Firefly Page 2

  Upon returning to the hallway, he swallowed heavily and told his patient, “First I want to move you somewhere more comfortable and with better light.”

  “The sofa in the parlor,” Julie suggested. “I don’t think she can walk further than that.”

  “She won’t have to.”

  Making it look easier than it actually was, Morgan lifted the injured woman into his arms. Her cry of pain might also have been a gasp of fright or disgust at being held by so unsavory a character, but before either she or her daughter could protest, Morgan had gently deposited Katharine on the black horsehair sofa and then retreated a step or two.

  The bloodstain that had been concealed in a fold of Katharine’s sleeve confirmed the worst of his fears. The girl had unfortunately been correct about the seriousness of her mother’s injury. Morgan muttered an angry, silent prayer that Opper would come back in the next five minutes.

  But he knew that prayer, like so many others, would not be answered. Without even looking at Julie, he said, “I need something to cut away the sleeve.”

  He expected questions, but almost before he had finished asking, she reached into the wicker sewing basket on the floor beside the sofa and produced a pair of shears. Still fighting the nausea, he took the instrument from Julie’s outstretched hand. Her calm seemed to give him a measure of resolve enough to steady his own hand to carefully snip away the pink linen fabric. A long sigh escaped him when he had exposed the wound. Blood oozed slowly from a long scrap, but there was no sign of protruding bone.

  As his fingers lifted her arm and gently probed, Katharine drew in a breath and squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

  “It’s broken for sure,” Morgan announced even before he had finished his examination, “but not as badly as I thought it might be. This scratch was probably caused by a splinter on the stairs.”

  Katharine moaned when he found the break. Whatever else he might have forgotten, he recognized instinctively that the ends of bone were out of alignment, not far but enough that he doubted the woman would be able to withstand the pain of having the break set. She was already near fainting.

  He didn’t take his eyes from the mother’s pale, drawn face as he told her daughter, “I need a couple pieces of wood and strips of linen for a splint, plus some whisky. She won’t handle it without help.”

  “There’s no whisky in the house,” Julie replied, wondering just whom he thought needed the fortification of liquor. “I can find the other things, but Papa doesn’t allow spirits.”

  “Then I’m afraid—”

  He was cut short by shouting and fists pounding on the front door.

  “Miss Hollstrom! Miss Hollstrom!”

  Julie ran the few steps to the door and admitted a frantic, florid-faced old man with a black bag gripped in his left hand. He pushed past her rudely and stormed into the parlor.

  “Simon told me you were here, Morgan,” Horace Opper puffed. “You no good drunken bastard, you don’t have any business tending this woman’s injuries.”

  Horace drew up his portly figure to his full height of five and one half feet and faced the green-eyed interloper who had also got to his feet. Morgan just looked down his nose with as much disgust as he could muster. Opper seemed unruffled.

  “Get out, Del Morgan. Go back to your bottle and leave the practice of medicine to sober physicians.”

  “Sober, true, but it’s a good thing you didn’t describe yourself as competent, Horace. You were washed up and out of date ten years ago.” He scratched at his beard unconsciously again and closed the green eyes for a long second. When they opened, he added, “By the way, she’s got a displaced fracture of the left radius about three inches above the wrist.”

  Opper’s red, fleshy face approached a brilliant crimson.

  “I don’t need you to diagnose my patients for me!”

  As Julie watched in horrified disbelief, Morgan shrugged and backed off, then walked around the physician the way one would avoid horse droppings in the street. He came to a halt in front of her by the front door.

  “That’s five bucks for the consultation,” he sneered. “Next time, wait for the old fart; don’t take me away from my hangover and my bottle, all right, Miss Hollstrom?”

  He held out his large, freshly scrubbed palm.

  Five dollars was outrageous. Julie had some money in her apron pocket, a couple of silver dollars and some change, but not enough to make this charlatan’s fee.

  “This is all I have,” she offered meekly. The coins jingled onto his hand, but he did not close his fingers over them.

