have loved to be able to turn herself invisible and watch and listen in; but since she could not, she helped Mary, Lizzie and Helen make quick work of the dishes (in a way that made her shudder to think that she’d just eaten off of these same dishes). There was no mention of joining the men on the porch or having an adult beverage for themselves, but Mary put on the kettle for tea and showed off her latest needlepoint, confiding that there was always so much mending to do that she had little time for such frivolous activity.
Despite the unspeakable outhouse, clean as such things went, she imagined, and the awkward clothing and social status, Ellen Naile realized that she wasn’t really having such a bad time. It had been years since they had dined in the home of friends.
Ellen and Lizzie were washing the breakfast dishes, helping Mary while she fed the chickens and collected the eggs and milked the cow. It was already late, according to something she’d overheard Tom Bledsoe saying. By Ellen’s own reckoning, the time was about six in the morning. Jack and David were assisting Tom with hitching up the team and feeding and watering the rest of the stock.
“I think I felt a mouse near my foot last night,” Lizzie confided, edging closer to Ellen at the wash basin.
“It was probably Helen’s toe,” Ellen reassured her daughter, thinking all the while that Lizzie was probably right. Lizzie and Helen had, at least, had a bed—Helen’s. Ellen’s own sleeping accommodations had been to share the bed with Mary Bledsoe that Mary normally shared with Tom. The bed had seemed clean enough, the mattress too soft, too uncomfortable, the bed’s framework easily felt every time Ellen rolled over. Mary had only one nightgown, and it wouldn’t do to sleep in twentieth-century underwear, so Ellen had slept in her clothes. In the morning, the once-unwrinkled skirt was no longer that way.
Lizzie was lamenting, “And that outhouse! Yuck! I just won’t go, Momma!”
“A couple of hours riding along a dirt road in the back of a wagon with no springs will make you feel differently. Go potty!”
“They don’t wash or anything!”
“You’ll hurt their feelings. Think of it this way. Would you really want to use a bathtub set up in front of the fireplace? I don’t think so.”
“My hair’s all greasy, Momma!”
“So’s mine, so’s your father’s and so’s your brother’s. We’ll find a way of getting clean once we get to town.” Ellen Naile wished that she felt as certain about that as she hoped she sounded.
Ellen had spoken precious little with her husband since their arrival at the Bledsoe place, the way of things between men and women in this time. But in a brief moment Jack had told her, “Bledsoe says that things are a little wild in town, advised us to carry pistols if we had them. Make sure Lizzie’s up on using a Seecamp, and you know how to use that derringer. Each of you carries once we start for town.”
She’d given Jack a snotty “Yes, sir, Jack, sir,” but realized that he was only looking out for them.
With the dishes through, she told Lizzie, “Hey! How’s about this? We go out to the outhouse, and I’ll use it first, then you’ll be using it after me? Okay?”
“Yeah, dammit,” Lizzie moaned.
“Ladies don’t talk that way, now or anytime.”
When they stepped together onto the front porch, the potential lethality of all of the unknown factors into which they were about to insert themselves hit her with the force of a rock. Jack was dressed in the same gray long-sleeved shirt and dirt-stained black Levis he’d worn the previous day. The item of apparel that was different was the gun belt, the black Hollywood rig that Sam Andrews had made for him, the gleaming, long-barreled Colt revolver sitting almost jauntily in its silver concho-trimmed holster.
When she noticed David, helping Bledsoe with hitching the team, the rock that had hit her struck again; but this time it had grown to boulder proportions. Her seventeenyear-old son had Jack’s second Colt, the old blued one that someone had cut the barrel back on to an “unofficial” five inches. He wore it in the old brown-leather Arvo Ojala gunfighter rig his father had so proudly traded for years ago, which David had never worn, never even wanted to try on without being forced.
David had fired a gun under his father’s tutelage for the very first time when