Hearts Awakening, page 12
When Daniel merely shrugged, Jackson suspected the boy had no answers to his questions because there were none. Ethan couldn’t have been talking to Daniel without Jackson having some inkling it was happening—the only time the boys were all alone for any length of time was at night. Since their bedroom was just across the hall from his, he would have heard them talking together at least once in the past six months.
Troubled that Daniel would lie to him, he did not want to put his son in a situation where he had to defend his lie, which would make it harder to admit to the truth. “Can you tell me why he won’t talk to anyone other than you?” he asked, deliberately making his voice as gentle as he could.
“ ’Cause he’s not mad at me,” Daniel said with conviction.
“But he’s mad at me?”
“Y-yes.”
“Why?”
“He thinks you sent Mama away,” Daniel whispered.
Jackson gulped hard. The anguish he saw in Daniel’s gaze and the pain he heard in his son’s voice was too real to be denied. The only way to lead Ethan to the truth was to get him to understand the very concept of death, as well as the loss of his mother. Repeating words he had used with his sons for months now, words he had heard Ellie say to them, as well, seemed pointless, yet he still was not prepared to tell them the true circumstances around their mother’s death because they were far too young to understand them.
“Why is he angry with me?” Ellie ventured. Her voice was soft and gentle, and Jackson saw no hint in her expression that she did not believe the tale Daniel had been spinning.
“You know,” Daniel replied and dropped his gaze.
“I think I know, but I can’t be sure I’m right unless Ethan tells me or you tell me.”
He held silent and studied the floor as if it were the most interesting thing he had ever seen.
“If you know why Ethan is mad at Miss Ellie, please tell her,” Jackson prompted, wondering if his son would be more comfortable explaining himself to someone he did not know well, which would give Jackson an opening to get the boy to admit to his lie.
“ ’Cause when Mama does come back and sees you here, she’ll think we don’t want her anymore, and she’ll leave for good. That’s why.”
Ellie paled.
Jackson drew in a long breath. His patience gone, he sent Daniel back to play with his brother.
“You don’t believe him,” Ellie whispered, her voice laced with disappointment.
“I believe he’s hurt and confused enough to fabricate a lie because he has no other way to face his grief. Ethan is too young to keep up a ruse for this long, and I would know if he had spoken to anyone in the past six months. They would have told me, or I would have heard him,” he replied in self-defense, keeping his voice low, too, so the boys would not hear their conversation.
“Just because you or anyone else, for that matter, hasn’t overheard him doesn’t mean Ethan hasn’t been talking to his brother,” she argued. “Think about what Daniel said. If he’s right, if Ethan has been talking to him and has told him he’s afraid their mother won’t come back to stay if I’m here, wouldn’t that also explain why he hasn’t spoken to any of the other women who’ve come to help out, either?”
“What about the Grants, especially Grizel? Why wouldn’t Ethan talk to any of them? And why hasn’t anyone who’s been around the boys heard Ethan talking to his brother?” Jackson charged, unwilling to accept Daniel’s words as truth or her arguments as valid.
“I don’t know,” she admitted and glanced over to the boys for a moment. “Ethan’s only three, like you just said. He’s still trying to make sense of a world that’s been terribly cruel to him, and so is Daniel, really. I don’t presume to understand why God allowed Rebecca to die, but He did and . . . and while you and I might have our faith to help guide us to trust in His wisdom, Daniel and Ethan are still trying to understand who and what God might be to them.”
“I understand that,” Jackson insisted, reluctant to admit to her or anyone else that he had yet to accept God’s plan for him and his sons. “But if Daniel is telling the truth, that Ethan is so upset with me that he won’t talk to me, why isn’t Ethan angry with me all the time?”
Her gaze softened. “I’m not sure, but nobody, especially a little child, can be angry every minute of every day,” she argued. “If Ethan truly needs and wants to talk to someone, maybe he turns to his brother because he’s the only one who doesn’t pose a threat to him. Daniel’s his lifeline, at least for right now, and he’s fortunate to have him.”
Jackson heard the pain in her voice and suspected she had not had someone close to her when she had needed a lifeline of her own. Then again, he hadn’t, either, until he had come to this island and met James Gladson.
She sighed, as if arguing the matter was pointless. “The longer Ethan remains angry and confused, the more likely it is that he’ll never speak again to anyone other than Daniel. And the less likely it is that we’ll be able to help both Daniel and Ethan become the happy children I suspect they once were. My mother used to say that we’re the angriest when we’re afraid. If she was right, and I believe she was, it means that unless we discover what has scared Ethan so much that he won’t talk, we’ll never be able to help him.”
Jackson blinked hard. The idea that this woman could presume to know his sons better than he did, even if she had been well-intentioned, was so preposterous he stiffened. “I know a lie from a truth, and I know what Daniel and Ethan need right now. They’re my sons,” he argued, not bothering to hide his annoyance with her.
She dropped her gaze. “I’m not denying that, but—”
“Maybe it will be better all around if Ethan spends more time with me and less time at the house. From now on, I want him to come with me and Daniel in the afternoons to work in the orchard, like he used to do when I didn’t have anyone helping out after Rebecca died,” he said, reluctant to remind her that one of her duties was to obey his wishes, not question them.