  He hadn’t expected her to pay him anything. If she had kicked his worthless carcass out of her tidy little house, he would have shrugged and gone on his way, back to Simon’s or the Castle. Three dollars and twenty-two cents would buy a day or two of oblivion, but somehow he couldn’t take it from her. He dropped a fifty-cent piece into his shirt pocket before pressing the rest back into her slim hand. He could feel, if not see, the red roughness of that hand. Her mother’s, in contrast, had been white and smooth and soft.

  Then without another word, he walked outside into the blast furnace heat of the afternoon, and he hoped those big brown eyes of hers weren’t watching as he went.

  Chapter Two

  Katharine Hollstrom sat at the dining room table and smiled beatifically. Her left arm rested in its sling made of a torn bed sheet; her right hand lay patiently on her lap while Julie deftly cut a thick slice of roast pork into bite-sized pieces on Katharine’s plate.

  “I hate putting you to all this trouble, Julie,” she apologized, just as she had at every meal for the past week. “Imagine, five more weeks of this!”

  She raised the incapacitated arm and smiled again. Julie choked down a caustic retort. She took the bowl of mashed potatoes from her brother Willy and scooped a small serving beside the meat, then covered both with creamy gravy. A deep breath of that warm, rich aroma set her stomach to grumbling rather loudly, to Julie’s acute embarrassment.

  “Not too many green beans, dear,” Katharine cautioned. “You know they don’t agree with me.”

  Seated just around the corner of the table from Katharine, Hans Wallenmund grabbed the bowl the instant Julie set it down and quickly emptied the contents onto his own plate.

  “Then that will be all the more for me,” he exclaimed.

  “Hans must be working very hard on his farm to have such an appetite,” Wilhelm observed from the head of the table.

  “And I do not cook so good as Julie,” the blond farmer replied. He added a mound of potatoes beside the beans.

  When Julie had finished her mother’s plate, she walked around the table to her own place opposite Hans. Her stomach growled again as she sat down, but before she could put any food on her plate, her father signaled for grace.

  “Lord God our Father, we ask a blessing upon this bounty.”

  Julie bowed her head but did not quite close her eyes while Wilhelm droned on. She could almost see her reflection on the china’s surface, her glasses sliding slowly again, and bitter thoughts filled her head. She hadn’t eaten since six o’clock that morning, and she had spent the intervening hours—except for the one at church—slaving in the kitchen until she was exhausted as well as famished. Now the green beans, fresh from the straggly little garden, were gone. Hans had poured nearly all the gravy on his heap of mashed potatoes, and only one biscuit remained of the dozen Julie had baked. She paid no attention to her father’s prayer because all she could think about was that biscuit, still warm in its towel-lined basket. It was within her reach; if she moved quickly at the end of the grace, she would have it.

  The biscuit became an obsession. The little lump of flour, milk, and baking powder represented more than just a morsel of food to be snatched before greedier hands grabbed it. Julie fought the rebellion that smoldered in her, fed by her gnawing hunger, but the feeling stubbornly refused to be suppressed. She wanted that biscuit, wanted to smother it with fresh butter and wild honey, wan
ted to nibble at it and savor the fluffy, doughy goodness that she herself had created.

  “In the name of our Lord Jesus, amen.”

  Julie had listened for those words, and as soon as they were uttered, her hand darted out and her fingers closed around the object of all her desire. She dropped the biscuit to her otherwise empty plate and did her best to smother a triumphant smile.

  She plopped a small serving of mashed potatoes from the spoon and managed to scrape some gravy together. With a slice of meat and a dish of applesauce, the meal looked spare but sufficient, though Julie couldn’t help glancing to the green beans steaming on Hans’ full plate. She licked her lips despite her efforts at control.

  She did not have to exert the slightest effort, however, to avoid looking at Hans Wallenmund. Without looking up from her plate, she could still see his smoothly handsome features, the broad, strong nose, the wide blue eyes, the square jaw, the blond hair from which a boyish forelock tumbled. He wore a clean but unpressed chambray shirt buttoned to his Adam’s apple, with black suspenders supporting his slightly faded denim trousers. Hans dressed the same every Sunday when he came to Plato from his farm for dinner with the Hollstroms.

