We’re cold.” Mari tugged at Jan’s sleeve.
“Code,” agreed Evie, bobbing her head up and down.
Jan stretched and looked over at Tildie. She was sleeping restfully on the pine needle mattress. He reached for his boots and pulled them on. The room was chilly, the fire almost out.
“I’ll go out and get some firewood.”
“Boister already did.”
Jan looked quickly about the cabin. Boister was nowhere in sight. He sprang to his feet and grabbed his heavy blanket coat.
“How long has he been gone?”
“Since we ate breakfast.”
Gladys was gone, too. Maybe nothing was wrong. Gladys could lead him back to the cabin. Jan wrapped a scarf around his neck and pulled a knitted cap down over his ears. He opened the door to the blaring light of sun on mountain snow.
He hurried around the corner, kicked the snow off a couple of smaller logs and brought them in. Repeating the process several times, he soon had the fire blazing.
“Mari, I have to leave you in charge of Evie and Tildie. Keep Evie away from the fire. If Tildie wakes up, give her some water and a biscuit to chew on.” The little girl nodded solemnly. Jan kissed her good-bye on the forehead and ruffled her hair. He gave Evie a quick peck and looked one last time at Tildie.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He opened the door and plunged into the deep snow, following the tracks left by Boister and Gladys.
No new snowfall obscured their tracks into the woods. With Jan’s long stride reaching over the heavy snow, he quickly covered the territory Boister had plowed through in his meandering.
When Jan found Boister, he had the strong urge to yank him up by the back of his pants and blister him good. All manner of disasters had plagued his thoughts as possible explanations for the boy not returning.
Boister and Gladys lay in the snow, scrutinizing the most makeshift rabbit trap Jan had ever seen. Built with the Indian snare in mind, it had some imaginative white boy innovations that would not have held a weak, blind rabbit for the time it took it to turn around, but boy and dog were entranced with the contraption.
Jan did nothing to cover the sound of his approach and Boister and Gladys turned eagerly to greet him, jumping up to run to him.
“Look, Jan,” Boister pointed to his trap. “If we wait awhile, we’ll have rabbit stew for dinner. I thought some rabbit meat would make Tildie feel better. You know, give her the broth.”
“That’s a good idea, son, but I need you back at the cabin. We’ll hunt up some meat for dinner for sure. Come on, now. Tildie’s better, and if she wakes to find us gone, she’ll be worried.”
Boister abandoned his trap immediately. “I was gathering twigs for kindling and then I got to thinking how they would bend and make a trap. It’s not exactly how White Feather taught me, but…” He looked over his shoulder at the trap. “Can we check it tomorrow? Or should we take it apart? I don’t want a rabbit to get stuck in it and die if we aren’t going to eat it.”
Jan didn’t have the heart to tell him the first stiff wind would collapse the contraption, so he shrugged. “We’ll check it tomorrow.”
They went back to the house to find Tildie still asleep and the girls playing their never-ending game of putting dolls to bed, waking them up to feed them, and putting them back to bed.
In the evening, Tildie awoke. She sipped on venison broth, courtesy of Jan’s afternoon hunt. The next day, she sat up on her bed. A few days later, she sat in a chair.
“Jan, these children smell,” she said, wrinkling her nose over Evie’s shorn head.
Jan looked up from the snare he was helping Boister craft. His head shook slightly from side to side in bewilderment.
“Didn’t your mother make all twelve of your sisters and brothers take a bath from time to time?” Tildie’s eyebrows arched over her eyes.
“Yes, but we had a tub and towels and something beside old lye soap.”
“Jan, you and I stink as well.”
“What do you propose we do about it?”
“We’ll give the children a standing bath.”
“A standing bath?”
“We need two pails.”
Jan looked over at the area beside the fireplace where he put together his food. He wouldn’t exactly call it a kitchen, but it had a pretty good-sized kettle. His mind wandered over his meager possessions.
“There’s a bucket I use to feed the horses.”
Tildie looked toward the stable end of the cabin. In an economy of heating, it attached to the house with only a half wall between the main room and the stalls. The children thought this was marvelous and visited with the horses regularly.
