housekeeper, and of course his son wouldn’t appreciate that. Thad wondered why
he
didn’t appreciate it.

The spit and polish this half-Chinese girl had shown in just a few hours reminded him not so much of Hattie as his Scots mother. She was long dead now, as was his father. That was one reason Thad had come to America—the Scots were starving. He had
just passed his twelfth birthday and both his parents were gone.

Hattie, he recalled, had not been a particularly careful housekeeper, but she had been his lifelong companion. And because he had loved her, he had forgiven her any domestic shortcomings.

But seeing another woman in her place sent a blade through his gut. It wasn’t that he regretted marrying Leah—just that he regretted losing Hattie.

Teddy clattered down the ladder and slouched toward the kitchen table. “I spose you want me to set out the plates,” he grumbled.

Leah turned to look at him. “Yes, thank you, Teddy. That would be nice.”

“Don’t have enough chairs, Pa. Guess she’ll have to sit on that old nail keg, huh?”

Thad met Leah’s questioning eyes and to his relief saw that she was amused, not angry. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Teddy’s suggestion of the nail keg even brought a chuckle to his own throat.

“Well, son, you have two choices. Either you cobble up an extra chair or you eat your dinner standing up. Leah and I are sitting at the table.”

“Aw, Pa.”

“Don’t ‘Aw, Pa’ me, Teddy. Take it or leave it. I’d tan your hide good if it wasn’t our wedding day.”

Teddy said nothing, but Thad noted that he dutifully laid three plates on the table and then disappeared.

“Hunting up a chair, I’d guess,” he murmured at Leah’s back. She’d found one of Hattie’s aprons and tied it twice around her waist in an oversize, floppy bow. His heart gave an odd lurch at the sight. Dammit, he remembered that apron. Oh, God, he wished it was Hattie there at the stove.

But it wasn’t Hattie, it was Leah. His new wife. Dammit, he could hardly bring himself to say the word. He focused on her slim figure and felt a flicker of warmth. He hadn’t necessarily expected to
like
his mail-order bride and now the woman was his wife.

He didn’t have to like her, he told himself; all he had to do was get along with her.

The front door banged open and in stomped Teddy, dragging a dust-coated, straightbacked wooden chair. “Found it in the barn,” he muttered.

Thad squeezed his thin shoulder. “Well done, Teddy.”

“I hope it breaks when she sits on it!”

Thad bent and tipped his son’s chin up with his forefinger. “No, you don’t, Teddy. Things are plenty difficult for all of us right now, so you’ll hold your tongue. From now on, if you want to say anything about my wife, you say it directly to Leah, understand?”

“Okay.” Teddy sucked in a breath and sent a venomous look at her back. “I don’t like you, Leah.”

Thad grabbed the boy by his shirt collar, then heard Leah’s calm voice offer a retort he could not have predicted with a crystal ball.

“I do not like you either, Teddy.”

The boy’s mouth dropped open. “Huh? How come?”

“Because,” Leah said, turning to face him, “the things you say hurt my feelings.”

Thad blinked, then caught Leah’s steady gaze. He raised his eyebrows and gave his new wife as much of a smile as he could muster.

In an agony of unease, Leah watched Thad and Teddy seat themselves at the wooden kitchen table. She poured Teddy a glass of fresh milk from the pail Thad had brought in, then filled Thad’s china cup with coffee that suddenly looked too black and too thick. Thad
reached his spoon to the milk glass, dipped some out and dribbled it into the cup. Now it looked like water from a mud puddle.

Teddy poked his fork at his father’s cup. “That sure looks awful.”

Leah’s face grew hot. “I have never made coffee before,” she confessed. “In China we drink tea.”

Hiding her face, she gathered up the three plates and whisked them over to the stove, where the skillet rested with her steaming dinner dish. There was no wok, so she had used the iron frying pan to cook in. She scooped a large dollop of the mixture onto each plate.

