Читать книгу The Man from Stone Creek - Linda Lael Miller - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

“YOU WANT ME to do what?” Maddie gaped at Sam O’Ballivan’s copper bathtub, ensconced squarely in front of the schoolhouse stove. Terran had left the store early that morning, of his own volition, and she’d barely recovered from her brother’s change of heart when back he came, breathless from running all the way.

“Mr. O’Ballivan says to come quick, if you wouldn’t mind!” he’d cried.

Maddie had frowned, concerned. Elias James, the town banker and, for all practical intents and purposes, her employer, since he oversaw Mungo’s investments, expected the mercantile door to be unlocked by nine o’clock sharp, and in the six years she’d been running the general store, she’d never failed to do that. It was now eight forty-five. “Is there some emergency?” she’d asked, already untying the apron strings she’d just tied a moment before.

“He says it’s important,” Terran had insisted.

And here she was, standing in the schoolhouse, staring in consternation at Sam O’Ballivan and the bathtub she’d sold him herself.

“I want you,” Sam repeated patiently, “to show Violet Perkins how to take a bath.”

Maddie knew Violet, of course, and had sympathy for her. The poor child hung around the store sometimes, when school was out, hoping for a hard-boiled egg from the crock next to the counter, or a piece of penny candy. She mooned over the few ready-made dresses Maddie carried—most women sewed their children’s garments at home, as well as their own—and huddled by the stove for hours when it was cold or rainy outside. Maddie often indulged her with a plate of leftovers from her own larder at the rear of the store, pretending the food would go to waste if Violet didn’t eat it.

“Here?” she asked, noting that Sam had set out the bar of French-milled soap and the towel he’d purchased with the bathtub. “In the schoolhouse?”

“What better place?” Sam reasoned. He’d been sitting behind his desk, wearing spectacles and poring over a thick volume when she burst in. At Maddie’s appearance, he’d set aside the glasses and stood. “A school is a place to learn, isn’t it? And Violet needs to know how to take a bath.”

Flummoxed, Maddie spread her hands. “What about the other students?” she asked. “You can’t expect the child to undress in front of the boys—”

Sam smiled. “Of course not. The girls can stay—I suspect some of them could do with a demonstration. I’ll take the boys down to the river for their lesson.” He held up the cake of yellow soap from yesterday’s marketing. “I’ve noticed that Violet is generally the first to raise her hand. Let her think she’s volunteering.”

Maddie glanced at the schoolhouse clock, torn. It was nine o’clock, straight-up, and the mercantile was still closed. At that very moment Mr. James was probably looking out his office window, the bank being kitty-corner from the store, wondering why the customers couldn’t get in to buy things and whipping up a temper because of it.

“Why me?” she asked.

Sam smiled again. “You’re the only woman I know in Haven besides Bird of Paradise over at the Rattlesnake Saloon. I don’t guess it would be fitting to bring her in to teach bathing, though she’d probably agree if I asked her.”

Maddie sniffed. “It certainly wouldn’t be fitting,” she said, wondering how Sam O’Ballivan had come to make the woman’s acquaintance. Damned if she’d ask him, even if her life depended on it. She approached the tub and peered inside, already unfastening her cuff buttons to roll up her sleeves. “We will need water, Mr. O’Ballivan.”

“I’ve got some heating in the back room,” he said. “No sense in lugging it in here and pouring it into the tub if you weren’t going to agree.”

She sighed. “What about the store?”

“Well, I figured, as the owner, you could—”

Maddie flushed. “I am not the owner. I manage it for someone else, and I am accountable to Mr. James, at the bank, who serves as trustee.”

Sam frowned. “Oh,” he said.

“Yes,” Maddie confirmed. “Oh. By now, there are probably people standing three-deep on the sidewalk, complaining because they can’t get in to buy salt and tobacco and kitchen matches.”

Sam brightened. “I think I have a solution,” he said. “I’ll take the boys to the river another day. In the meantime, they can learn how a mercantile operates. We’ll make a morning of it.”

“You intend to take over my store?” Maddie asked, affronted. “Do you think it’s so easy that any idiot can do it?”

The schoolmaster smiled. “I don’t regard myself as an idiot, as a general rule. How hard can it be, filling flour bags and measuring cloth off a bolt?”

Maddie came to an instant simmer, but before she could tell the man what she thought of his blithe and patently arrogant assumption that keeping a thriving mercantile was something he could do one-handed, the pupils began to straggle in. She swallowed her outrage and stood as circumspectly as she could, letting her gaze bore into Sam O’Ballivan like a pointy stick.