Jan explained that the heat of the horses’ bodies helped warm the cabin, and in the dead of winter, he didn’t have to worry about them being in a drafty stable freezing to death. Of course, the stable room had originally been built for a horse and a pack mule, but the three new tenants were comfortable, if crowded.
“What became of the original tenants?” Tildie had asked.
“Traded them.”
“For what?”
“Books.”
“Books?”
He shrugged. “Winter before last, I read to the animals every book I owned two or three times each. Gladys and I don’t mind walking. We didn’t really need the horse and mule once we were settled in.
“Gladys is good company during the winter months, but the books truly were better companions than the horses, and I didn’t have to feed them every day and clean out their stalls.”
Boister laughed. He threw back his head and laughed. The girls looked up in surprise, and they laughed too, more to be joining in the merriment than realizing what had struck their big brother as funny. Tildie who had never seen her cousin laugh, smiled with tears in her eyes. Gladys began to bounce around him and added her bark to the hullabaloo. Jan swept down on the boy and tickled him until Boister begged him to stop. Mari and Evie joined in by tackling Jan and claiming they could save their brother.
Eventually the fun subsided, and the four lay in mock exhaustion on the floor.
“I haven’t forgotten the baths,” said Tildie.
“Our babies need a bath, too.” Mari reached out to rescue her doll, which had been carelessly thrown aside.
Evie bobbed her head in agreement and crawled over to where her doll lay upside down against the wall.
“So does Gladys, Tildie,” pointed out Boister.
Jan drew the line at the dog. “Only humans are getting bathed this winter,” he declared.
Mari’s lower lip came out in a pout. “Sarah is ‘uman.” She squeezed her beloved playmate.
Jan looked to Tildie for advice.
“The dollies can take a bath with you. Just hold on to them, and they’ll get plenty clean.” She hoped this would suffice. It was going to be a chore just washing bodies and clothes.
They heated the water in the kettle, then they stripped down Evie first, standing her in the horses’ feed bucket. With Tildie’s supervision from her chair, Mari and Jan wet down the giggling girl, soaped her up, and sponged her off. She was wrapped in a large piece of blanket and relegated to Tildie’s lap while the process was repeated for Marilyn.
As long as Evie did not wiggle too much, Tildie enjoyed having her in her lap. The little girl settled quietly, with only a reminder that too much bouncing hurt her cousin.
Boister did his own wetting down, but Jan declared he wasn’t energetic enough in the application of the soap and ended up scrubbing him.
“My skin’s gonna come off!” Boister declared as he turned pink under the scant bubbles of the lye soap.
The girls laughed, and Jan showed no mercy.
“Your turn,” Boister declared as he hunkered by the fire in his blanket. His eye was on Tildie.
She turned pink, but declared, “Yes, I must have my turn. If you gentlemen will put up a blanket for privacy, Marilyn will help me.”
“Me, too,” insisted Evie. “Wash Tildie. I scrub, scrub, scrub-a-dub.”
“You’ll have to be gentle, Evie,” Jan said, gazing at Tildie’s blush. “Remember, your cousin got hurt and has been sick.”
“You better let me do the scrubbing,” said Mari, importantly. “You can wrap her in the blanket.”
“Well then,” said Tildie, thoroughly embarrassed. “Shall we get started?”
Her bath took a while and there was a lot of giggling behind the makeshift screen. Jan concentrated on keeping a fresh supply of water warm and studiously avoided watching the blanket being bumped by the figures behind it.
With all the bodies washed except Jan and Gladys, Tildie instructed from her bed that their clothing must be washed. The dollies were set on the hearth to observe the proceedings as they, themselves, dried. With only the small bucket and kitchen kettle to use for washing, laundry was an all-afternoon project. During the process, Mari and Evie managed to get their cloth dolls soaking wet again, and they were laid farther from the hubbub of activity to dry.
The children were draped in their blankets with ropes binding their garments to them. Jan said they looked like Romans in togas and spent an hour explaining about the customs of early Greece and Italy while they labored over the soapy project. Tildie fell asleep directly after dinner which was cooked amidst garments hanging about, drying in the cabin’s fireplace heat.
