The Bridal Veil (24 page)

“
Rose! Where do you think
you’re off to now?” Cora’s grating voice spiraled up the stairwell
to Emily’s ears.

“
The barn.”

“
Well, missy, you just think
about what I said. And since you and Mrs. Becker want to be family,
you can make your own blamed supper.” Emily heard the front door
slam. It reminded her of when the servants used to argue in the
kitchen on Washington Boulevard, but this was far worse. The
servants had never yelled at her or Alyssa. What in the world is
going on? Emily wondered. She didn’t have to wait long for an
answer.

“
You, Mrs. Becker!” came
Cora’s rude bellow. “I’m going to sit with Bertie Richmond. She
sprained her ankle and she can’t get her housework done. I hope you
know how to cook.”

The back door slammed with enough
force to rattle the windows. And Emily found herself alone in a
suddenly quiet house.

~~*~*~*~~

“
Miss Emily?”

Emily looked up from the pile of
potatoes that she was peeling, and not very well, she had to admit.
At the back screen door, Rose stood with a dirt-and-tear-streaked
face, clutching Cotton to chest. She struggled with the lamb’s limp
weight. Its back feet dragged around Rose’s knees, the little
hooves brushing against the legs of her overalls.

“
Rose!” She jumped from her
chair and the potato she held slid out of her hands, bouncing
across the floor. She ran to the screen door and held it open.
“What happened?”

“
Cotton is worse again! He’s
gasping for air. Daddy isn’t back from the feed store, and I don’t
know what to do.”

“
Bring him in here.” Without
a thought for the potatoes or the clean dinner plates she’d put
out, Emily pushed everything aside to make room for the sheep. His
fleece was grimy with hay, manure, and dirt, but that didn’t even
cross her mind. “What did your father say is wrong with
him?”

“
He said something about
congestion of the lungs, but Cotton was getting better, truly he
was.” Bewilderment and terror crossed her face in waves. “Only
now—now—“

Only now the little thing seemed to be
panting as if he’d run across a field, his sides heaving with the
effort to draw one breath. Now and then, he issued a weak
bleat.

Emily didn’t know the first thing
about animal medicine, but she had rudimentary knowledge of how to
ease a human’s breathing problems. “All right, we’ll have to work
quickly. Get under the table.”

“
What?”

“
Go on. We’ll make a steam
tent, and you need to hold him. I have a bottle of eucalyptus oil
upstairs that we’ll use for an inhalant.” Rose crawled under, and
Emily picked up the lamb and handed him to the girl. Then she raced
out of the kitchen and upstairs to her bedroom to get the oil. She
opened her trunk and flung things right and left before she found
the tissue-wrapped vial at the bottom. Galloping back down the
stairs, she skidded to a halt in front of the sideboard, pulled
open a drawer, and yanked out two tablecloths to make the tent. She
flung them over the table, arranging them so that they reached the
floor and created an enclosure underneath. Turning to the stove,
she stoked the fire to a hot blaze, then pumped water into two big
kettles and put them on the burners. From the kettle that always
sat on the back of the stove, she poured boiling water into two
crockery bowls and dripped over them the oil of eucalyptus. The
aromatic vapor instantly filled the kitchen and gave it the odor of
a sickroom.

“
Rose, here are bowls of hot
water. Be careful that you don’t burn yourself.” She lifted one
flap of the makeshift tent and pushed the medicated water inside.
“Try to hold his nose close to the vapors.”

“
Oh, he won’t let me!” The
lamb struggled in Rose’s arms, apparently having enough life left
to fight his nurse. Emily dropped to her hands and knees and
crawled under the table to help.

“
He’s probably scared and
doesn’t understand that we’re trying to heal him.” She took the
baby onto her lap and tipped his head close to one of the bowls.
“Just hold him there.”

Rose’s fear showed in her pale cheeks
and tear-wet eyes. “Please let him live,” she prayed. “Please. He’s
so little. And—and I don’t have much family.”