  “I bought six more Holsteins this week,” he informed his hosts. “No more little Jerseys.”

  He said it as if he were spitting out a piece of unchewable gristle.

  “I get twice as much milk from a Holstein, and they don’t have problems calving the way Jerseys do. The four I bought last year all dropped their calves with no help, but I had to pull three calves from my seven Jerseys. Even so, I lost two calves and one cow.”

  “Such a loss!” Katharine exclaimed.

  “With the Holsteins I can make up for it very quickly,” Hans boasted, and he reached without asking for another slice of pork, his third. “Already every month I am making two hundred pounds more schmierkase.”

  At that point Julie stopped listening to the conversation. There was no excuse for this repeated bragging of the wealth and success of Hans Wallenmund. His farm, his crops, his livestock, his cheese, his barn, his house, even his new wagon had been verbally inventoried and spread out before her over the past three Sunday dinners. None of it appealed to her in the least, especially the thousands and thousands of pounds of cottage cheese.

  Hans didn’t appeal to her either. He was handsome enough, and he had money, though here in Plato there wasn’t much to spend it on. His manners weren’t the best, but Julie had seen worse. Lucas Carter, for instance, with his perpetual chaw. Or that drunken lout Del Morgan and his foul tongue.

  She couldn’t blame Hans for his lack of education, which was one of the points that irritated her. Few of the farmers she had known in Indiana or the other places the Hollstroms had lived had been able to do much more than read and write their own names. Hans at least could print a legible letter and he knew enough arithmetic to avoid being cheated when he sold his precious cheese or bought another cow. But Katharine Hollstrom had raised Julie with a love for literature and history, and Julie doubted Hans would be the kind of husband with whom she could share those interests.

  Not that she expected to find such a man out in the wilderness of the Arizona Territory any more than in the frozen wastes of Minnesota or the wide golden wheat fields of Kansas.

  Hans pushed himself away from the table with a loud belch, interrupting Julie’s musings.

  Katharine smiled indulgently and said, “I do believe we’re ready for dessert, dear.”

  Julie stared at her half-eaten meal. The potatoes were cold, the gravy congealed greasily. She had barely touched her applesauce. The biscuit, however, was quite gone. She expected a lecture from her father on this waste of good food, but Wilhelm remained silent while she gathered the plates and took them to the kitchen.

  The pie on the windowsill fairly glowed in the narrow band of sunlight. From the golden crust oozed lush red strawberry sauce, almost candied in the oven. Strawberries were Hans’ favorite, and he had complimented her profusely last week for the unsurpassed deliciousness of her pie. She had made this only at Katharine’s insistence. The effort of preparing dinner was more than enough, and Julie could easily have done without the added work of baking a pie. Now she felt reluctant to share the splendid work of art. She hesitated before sliding her hand carefully under the pan and lifting the pie from the windowsill.

  She was a good cook, she smiled proudly to herself, no matter what anyone else said—or didn’t say.

  In the dining room, as she cut and served the pie she added, “I have whipped cream in the cooler, and the coffee is hot on the stove. I’ll fetch them in a minute.”

  Wilhelm took a healthy wedge of the pie, Willy demanded an equal portion despite his mother’s protests that he would never be able to eat it all, and of course Hans took two, leaving barely a third of the pie. Julie cut what remained into two portions and gave one to her mother, then returned to the kitchen for the coffee pot and the bowl of whipped cream.

  She didn’t know why she resented everyone today. No one had ever helped her serve the meals, and there was no reason to expect any assistance now. Oh, they helped themselves when it came to filling their plates or garnishing their pie with whipped cream, but it was always Julie who carried the dishes to and from the steaming kitchen, who served herself last, almost as though she were a servant relegated to the scullery—and the leftovers.

