‘Don’t cry,’ he says, reaching for the handkerchief in his pocket.
‘You just marry me,’ I tell him, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand before walking past the boys, ignoring Sully and Henry pulling faces as I go back to Mama and Betsy.
BETSY’S BREATHING IS so loud and my mind won’t quit.
All day I waited, but Jeremiah ain’t come by to help Papa fix tools or make rope like he always does. And me, staring out the window and slamming doors and clattering dishes the whole time ’til Mama threw me out of the kitchen for giving Betsy fits.
I kick at the quilts, sliding away from Betsy and the warmth coming off her. The floorboards are cold but I go to the window. Nothing. Not a thing but snow outside and my breath turning to mist against the inside of that glass.
Out there in the dark, the creek winds through the trees to our back fence line, to where it crosses over onto the Snyders’ land. The creek is where I first learned something of Jeremiah besides his name and that he didn’t read good for being two years older, the first time Eli got to bothering me on account of our papas’ quarreling. I was feeling easy that day, outside our grieving house, proud that Papa was trusting me with a job so grown up.
The water rippled past my shins, the trout darted past my ankles. But fishing always ends in pounding heads with rocks. My pail sat on the squishy mud by the bank of the creek, four trout in there, brushing the sides with their silver-brown tails. My toes old-man wrinkled from being in the creek since first light. Eli came crashing through the bushes behind me, his face red like a dried apple, and his friends, boys whose papas sometimes did day labor for Mr. Snyder, hanging back in the bushes, ready to run.
‘You can’t fish here,’ Eli told me.
‘I can fish anywhere I want. You don’t own this creek,’ I said, wondering if I should run or swim or scream, and standing frozen like a deer instead.
‘My Papa owns the pool where those fish hatched, and these fish are mine,’ he said.
When he picked up my pail I screamed, ‘No! Those fish are for my Mama! She’s sick!’ but he dumped my four brown trout in the calm water by the bank. They looked sad and stiff bobbing there in the water and I wanted to be everywhere at once, saving my fish before they floated away, pounding Eli’s head. Instead I ran at him, clumsy in the water, and stabbed into his belly with my pole. I didn’t know that was a mistake until too late.
‘How dare you!’ I said. ‘My Mama’s so sick and you throw away our supper?’ And then I said things that didn’t make no sense. ‘That’s for the baby! You take away everything and I don’t even have no brother!’
He grabbed my pole, making my arm jump like I’d got the biggest fish in the world on the line. I wouldn’t let go and he jerked and jerked.
I slipped and fell hard on the green slime creek rocks and when I came up sputtering, he shoved me back in the water before breaking my pole over his knee.
Only the splashing and yelling stopped me from the murder I was thinking.
‘You can’t push a girl!’ one of them boys was saying. It was tall and skinny Jeremiah Wakefield, sticking his chest out, stomping through the water, pushing Eli’s shoulders with both hands, pushing him away from where I was standing. ‘It ain’t right.’
I cried then, everything hurting so bad I sat back down in the water, watching a snot string dangling from my nose like spiderweb and then dropping in the water; I cried for the fresh mound on the hill and the new baby born dead and my Mama sick with fever, but I said, ‘The fish …’
I pull that curtain shut. What kind of fool have I been, thinking Jeremiah would want me for a wife with that as his first real memory of me?
Betsy sprawls across the whole bed. Maybe I ain’t leaving this house after all. Maybe I’ll be sharing this bed with Betsy until she’s the one getting married, until her husband is the one taking over Papa’s farm because a spinster daughter don’t get nothing if there’s a man around to claim it. Maybe Jeremiah didn’t mean a thing by making Eli leave me be, by helping Papa with the rope and the horses. Maybe he was only ever being neighborly and all those kisses I let him steal really were only for practice.
But then I think of his hand on my arm, how he stood me up, saying, ‘You go home, Rosetta,’ his blue eyes a surprise with that dark hair, and him holding out my pail with four fish back in it but cleaned and gutted too, and how I listened when he said, ‘You go home now.’
‘THERE’S MORE SEWING and mending than Betsy and I can get to,’ Mama says, settling down Papa’s plate of eggs.