She awoke to a darkened room. The blanket still hung over the space in front of her bed. Jan was there straightening the pallet he slept on beside her. “Jan.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I can’t see you.”
He leaned over the bed so his face was close to hers. She felt his nearness, but it was so dark she still couldn’t see.
“It’s snowing again,” he said.
She touched the side of his face.
“Your hair’s wet.”
“I took a bath after the children were in bed.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, you’re welcome. I couldn’t be the only human in the cabin who smelled.” She could hear the laughter in his voice.
“No, I meant, thank you for going to all the trouble. For the children, for me.”
“We’re going to be here a long time, Tildie—maybe until spring. You can’t travel now, and by the time you can, hard winter will have set in.”
“Are we going to be all right? Is there enough food, enough fuel?”
He took her hand, the one with which she unconsciously stroked the side of his face, feeling the smoothness of his just shaved cheek.
“Yes, that’s no problem. I’ll hunt now, and we can dry the meat or let it freeze in the cave I use for storage. There are trees all around us for firewood. It may be difficult to get enough hay in for the stock, but I’ll manage. It would be nice if we had a cow.”
“A cow?”
“Milk and cheese for the little ones.”
“The children will get bored.”
“If they’re bored, we’ll give ’em baths. That took all day, and they loved running around in their togas, playing chase between the hanging clothes.”
“Do you mind them?”
“Last year, I was nearly crazy with loneliness. No, I don’t mind them.” She liked his tone of voice. She could listen to him talk this way every night. It was nice to have him there.
“There is something else, Tildie.” He sounded serious. Was he going to talk about her injuries? Did he have something to say about why it was taking her so long to recover?
“What?” she whispered in her anxiety.
“I don’t think of you as one of the children. I think of you as a woman—a warm, beautiful, kind, sweet woman.”
She started to cry.
It alarmed him. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Tildie. I’d never do that, but it’s going to be a long winter in this cabin, and I’ve got my heart set on marrying you.”
“But I’m sick and maybe a cripple… and until today, I smelled like a goat.”
“You’re brave, and you’re going to get well. And until today, I smelled like a buffalo.”
She giggled through the tears.
“I don’t know if I love you,” she admitted. “Sometimes, I think I’d die if you walked away and left us. I’ve thought about when we get back to the ranch and you’ve fulfilled your promise to see us safely away from the Indians. Then, you’d leave us. I don’t want that.”
He stroked her hair back from her face, and she felt warm and secure.
“I’ve never been in love, Jan. I don’t know if I can be a good wife. All I’ve thought about the last two years is keeping a roof over my head, then keeping the children safe and happy.”
He kissed her then, interrupting her ramblings. When his lips released hers, she gasped a tiny little breath of air that tickled his lips so close to hers.
“Jan,” she whispered.
“You talk too much.” He kissed her again.
When he pulled away, he stared at her, barely making out her features in the dark.
“Do you think you could love me?” he asked.
“Yes.” The answer came without hesitation. He smiled. He shifted, deliberately moving away from her but retaining her hand in his. He sat on his pallet with his back against the wall.
“We’ll have to get married,” he said huskily.
“How can we do that?”
“I’ll marry us. When the spring comes, we’ll register the wedding in the nearest town that has a courthouse. That may be clear back in Oklahoma. Can you handle that? We’ll be married in the eyes of God. The children will be our witnesses. It’s unusual, but out in the wilderness, that’s how some couples have to do it.”
“Have you married people before?” This thought fascinated her.
“Yes, I was a regular preacher before I came west to be a missionary.”
“I didn’t know that. Jan, there’s an awful lot I don’t know about you.”
“We’ve got a long, cold winter ahead of us. By spring we should be pretty well acquainted.”
“When will we get married?”
“Let’s say… when you’re strong enough to stand up for the ceremony.”
“How long do you think that will take?”
He rose up on his knees and came to kiss her again, trailing light, feathery kisses over her forehead, down her cheeks, and settling on her lips. He pulled himself away abruptly.
“Go to sleep now, Tildie. Rest, so you can get well quickly.”
“Good night, Jan.”
“Good night, honey.”