“I don’t know, but a woman can always tell.”
George wasn’t sure he liked being so transparent. It was hard to defend yourself when other people could read you so easily, and he had too many secrets he wanted to keep.
“What else can a woman tell?”
“When it’s time to stop talking,” Rose said with a smile that rocked George off balance. “I just told Zac that girls don’t get a book when they’re born, but they do. They get one about boys. And the first thing it tells you, right on the first page, is not to tell everything you know. Hand me that last turkey. If I don’t get them cleaned, I’ll never have the stuffing started before Zac gets back. And he won’t let me forget it.”
“You don’t have to spend so much time with him,” George said. “He can be an awful nuisance.”
“I don’t mind. Besides, he makes me laugh. It’s a nice break from all the fussing around here.”
Rose hadn’t meant to say that. She had made a promise to herself to stop criticizing so much.
“I’m sorry. I guess we don’t see it. You’d have to have known our father to understand. Monty’s not half so bad.”
Rose felt chastised.
It turned out to be one of the busiest days of George’s life. While Rose dressed the turkeys, prepared the giblets for gravy, and mixed the stuffing, he and Zac beat the blankets, turned the mattresses, took up the rugs, and washed the bedroom floor. Then he chose and cleared a site for the chicken coop. After that he cut four posts and set them in the ground to form the corners of the coop. Next he cut some saplings from the creek bank, dressed the trunks, and built the roosts. Then taking a pencil and making a rough sketch, he figured out how much lumber he would need for the roof and sides.
Later he and Rose walked over every foot of ground within a half mile of the house trying to decide on the best place to locate the garden. Tyler had placed his garden on top of the ridge. It was safe from floods, but the ground was hard and dry and the crops exposed to the wind. Rose meant to plant her garden in the rich soil of the creek’s floodplain.
They came upon Mrs. Randolph’s grave in a small grove of live oaks just beyond the well. Only her name and the date of her death were carved into the weathered board that marked her final resting place.
“I mean to carry her back to Virginia someday,” George said. “I think she lost her will to live when she had to come out here.”
Rose could only wonder how the mother of seven such vital, vigorous sons could give up on life. Rose would give almost anything to have such sons. And she would fight to her last breath to see them grow to manhood.
But it wasn’t fair to judge Mrs. Randolph. There was so much Rose didn’t know about the family. Besides, any woman who could inspire her children to wallpaper a log cabin deserved her respect.
By the time she and George had spent more than an hour deciding what they wanted to plant, how many rows they needed, and how many seeds they required, it was late afternoon. The sheets were dry, so George carried the mattresses inside so Rose could make up the beds. Then while Zac looked for the eggs a second time that day, George tried to milk the cow. The cow might not have minded clumsy, but she minded George. Zac finished the milking while George split wood for the stove.
“I think it would have been easier to go with the boys,” George said as he sank into his chair at the head of the table. Rose was fixing dinner. He wasn’t especially hungry, but the smell of roast turkey was enough to tempt even the most lethargic appetite.
“There are still a lot of things around here I can’t do by myself,” Rose said.
“Make a list, and we’ll start working our way through,” George told her, but without much enthusiasm.
He wasn’t thinking about chores. He was thinking about Rose. It had been years since he had been around a woman for more than a few minutes. He couldn’t remember their effect on him in any great detail, but he knew it was nothing like his reaction to Rose.
He felt no chivalrous desire to protect her from bandits or rustlers. He wanted to take her to his bed and make love to her until he didn’t feel this burning inside his loins. He wanted to lose himself in her sweetness until he stopped having the queasy feeling all over when she brushed against him. He wanted to bury himself in her body until he was certain he would never want a woman this badly again.
He also felt desperate to break the hold she had on him.
He wanted to be free of any ties that would keep him from going where he wanted, doing what he liked, being what he wanted to be. He didn’t want to endure the same difficulties and frustrations his father had. True, his father had been weak and selfish, but George had watched unending demands wear at him until he lost his control, his dignity, his self-respect.