She placed Teddy’s dinner before him. The boy wrinkled his nose. “What’s that stuff?”

“That is called
chow fun
. It means ‘vegetables with noodles.’ In China, we make it with chicken.”

“Eww,” Teddy muttered.

Leah tried to see the dish through the eyes of a young American boy: a pile of thinly shaved potatoes covered with fried onions and topped with crumbled bacon. Of course, some ingredients were missing—not just chicken, but the noodles, crisp green peapods and a
dribble of plum sauce. In China, the dish was special; here in Oregon it was obviously not.

Teddy dropped his fork and laid his forehead on the table next to his plate. “I can’t eat it, Pa.”

“Nobody’s pushing you, son.” Thad jammed his own fork into the mound on his plate and purposefully shoved a bite into his mouth. The apprehensive look on his face faded to surprise.

“Not bad,” he said. “Pretty good, in fact.” He gobbled another bite, then another. Leah ate quietly beside him, noting that he took only one tiny sip of the coffee she had made. Her throat tightened.

For dessert she had baked a traditional Chinese tart made of layered apple slices, but now she hesitated to present it. She would never understand American cooking. She feared she would never fit into American life no matter what she learned to cook. Finally she gathered up her courage, set the tart in front of Thad and handed him a knife to slice it into wedges.

The tart met with a broad grin from Thad and a glimmer of interest from Teddy. At least he tasted a bite. Then, without a word, he wolfed down his portion of the intricately
assembled creation and held out his plate for another piece.

“Good!” Thad pronounced. Teddy said nothing, just sat staring at the empty tart pan. “Mama used that pan to flour the chicken before she fried it.”

“Oh? What does ‘flour the chicken’ mean?”

Teddy smirked. “You don’t know nuthin’, do ya? You take a chicken leg and roll it around till it’s all floury and then you fry it.”

“Could you show me?”

“Uh, I guess so, if I—I have to,” the boy stammered. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Monday, son. Don’t forget school.”

Leah looked up. “I would like to walk to school with you tomorrow, Teddy.”

“What for? You need to learn somethin’?”

“Oh, yes. There is much for me to learn about life in America. But that is not what I meant.”

“Miz Johnson doesn’t teach that stuff, ’cuz we already know it,” Teddy snapped.

“Teddy,” Thad said in a warning voice.

“I wish to meet your teacher, Teddy.”

“Leah,” Thad warned, “the schoolhouse is a three-mile walk.”

“An’ if it snows, Pa takes me on his horse. I bet you can’t even ride a horse.”

“No, I cannot. But I am used to walking. My father’s school was two miles from our house, and I walked there every day, even in the snow.”

“That was dumb,” Teddy muttered.

Thad made a move toward his son, but Leah laid her hand on his arm.

“My father did not own a horse,” she said. To avoid explaining, she cleared the table, poured Thad’s coffee into the slop bucket and washed the dishes in water she’d left heating on the stove. Her anxiety mounted with every plate she dried. She knew he had not wanted to marry her; what would he expect of her? Would he want to sleep with her? And…perhaps more?

Thad seemed to be a reasonable, sensible man. And he’d had a wife before, so he knew…what to do in bed. But she most certainly did not.

A cup slipped from her shaking fingers and shattered against the floor. Before she could reach for the broom to sweep it up, Thad’s hand closed over her shoulder.

“You’re wondering about tonight,” he observed in a low voice. He turned to snag the
broom. “I’m wondering, too. We’re husband and wife now.”

“Yes,” Leah murmured. “We are.”

Thad cleared his throat. “But I don’t really feel married, so maybe I should still sleep in the loft.”

Leah met his steady gaze and her stomach flipped. He had offered marriage to give her a respectable way of escaping what was inevitable in San Francisco. He could never know how desperately she needed the safe haven he offered. If she had stayed in the city, Madam Tang would have quickly auctioned off her virginity to the highest bidder.

