Lynna Banning - Loner's Lady

“I’ll be better than the Gundersen boy.” Mr. Flint said it without apparent pride, just stated it as if he were saying, “Today is Tuesday.”

“Besides,” he added, “I want to stay.”

Ellen opened her mouth without thinking. “Why?”

The rocking motion stopped abruptly. “You’re one nosy woman, Miz O’Brian.” He looked at her for a long minute, his eyes so stony she caught her breath.

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “I guess it comes from being alone. I question everything. It is nosy, but I need to be, well, careful. I don’t much trust men, ever since Dan…”

“Yeah.” He nodded once, downed the last of his coffee and set the mug on the floor beside him.

Ellen studied his face. He hid his feelings cleverly. Dollars to doughnuts there was something he wasn’t telling her.

“Mr. Flint, you have not answered either of my questions.”

“You’re right.” He rose, scooped his coffee mug off the floor, stacked her empty plate on his. “Maybe I’m tired of traveling. Maybe I want to stop somewhere and rest awhile.”

He didn’t look at her when he spoke.

Maybe. And maybe I’m the Queen of Sheba. Ellen smoothed out the sheet covering her lower torso.

“Anyway, Miz O’Brian, might be smart to say thanks, and wait till you’re on your feet again. Right now you’re in no position to run me off.”

Ellen blinked. Was that a threat? She listened to the irregular rhythm of his footsteps going down the stairs. He was right about one thing: she did not want her leg to heal crooked.

It would make it even harder to hold on to the farm for when Dan returned. And if she had the child her heart yearned for, how would she tend it if she was crippled? It would be impossible to chase after a toddler if she couldn’t walk right.

Ellen closed her eyes against the pain of her longing. It was foolish to hope for a child when her husband might be dead.

Downstairs, dishes clattered. The hand pump squeaked and water trickled into the sink. The back door opened, shut, then opened again. Later a rhythmic thonk-thonk carried on the still air, like an ax biting into a tree. She let the noises wash over her.

When she woke the sky was a milky lavender. Almost twilight. The curtains had been pushed back and the sash raised to catch the breeze. The soft squawks of her chickens drifted up from the yard. Bullfrogs croaked down by the creek, and the still, warm air smelled of dust.

She loved this place with its earthy smells, the warm, peaceful evenings and the mornings alive with inquisitive finches chattering in her apple trees. Her life moved forward in an ordered sequence of events, guided by the rising and setting of the sun. It was predictable. Safe.

It didn’t matter that chores filled every hour between dawn and dark. The cow needed to be milked, the horse fed and the stall mucked out. The vegetables weeded, apples picked and cooked into applesauce… Oh, Lord, the drudgery never ended. Sometimes she felt as if she were suffocating.

But it would be worth it in the end. Dan would be so pleased when he returned, so proud of her. Something unforeseen must have happened to him that day he left for town. An accident, perhaps. Whatever it was, when he came home he’d find the farm prospering and his wife waiting with welcoming arms.

With a wrench she turned her mind away from Dan. She wouldn’t allow herself to brood. She’d think about how peaceful it was just lying here in her bed, listening to the quiet noises she never had time to stop and enjoy—twittering finches in the pepper tree, Florence lowing across the meadow.

No sound came from downstairs. Maybe Mr. Flint had absconded with her horse and her cow, after all?

Don’t be an idiot. If that rambling man had wanted either, he would have taken them this morning and not returned. True, he did take the horse, but he’d brought him back. Even so, it was hard to trust him. Even if he could set a broken leg.

By late afternoon Jess still tramped the perimeter of Ellen’s farm. His shadow lengthened, but he had to learn the lay of the land. Stopping under the same spreading oak he’d climbed earlier, he knelt, unfolded a rumpled sheet of brown grocer’s paper and wrestled a pencil stub out of his jeans pocket.

“Here, and here,” he muttered. He marked the points with an X on the makeshift map, then sketched in the barn, the house, the creek and the pasture beyond it, the apple trees at the back of the property, even the tree under which he sat. Chewing the tip of the pencil, he studied the layout, then bent to draw a grid over the landmarks. Each square represented maybe five long strides. He’d start at the upper left boundary and methodically work his way across and then down. He’d cover every goddam inch of this ground before husband Dan came home.

By suppertime, Jess had milked Florence and locked the hens in their shelter. For the evening meal he boiled up an armload of sweet corn he’d picked, and heated a can of beans from her pantry. He dished up two plates, piling his own high with ears of corn, and clumped upstairs to Ellen’s bedside.

He also carried with him the oak limb he’d cut and shaped this afternoon. By God, he was more nervous about what she’d think of that bit of wood than about his cooking.

Ellen heard him coming up the stairs, a clump and a pause, clump and pause. Balancing two steaming plates in his hands, he walked to the chiffonier and set them down next to the water basin.

“Got something for you,” he said in a gravelly voice.

“Supper, so I see. That is good of you, Mr. Flint.”

“Something besides supper.” He unhooked an odd-shaped length of tree limb from his forearm and presented it for her inspection. “It’s a crutch. I made it this afternoon.”

Ellen stared at it. The wood had been cleverly shaped using the natural curve of the limb to fashion an underarm prop, padded with one of her clean dish towels. Her throat tightened.

She appreciated his gesture more than she could say.

She tried to smile, but her lips were trembly. “How very kind of you, Mr. Flint.”

“It’s a necessity, the way I see it. You need a way to get around, even if it’s only as far as your wardrobe and the commode. Which, I assume, is under the bed?”

Her face flushed with heat. “It is.” Surely they should not speak of such an intimate matter as her commode? It made her feel uneasy, as if he knew things about her she wished he didn’t.

He laid the crutch at the foot of the bed and turned to the plates on the chiffonier. “You can try it out after supper.”

He settled two pillows under her shoulders and laid another across her lap, pulled two forks out of his shirt pocket and handed her one. Her plate he settled on the lap pillow. Two ears of corn swam in a puddle of melted butter, and suddenly she was ravenous.

“I cannot imagine why I should be so hungry! All I’ve done is lie in bed all day.” She lifted the corn and sank her teeth into the tender, sweet kernels, watching Mr. Flint settle into the rocker and begin to eat as well.

“Healing uses energy, just as much as baling hay. That’s why you’re hungry.”

Ellen tipped her head to look at him. “You really are a doctor, aren’t you?”

“Was one once, yes, as I told you. Sounds like you didn’t believe me. I served four years, until—” He stopped abruptly.

“Until?”

“Until I stopped believing I could save anyone.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what I believe,” Ellen heard herself say. She gnawed another two rows of kernels to hide her embarrassment. Butter dribbled down her chin but she didn’t care. Corn on the cob had never tasted so good.

He sent her a penetrating look. “Why is that, Miz O’Brian?”