Emily’s heart clenched in her chest.
“What do you mean, dear? You’ve got your father and your
grandmother—”

“
No, Grammy is mad at me.
She found my drawing and she said I don’t love her.”

God, again? Emily thought wearily,
struggling with the lamb’s hooves. “What drawing?”

The girl dashed a dirty hand across
her eyes. “I’ve been drawing a picture on that brown paper you gave
me. Kind of like that tapestry you told me about, the By—Bygone
one?”

“
You mean the Bayeux
Tapestry?”

“
Yes, that’s it. I’ve been
sketching the story of our family on that long piece of paper. I
started with Mama and Daddy and me in front of our house, and then
I drew in Mama’s grave.” She went on to describe the picture as
she’d sketched it thus far. “Then you come along in the story.”
Rose hung her head and her braids swung forward.

“
And your grandmother didn’t
like that?” Emily could just imagine that she didn’t.

The girl gave a tremendous wet sniff
and Emily heard the agony of heartache in her voice. “She said that
I must not love her anymore and that I’d better figure out which
side my bread is buttered on. I don’t know what that means, but it
sounds bad.”

Just then, footsteps sounded
on the stairs and the back door opened. “Lord above! Good Lord
above!” Cora had returned. “Are those
Belinda’s
table linens?” Her voice
climbed in volume with each word. Rose flashed Emily a look of
fear.

She put the lamb back in the girl’s
lap and crawled out of the tent. Rising to her full height, she
towered over Cora, who wore a battered blue straw hat and carried a
knitting bag. “Yes, Mrs. Hayward. We’re trying to save Rose’s lamb.
He’s having trouble breathing.”

Cora’s contorted face turned
scarlet and she made a series of inarticulate noises that raised
the hair on Emily’s arms. “The lamb? You ruined Belinda’s beautiful
tablecloths for a lamb? Have you lost your mind?” she screeched at
last. “It’s a good thing I came back for my favorite apron, or who
knows what you’d do to the rest of the house. Didn’t I tell you to
keep your hands off Belinda’s tablecloths? Didn’t I tell you not to
touch
any
of her
belongings,
Miss
Fine-and-Fancy-Manners
?” Her fleshy
double chin wagged like a turkey wattle with every word she
shouted.

Beneath the table, Rose began crying
again and fury filled Emily’s head like the eucalyptus vapor.
“Can’t you see how you’re upsetting Rose? Your behavior is
appalling and unacceptable, Mrs. Hayward,” she replied, cutting off
each syllable with fire and ice.

Cora would not back down. “Oh, is that
right? Well, everything was fine between me and Rose before you got
here. Then you came, uninvited, trying to change things, sticking
your nose where it doesn’t belong. You act like you own this place,
lock, stock, and barrel. Well, you don’t! You’ll never belong here!
This is still my daughter’s house.”

At last, Emily thought, it was out.
The dreadful harridan had finally joined words with her graceless
attitude. “Then maybe we should set a place at the table for
Belinda every night!”

“
Well! You have a lot of
nerve, Mrs. Becker!”

“
A living creature has more
worth than an inanimate object like a tablecloth! The living must
be given greater consideration than the dead!” Mercy, she was
actually shouting back in this ridiculous but vicious argument.
“Have you no heart?”

At that moment, Luke walked in. He’d
heard the yelling from the yard and came up the steps in one jump.
He didn’t know what was happening, exactly, but one look at Emily’s
face told him that his mother-in-law had overstepped her bounds one
time too often. He felt as if he’d plunged his head into the
spinning blades of a windmill.

“
Cora!” he
barked.

“
Tell her, Luke!” she
demanded, whirling to face him. Her hat was askew on her head.
“Tell her we don’t need her here! She’s done nothing but cause
trouble.”

All the years of resentment that he’d
bottled up and tamped down, all the words he’d swallowed to keep
the peace and give Rose a stable home, finally boiled over. Though
his own home life had been one of constant arguing, his old man’s
drunkenness, and abuse, he’d fry in hell before he saw that happen
to Rose. “The only person causing trouble is you, Cora Hayward, and
I’m goddamned fed up. I want you to pack up and go
home.”