  Maybe it was the weather. She had known heat like this in Kansas and even in Indiana, but rarely so early in the season and never so early in the day. Someone in church had said the thermometer at the post office registered ninety-two degrees at sun-up.

  And then to be forced to stand in the kitchen, with a pork roast sizzling in the oven of the monstrous cast-iron cook stove, and bake a strawberry pie: Yes, it must be the heat that made her so angry that even when she was hungry enough to eat a horse, she could barely down a bird’s portion.

  She poured three cups of coffee, none for herself, and then Willy called for more lemonade.

  The words of resistance hovered on the end of her tongue, daring her to spit them out. Willy had two perfectly healthy legs and two perfectly healthy arms. There was no reason why he couldn’t excuse himself from the table and refill his own glass from the pitcher in the cooler. Instead, he held the empty glass out to his sister.

  And by the time Julie had done her brother’s bidding and returned to the dining room, Hans had helped himself to the last of the whipped cream—which she really didn’t care about—and the last slice of strawberry pie—which she did.

  *

  It was too hot to walk far, but Julie consented to stroll with Hans for a while after she had finished washing, drying, and putting away the dishes. She would have done just about anything to get out of that kitchen for a while.

  At the north edge of Plato, where the street narrowed to a dusty track before it began its rise to the mountains, the cottonwoods grew thick along an icy, spring-fed stream. Here there was some respite from the sweltering sun, from the glare and the breathless heat, but not from the internal fire. Julie fumed with each step she took, though she kept a smile on her lips.

  “I still can hardly believe you are here, Julie,” Hans said quietly as they passed the church and the iron-fenced cemetery. His accent had thickened as the volume of his voice dropped. She strained both to hear and to understand him. “Soon I will have what I have waited so long for.”

  Julie swallowed hard and glanced down to the dust at her feet. She had expected this conversation last Sunday, but Hans had been too enthusiastic over the breeding of his precious cows and had not broached the subject. Now he had nothing to distract him from his purpose.

  “I have spoken to your papa, Julie. He says we should wait and see how things are now that you have come to Arizona. It has been a long time, and he thinks we might not feel the same as we did then.”

  She wanted to run but knew he would stop her, and she did not think she could bear his touch. His emotional declarations did n
o harm, and the presence of a solitary mourner in the graveyard assured her that Hans would only plead his cause, nothing more.

  “My feelings haven’t changed, Julie, except maybe they are stronger. I think we should get married very soon, so I can take you to the farm and—”

  “Sssshhh,” she whispered, raising a finger to her lips and nodding her head in the direction of the man who knelt by one of the graves, his back to the couple under the trees. Hans bowed his head with a crimson blush, but Julie had to refrain from letting out a long sigh of relief. She had already heard quite enough.

  Hans, however, had much more to say.

  “I have thought of this for so long that I do not want any more time to pass. I have dreamed of us, Julie, of you and me making the farm something to be proud of to pass on to our sons the way my father could not do for me.”

  In his enthusiasm, Hans had raised his voice again, despite Julie’s repeated cautions, and this last statement carried to the man in the cemetery. He rose, anger in his movement, and turned to face the people who had disturbed his communion.

  Now Julie blushed. In the dappled shade and from a distance of perhaps fifteen yards, she could not possibly see his eyes, but she didn’t need to see them to remember their eerie green and the way Del Morgan could level them at her. He stared only for a moment, no more than a handful of long seconds, and then he returned to his contemplation of a grave Julie could see was carefully tended, with a lovely red rose bush blooming riotously beside a small headstone.

  That stare had sufficiently cowed Hans as well. The burly farmer backed a step or two away from Julie and said nothing. She took advantage of the opportunity to whisper, “I think we should go back. We’ve disturbed that gentleman.” She ignored the blatant inappropriateness of applying the term to Morgan. “And Mama may need me.”

  She tried to ignore the guilt she felt at using her mother’s injury, toward which she held a mounting resentment, as an excuse to escape Hans’ attentions, but it was much easier to imagine Del Morgan a gentleman than to clear her conscience.