“But what about his afternoon nap?” she argued.
“Ethan’s slept under a tree before. It won’t be anything new to him,” he countered. Anxious to reassert his authority over her, as well as his sons, he turned his attention to the other end of the room. “Daniel? Ethan? I want you to start picking up those blocks and storing them away. Ethan, come over here.”
When Ethan complied, Jackson pointed to the boy’s pocket. “I thought you were going to keep those ribbons in your room.”
Ethan looked down and poked the ribbons deeper into his pocket.
“Hand them over, son.”
Ethan’s eyes filled with tears, but he tugged the ribbons out and gave them to him.
Jackson held the soiled ribbons by the ends, wondering how they could have gotten so dirty in a matter of days. He was about to tell Ellie the ribbons were bound for the trash pit when he saw the tears trickling down his son’s cheeks.
Moved, he bent down to wipe the tears away. “I want you to let Miss Ellie wash these ribbons for you. Once they’re clean again, we’ll have to think of a special place for you to keep them,” he said and handed them to Ellie. “Now hurry back and help Daniel with the blocks so you can come with us to work together in the orchards this afternoon.”
Ethan managed a smile, but Daniel whooped and hollered and ran over to his brother. “Come on, Ethan! Pappy just said you could come today. You can help me pick up all the apples that dropped on the ground, just like you did before,” he gushed and tugged his brother back to the pile of blocks.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d launder those ribbons as best you can. Maybe by the time they dry, Ethan will forget all about them.”
“I doubt he will,” she noted.
“You may be right, so when you’re making those new overalls for him, don’t bother to add any pockets.”
After she disappeared back into the kitchen without argument this time, he watched his sons fill the canvas bag with blocks. His heart swelled with love for his boys, even as his mind wrapped around the remote possibility that Ellie was right and Daniel had been telling the truth about Ethan.
What that meant for Jackson as a father was just as telling as what that meant for him as a husband. Then again, he reminded himself as he walked over to help his sons, he was not a real husband. He was just a man. He loved his sons. He loved his work. He loved this island. And in his own fumbling way, he supposed, he loved his God.
There was no room in his life and no need for him to love anything or anyone more.
Fifteen
Ellie walked around the kitchen to make sure she had not left anything undone. She paused and fingered the white ribbons she had laundered for Ethan and hung from one of the shelves to dry, convinced she could find a way for the boy to keep them.
She turned and walked over to the cookstove. Now that the burners on the cookstove were barely warm, she gave them one last swipe with a damp cloth, put her hands to her hips, and stared at her nemesis.
The three-tiered stove, constructed of heavy iron plates, did not look that complicated to use. The highest tier was a bake oven. Four round iron plates of various sizes, used as burners for pots and pans, made up the middle tier. The lowest tier was the narrowest and offered scant room to rest utensils or cookware that needed to cool.
Hinged doors on the top two tiers opened easily to insert the hickory wood used for fuel, porcelain knobs for each of them allowed for the fires to be controlled separately, and smoke escaped by way of a large pipe that came up from the stove and out through the back wall. But the only advantage of using this contraption she could discover was that she did not have to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for the fire to be hot enough for her to prepare a meal, saving her hours of time each day.
“If I had my way, I’d drag you outside myself and leave you to rust and have a nice hearth built right here in your place. You’re lucky I don’t, you finicky old thing,” she grumbled.
In the end it was a matter of pride, and she was reluctant to spend what little pride she had left by having Caden James teach her how to use it after he checked it out, assuming the day was clear on Sunday.
She glared at the cookstove and tapped her foot. “Maybe Jackson’s right. Maybe it’s not me at all. Maybe it’s you. And maybe all you need is a good cleaning on the inside to make you work,” she said.
She had the time and opportunity. She had the motivation. And she certainly had the wherewithal. After her father had died suddenly, leaving her alone to care for her invalid mother, she had been forced to learn how to handle tasks normally left to men, and she was not daunted by the prospect of cleaning the inside of the cookstove, even if that meant she had to take it apart, plate by plate.
She eyed the stovepipe and decided she would somehow find the strength to take that apart to remove the soot that must have accumulated there, too. After removing her wooden wedding ring and storing it safely on a high shelf, she set straight to the task.
“Go . . . back . . . in . . . to . . . place. Go. Go. Go!”
Several hours later, Ellie used all of the strength she had left to give that detestable stovepipe another shove to get it back into place. Meanwhile she attempted to ignore the pain from the new blisters she had gotten on her hands after discovering the inside of the stove was still a lot hotter than the outside.
That stovepipe did not budge. Not a hairsbreadth.
Before the muscles in her arms twitched themselves into knots that would take a week of Sundays to unravel, she eased down from the seat of the chair she had been standing on. She set the end of the stovepipe down on the floor next to a host of kitchen gadgets she had tried to use as wedges to force it back together and sighed.
Once she was on solid ground again, she blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. She did not need to look into a mirror to know she had as much soot on her face again as she did on her gown, which she had used twice already as a wiping cloth after her very last apron got too soiled.