When everyone was settled in their seats, Sam announced his plan. The boys would help him tend the mercantile, the girls would remain at the schoolhouse for a “hygiene” lesson.

The boys cheered and stomped their feet, and rushed for the door at an offhand signal from Sam. The girls sat, wide-eyed, waiting for enlightenment. Maddie would have bet not a one of them could have defined the word hygiene, but they had noticed the bathtub. They were all agog at the spectacle.

“Miss Chancelor will give the demonstration,” Sam went on, looking worriedly from face to face. “But we’ll need a volunteer to get into the tub.”

Sure enough, Violet’s hand shot up. “I’ll do it, Mr. SOB,” she cried.

“Mr. O’Ballivan,” Sam countered easily. “That’s good, Violet. I appreciate your willingness to take the initiative.”

Violet beamed. “Can I go to the privy first?”

The other girls giggled and Sam silenced them with a ponderous sweep of his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “You do that.”

While Violet was gone to the privy, he brought in four buckets of hot water and emptied them into the tub. The remaining girls watched, barely able to suppress their amusement.

When he’d set aside the last bucket, Sam turned to address them. “If even one of you makes fun of Violet,” he said, “you’ll find yourself writing ‘I will not bully smaller children’ one hundred times on the blackboard. Is that clear to everyone?”

The girls nodded, subdued.

Sam dusted his hands together. “Good,” he said, and turned to Maddie. “Now, Miss Chancelor, if I might have the key to the mercantile—”

She surrendered it, slapping it down into his palm with a little more force than strictly necessary.

“Thank you,” he said, tossing the large brass key once and catching it with an aplomb that made Maddie grit her teeth.

And so it was that Maddie came to illustrate the finer points of taking a bath, using Violet Perkins as a model.

* * *

MADDIE HAD BEEN RIGHT, Sam thought as he opened the mercantile for the day’s commerce. There were eight women waiting on the sidewalk, shopping baskets in hand, tapping their toes in impatience. He greeted them with a nod and made his crew of boys wait until the ladies had swept inside.

It was the contrary nature of folks, he reckoned, that on this particular morning, everybody in town wanted to get their marketing done. Had Maddie followed her usual routine, there most likely wouldn’t have been so much urgency.

He set the boys to sweeping and dusting canned goods while the female population of Haven made their various selections.

“Where,” demanded a narrow-faced old biddy with hooded, hawklike eyes and a nose to match, “is Maddie?”

Sam opened his mouth to answer, but before he could get a word out, Terran cut him off. “She’s over to the schoolhouse, giving Violet Perkins a bath!” he crowed.

“Teaching a hygiene lesson,” Sam corrected quietly.

“Well,” huffed the Hawk Woman, “it’s about time somebody look that child in hand.”

“Yes,” Sam said, opening the cash register drawer to tally the funds on hand. “It is about time.”

The woman blinked.

Sam silently congratulated himself on a bull’s-eye.

By ten-thirty, he’d taken in four dollars and forty-eight cents, and made careful note of every transaction, so Maddie couldn’t say he’d fouled up her books. Then, figuring the hygiene lesson ought to be over, and Violet decent again, he dispatched Terran and young Ben Donagher to the schoolhouse to find out.

When they came back, Maddie was with them, the front of her dress sodden and her hair moist around her face. He couldn’t rightly tell if that sparkle in her whiskey eyes was temper or satisfaction with a job well done.

“I see my store is still standing,” she remarked.

Sam grinned. “I trust my school has fared as well,” he parried, reaching for his hat.

“You’ll have to empty the bathtub yourself,” Maddie said, taking her storekeeper’s apron down off a peg and donning it. “Violet fairly gleams with cleanliness. One of the other girls aired out her dress while she was soaking.”

Sam sent the boys trooping back to the schoolhouse, lingering to take out his wallet. “Next time Violet comes in the store,” he said, laying a bill down on the counter, “you outfit her with a new one. Say there was a drawing and she won.”

Maddie regarded him solemnly. He still couldn’t tell whether she was pleased with him or wanted to peel off a strip of his hide. “You lie very easily, Mr. O’Ballivan,” she said.

Well, that answered one of his questions. “Kids like Violet run into more than their fair share of humiliation, it seems to me,” he replied. “If a lie can spare them embarrassment, then I’m all for it.”

She had the good grace to blush.