She pressed her hand flat to
her ample bosom, wearing the look of insulted dignity that he’d
come to so despise. “Me? You want
me
to leave?”

“
The sooner the better,
Cora. This day has been coming for months. I’m going to have peace
under this roof. This is my house, not yours, and Rose is my girl,
not yours.”

“
She’s more my blood than
she’ll ever be yours.”

“
Cora
.” The warning in his voice carried a threat that no one, not
even his thick-skinned, block-headed mother-in-law could have
mistaken. Even Emily’s eyes widened.

Cora lifted her nose. “Well, what
should I expect from the man who killed my daughter?”

From somewhere under the table, Luke
heard his own daughter sobbing. Cora had never come out and made
that accusation until now, and he knew she was using it as a last
resort. But she’d said it in front of Rose and Emily. God, would
this nightmare never end? Luke wondered. And that smell, he thought
irrelevantly, what the hell was it?

“
I think we know the truth
about that, don’t we?” he ground out. “Who’s house did Belinda die
in?”

She gave him a poisonous look. “I’ll
be gone in the morning. And there’s no point in trying to make me
stay. I wouldn’t live here now if you got down on all fours and
begged me.” With that, she spun on her heel and marched to the hall
and up the stairs.

Rose’s sobbing quieted to an eerie
moaning.

Emily pushed aside a corner of the
tent. “Cotton has taken a turn for the worse,” she told Luke. “He
can’t breathe.”

“
He’s not breathing at all
now,” Rose announced, her voice teary and yet
dull-sounding.

Luke stooped down and looked at his
daughter on the floor under the table. She had the lifeless, dirty
sheep on her lap and while she held his head over a steaming bowl
of some concoction. “Oh, hell, Rose, honey—I’m sorry.”

“
Daddy, you’ll save him
won’t you? We’ve already tried everything we can.”

The stricken, pleading look on her
face made him want to promise just about anything, but he couldn’t
save Cotton. The animal was dead. He climbed under the table with
her, trying not to bump his head on the low overhead. Rose’s hair
hung in dark, damp strands around her face. The air was thick with
humidity and the combined smells of medicine and wet, dirty wool.
He pulled Rose and the lamb onto his lap and wrapped his arms
around them both.

“
He’s already gone, honey. I
can’t do anything for him.” From the floor above, he could hear
Cora opening and slamming drawers, and stomping around with great
drama.

“
Oh.” Her chin began
quivering again. “He was so little. What’s going to happen to
him?”

Luke’s heart ached for his daughter.
No child should have to endure the kinds of losses and turmoil
she’d suffered. What could he do? How could he make this
better?

Emily lifted the tablecloth and sat
down cross-legged on the floor. It seemed so out of character for a
woman who didn’t even let the back of a chair touch her spine.
“Rose, would you like it if we have a little funeral for
Cotton?”

“
Could we?” She turned to
her father. “Oh, could we?”

Luke thought it was a silly idea, but
blessed Emily for her kindness and insight into the workings of a
small girl’s heart. “Sure, honey. We’ll have a funeral.”

“
Can we bury him beside
mama?”

“
What?” Luke
started.

Emily shot him a look and then said,
“Wouldn’t you like it better if we bury him here on the farm, so
he’ll be close by?”

Rose thought about this and then
nodded. She let Emily take the lamb from her arms. “Come on. Your
father will help you find a nice piece of old blanket to wrap him
in.”

“
Thanks, Emily,” Luke said,
and even though tears stood in her eyes, he swore there was a smile
in them.

~~*~*~*~~

The sun was just a crimson ribbon on
the western horizon by the time Emily made her way to the front
porch. The evening stars were beginning to come out and she settled
herself on the stool, feeling as creaky and tired as an old woman.
Her black dress, the one that had already suffered through the
visit to the chicken coop, was filthy again. Between holding Cotton
and dragging her hem through the mud beside his grave, the dress
was probably a loss.