She used the back of her hands to wipe the sweat from her brow before she wiped off most of the soot on her poor hands. She glanced around the room and looked for something else to use to knock that pipe into place. “Nothing,” she grumbled, but a burst of an idea sent her charging out to the side porch and back inside again wielding a piece of firewood that had not been split into smaller pieces to fit inside the cookstove.
She stumbled twice when she tried to get back onto the chair without dropping the wood or the end of the stovepipe she was trying to balance on one of her shoulders. Finally, when she had both feet planted firmly on the seat of the chair, she took a deep breath, lifted the stovepipe to the right height, and banged at it with the firewood.
For her efforts, she was rewarded with a palm of splinters before the end of the stovepipe slipped and went clunking to the floor, landing right on top of that piece of firewood. “Miserable hunk of iron. I hope you . . . you rust,” she hissed and climbed back down again.
“Having a problem?”
She swirled about, saw Jackson standing in the open doorway that led to the side porch, and wished that stovepipe was large enough that she might crawl inside.
“Define problem,” she managed and hid her hands in the folds of her skirts. Why that man had even a hint of a smile on his face was a mystery, and she was in little mood for unraveling anything that complicated when she clearly could not even put a simple stovepipe back into place.
He glanced at the mess of utensils on the floor, as well as the half-hidden piece of wood and the errant stovepipe, and shrugged. “I thought we decided to ask Caden James tomorrow to tackle that cookstove.”
She gulped hard. “You did, but since I had some free time, I . . . I thought I might be able to do it myself. Unfortunately, I think the stovepipe must have warped or something when I scrubbed it clean. It won’t go back into place.”
He shrugged again, walked over, and picked up the end of the stovepipe. “Iron doesn’t warp,” he quipped and snapped it back into place with one hand.
She gasped. He did not even have the courtesy to pretend it took any effort to do it at all.
“Michael agreed to keep an eye on the boys because I needed to come back home. I forgot to tell you that we’re having supper with the Grants tonight at six-thirty,” he said casually. He picked up the hunk of firewood and carried it back with him to the doorway.
“You forgot?” she managed, unable to fathom how she could possibly get herself cleaned up, let alone her gown, in time to go to supper at the Grants’.
He winced. “I’m afraid I did.”
“W-when did they invite us? This morning?” she asked as her mind raced for a reason to politely decline.
“No. Actually, it’s not an invitation at all. It’s more of a tradition during harvest season my father-in-law started, but I forgot you haven’t been here to celebrate it until Michael mentioned it to me today.”
“Tradition? What tradition?”
“There’s a full moon tonight,” he answered, as if she knew what that meant. “I stopped working so I could come back to tell you now instead of waiting until we finish working this afternoon so you would have time to get ready. Obviously, that was a good idea,” he teased.
She looked down at her filthy gown and rolled her eyes. “Obviously.”
“I thought I’d meet you at the Grants’, since it’s closer than coming back here. You can’t miss their cabin. Just follow the road to the landing and bear left.”
“I’ll find it,” she gritted. “Did you say six-thirty?”
“I did. Why? Is it a problem?” he asked innocently.
“Define problem,” she whispered in return, but he only grinned and waved before hurrying back to the orchards.
She stared at the open doorway for several long moments before she sighed. “The problem, dear man, is that you have no idea of how inept you just made me feel,” she said.
She was not prepared, however, to pose the question of why she also found his grin so irresistible or his dark blue eyes so intriguing or his opinion of her so important, for fear the answer might make this marriage of hers far more complicated than she dared to think.
She had more pressing concerns.
She had no idea if she could actually remove all the dirt and soot from her face and hands, or under her fingernails, for that matter, in the space of an hour or two, but she was quite certain there was nothing at all she could do to salvage her gown to make it presentable.
Especially with a full moon outside.
“Of course there’s a full moon tonight. Why shouldn’t there be a full moon?” she griped. “That way, everyone will be sure to see what a mess I made of my gown and then they’ll all have a good laugh when Jackson tells them how easily he put that stovepipe back into place.”
She turned and glared at the cookstove. “Mark my words. One day I will drag you out of this house, and I won’t need his help to do it,” she promised, tilted up her chin, and marched straight to her room.
Sixteen
With one large great room, three doors leading to bedrooms, and supper bubbling on an open hearth, the Grant cabin looked and smelled just like her childhood home.
The moment Ellie stepped inside, she forgot all about the two new blisters on her one hand and the one stubborn splinter on the other that was lodged too deep to remove quickly. The unease she felt at wearing her Sunday gown slipped off as easily as the cape she gingerly handed to Mr. Grant.
But it was seeing what was left of the intricate design winding three feet wide around the perimeter of the packed dirt floor that made her heart beat a little bit faster.
Mesmerized, she studied the design at her feet and embraced the memories it inspired. Growing up as an only child, Ellie had spent years watching her mother, before she was old enough to help her, etch designs on their dirt floor with sticks her father had sharpened for that very purpose. Every holiday or special occasion demanded a design of its own. No design lasted intact more than an hour or so once guests arrived, either, and this design was no exception.