He waited until he’d reached the doorway before putting on his hat. “We’re due at the Donaghers’s supper table at seven o’clock,” he reminded her. “Best have Terran hitch up that buckboard you use for deliveries unless you want to ride two to a horse.”

Maddie put the bill he’d left on the counter into the cash register and headed for a display of calico dresses, probably to choose one for Violet. “We’ll take the buckboard,” she said without looking at him.

Sam smiled to himself as he closed the door behind him.

Damn, he thought. It would have been a fine thing to share a saddle with Miss Maddie Chancelor. A fine thing indeed.

* * *

SCHOOL HAD LET OUT for the day and Sam was seated at his desk, going over the map Vierra had given him the night before, when a small, impossibly thin woman stepped shyly over the threshold. She wore a bonnet and a faded cotton dress, and he knew who she was before she introduced herself.

He refolded the map, set a paper weight on top of it, and stood. “Sam O’Ballivan,” he said by way of introduction, and added a cordial nod.

“Mrs. John Perkins,” Violet’s mother responded, lingering just inside the open door.

“Come in,” Sam urged when she didn’t show any signs of moving.

She hesitated another moment, then thrust herself into motion. He noticed then, as she approached, that she was carrying a basket over one arm, filled with brown eggs. She set the whole works on his desk, straightened her spine, and looked up at him.

“I guess my Violet had a bath today at school,” she said.

Sam waited. She’d brought him eggs, which might be construed as a peaceful gesture, but you never knew with women. They could be crafty as all get-out. Most of the time, when they said one thing, they meant another. They expected a man to learn their language and converse in it like a native.

Mrs. Perkins drew herself up to her full, unremarkable height, the top of her head barely reaching Sam’s shirt pocket. Under the brim of that bonnet, her eyes spoke eloquently of her discouragement and her fierce pride. “I came to thank you for making a lesson of it,” she said. “Violet’s real pleased that she was chosen for an example.”

“Violet,” Sam said honestly, “is a fine girl.”

Tears brimmed along the woman’s lower lashes and her pointed little chin jutted out. “It’s been so hard since John was killed. I love my Violet, I truly do, but betwixt keepin’ food on the table and a roof over our heads, I fear I’ve let some things go.”

Sam wanted to lay a hand on Mrs. Perkins’s bony shoulder, but it would be a familiar gesture, so he refrained. “Any time you want the use of my bathtub,” he said awkwardly, “you just say the word. I’ll fill it with hot water and make myself scarce.”

Mrs. Perkins blinked, sniffled, looked away for a moment. “That’s right kind,” she said. “I can do better by my girl, and I will, too. I swear I will, Mr. O’Ballivan. Short of goin’ to work for Oralee Pringle, though, I can’t think how.”

Sam took an egg from the basket and examined it as thoroughly as if he’d never seen one before. “I do favor eggs,” he said. “I’d buy a dozen from you, every other day, and pay a good price for a chicken now and then, too, if you’ve got any to spare.”

“Them eggs was meant as a present,” Mrs. Perkins said, but she looked hopeful. “I sell a few, but folks around here mostly keep their own chickens.”

“Bring me a dozen, day after tomorrow,” Sam replied. “I’ll give fifty cents for them, if you throw in a stewing hen every now and then.”

For the first time since she’d entered the schoolhouse, Mrs. Perkins smiled. It was tentative, and her eyes were wary, as if she thought he might be playing a joke on her. “That’s an awful lot of money, for twelve eggs and a chicken,” she said carefully.

“I’m a man of princely tastes,” Sam replied. His mouth watered, just looking at those eggs. He’d have fried half of them up for a feast if he wasn’t dining at the Donagher ranch that night.

It would be interesting to see if those two fools he’d locked in that Mexican outhouse showed up at the table, and more interesting still to pass an evening in Maddie Chancelor’s company.

“You want that chicken plucked and dressed out, or still flappin’ its wings?” Violet’s mother asked.

Sam took a moment to shift back to the present moment. “It would be a favor to me if it was ready for the kettle,” he said.

Mrs. Perkins beamed. “Fifty cents,” she said dreamily. “I don’t know as I’ll recall what to do with so much money.”

Sam took up the eggs. “I’ll put these by, and give you back your basket,” he told the woman. She waited while he performed the errand, and looked surprised when he came back and handed her two quarters along with the battered wicker container. “I like to pay in advance,” he said as casually as he could.

To his surprise, she stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek and fled with the basket, fifty cents and the better part of her dignity.