This was Thad’s house. Thad’s bedroom. She could not usurp it.

“I think perhaps we could share your bedroom.”

He said nothing, just swept up the pieces of china and dumped them into the trash box next to the stove. Then he straightened to face her, and swallowed hard.

“You go on to bed, Leah. I’ll be along in a while, after I have a talk with my son.”

She lifted the broom out of his grasp. “Please do not. Have a talk, I mean. It will make him feel even more resentful. I will handle Teddy in my own way.”

At that, Thad propped both hands on his hips and stared at her. “I keep being surprised by you, Leah. You’re turning out to be some woman!”

“What does that mean, ‘some woman’?”

To her astonishment, Thad’s cheeks turned pink. “It means you are unusual. Not like other women.”

She hesitated. “Is it…is it because I am Chinese?”

“Oh, hell no, Leah. That doesn’t much matter to me.” He reached out and gently squeezed her narrow shoulders while she stood before him, the broom still clutched in her fingers. Moisture burned at the back of her eyes.

“It will be all right, I swear.” He lifted the broom out of her hands, turned her toward the bedroom and gave her a little nudge. “Go along to bed now.”

She moved away quickly so he would not see her tears.

For more than an hour she lay in the big double bed and, despite the flutter in her stomach, her eyelids kept drifting closed. Thad did not come. The moon rose, sending a cold silvery light through the single bedroom window, and still Thad did not come.

Had he changed his mind and climbed up into the loft to sleep with his son? Or perhaps he was sleeping in the barn? Why did he not come to his own bed? Was it because
she
was there?

At last she heard the front door open, then close, and suddenly there he was at the foot of the bed. Bathed in moonlight, he looked to be coated in shiny armor. Like Ivanhoe, as she had imagined him when she was growing up. It had been her favorite book.

“You still awake?”

“Yes,” Leah murmured. “I thought it polite to wait for you. I kept myself from falling asleep by thinking about…Ivanhoe.”

A laugh burst from the tall shadow by the bed. “Ivanhoe!”

Thad began to unbutton his shirt. He fumbled with the buttonholes halfway down his broad chest, stalled, swore a Gaelic curse and abruptly yanked the garment off over his head. His wool undershirt followed.

“Ivanhoe wouldn’t have to cope with buttons,” he muttered.

“Ivanhoe,” she heard herself say, “would have a squire to unbuckle his armor.”

Thad’s hands at that moment rested on the leather belt at his waist. He stopped and sent
her a challenging look. “You want to be my squire?” he joked.

“Oh, no,” she cried. “I could never—”

He laughed softly. “Leah, you’re gonna wash my clothes. You’re gonna get so used to my trouser buttons you could undo them in your sleep.”

She pulled the sheet up over her head. The next thing she knew the bed sagged under his weight and a long, very cold body stretched out next to her.

“Oh! You are frozen! Where have you been?”

He chuckled aloud. “I’ve been out talking to my wheat field. Do it every night, mostly to reassure myself it’s still there.”

“Your wheat field? Why would it not be there? Is it growing?”

“Oh, aye. Little by little. But it’s like waitin’ for a kettle of water to boil.”

Leah rose up on one elbow. “Do all American farmers talk to their crops?”

“Nope.”

There was a long silence, and she wished she had not spoken out in such a bold manner.

“Dunno why I talk to the wheat, really. Well, that’s not true—I do know. That crop means a lot to me for two reasons. One, it’s a
challenge. A gamble, really, but I like a challenge. Always have. And the other reason is this—when I was real young, about Teddy’s age, back in Scotland, my da had a farm. One year there was an awful storm that killed all our crops except for the red winter wheat Da had sown. We lived on that wheat, and goat’s milk, for a whole year. Nothing else survived. Neither would we have, if not for that crop of wheat. Saved our lives, it did.”

“That happens in China, too. If the rice crop fails, many people starve to death.”