you’re well rid of them.”
She nodded, agreeing with his words, then turned and opened the door. Stepping inside the room, she halted, hugging herself as she looked around the four walls. A fireplace built of stone filled the back wall, with a wide hearth that invited her to come nearer. She stepped across the room, her hand touching the back of a chair beside the hearth, as if she could feel the warmth of John’s head there. For surely he must have sat in that very place of an evening, watching the fire.
She paused, then stooped beside the open fire pit, reaching to place several logs inside from the pile he’d left on the edge of the hearth, and looked back at him.
“Can we have a fire here tonight? Will it be cool enough outdoors to warrant wasting the wood?”
He grinned at her, delighted that she approved of the home he had offered. “We can do anything you want, Katie. If a fire will make you happy, I’ll be sure there’s enough wood to build a dandy blaze.”
She rose and her cheeks turned rosy, as if she were embarrassed, and he stepped closer. “What is it, Katie? Is something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m just having a hard time believing that this is all real. That I’m truly here, and I’m going to work for you, John. I don’t deserve this and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for being so good to me.”
He walked across the room toward her and thought she shrank from him as he neared. He halted a few feet from her and softened his voice as he spoke words of comfort and assurance. “Don’t ever be afraid of me, Katie. I don’t ever want you to worry that I’ll hurt you in any way. I’m not angry with you, not now, not ever. Don’t forget that. Don’t ever feel that you have anything to fear from me.”
She nodded, her eyes wide, her stance uneasy as he took her hand in his. “You’re a woman, almost full grown, Katie. You have my respect and my consideration in all things. Can you understand that?”
She nodded slowly. “I think so, John. It’s just so hard to know what to expect. When you turned so quick like and came toward me, it made me think you had cause to be angry with me. I didn’t know if I’d done something to make you upset with me. Sometimes it didn’t take much for those folks I lived with to get mad and sail into me.”
Sensing she needed reassurance, he spoke quietly, his heart aching as he felt the pain of her fear of him. “I won’t hurt you, Katie. I promise not to cause you harm in any way. If we have differences and if you get angry with me, you can speak your mind and I’ll do the same, but we won’t ever be mean or hurt each other. Is that agreed? I want us to be friends, not just a boss and his housekeeper. I may be bigger than you, and yes, stronger, but I’ll not use my strength against you, Katie.”
She sat quietly, then looked up to where he stood, and he recognized the trembling of her body as something instilled by her experiences in the past. He knew that she feared him.
He crouched down before her. “Your heart is pounding so hard, it’s a wonder it doesn’t thump right out of your chest,” he said quietly. “I can’t stand it for you to be afraid of me.”
She looked past him, at the wall behind him, and he recognized that she was unable to meet his gaze. He stood then, stepping back, unwilling to make her feel trapped by his greater build, by the size and shape of him, and his mind sought for a way to bring peace to dwell between them.
“Do you suppose we can sort out the foodstuffs we bought now? Maybe put together a meal of some sort?” His words were calm and slow, his intent being to steady her and make her more comfortable with him.
And in that he succeeded, for she rose from the chair with haste, turning to open the packages they’d brought in, sorting through the boxes of groceries and finding places to put all the supplies he’d ordered. Her hands were quick as she stacked the canned goods in the pantry and made order from the assortment of dry goods he’d purchased.
“I’m going out to tend to the wagon and put the horses in the barn,” he told her, watching as she worked.
She nodded, turning to watch him leave the cabin, then went on with the work that was familiar to her. The small pantry just next to the cookstove held most everything, with shelves on either side of the door. It was about six feet deep, and had four shelves on either wall, enough room to hold canned goods and anything they might need from town with which to prepare meals.
The lower shelf held an odd assortment of kettles, with iron skillets stacked neatly. Katie stooped before the clutter of pots and pans and pulled forth a medium sized kettle, then the smallest of the iron skillets. “These will work for dinner,” she murmured to herself, carrying them out to the kitchen and across to the sink, where she pumped water into a dishpan there.
The reservoir yielded hot water from the stove and she added soap to the pan from a bottle beneath the sink, then set about washing the kettle in preparation for cooking his meal. As she was wiping out the skillet with a piece of brown paper, John came back in the cabin and hung up his outdoor clothing, taking off his boots by the door.
Katie dabbed a bit of paper into the lard from the pail in the pantry and returned to the skillet she’d wiped clean, using the lard to coat it. “You don’t wash your iron skillets, do you, John? You’re not supposed to, you know, only wipe them out. Water’s not good for them.”
John thought she sounded worried and in response, he only nodded his agreement, unwilling to confess that he had washed that very skillet only yesterday after frying eggs in it.
She put the vessels on the stove and found a small slab of bacon in the store of supplies John already had in the pantry, located a knife and sliced through it, forming six thick pieces for their meal. The remaining bacon was wrapped in cheesecloth and put away for another time and the skillet was placed on the stove, where the remains of last night’s fire kept the stovetop warm.
“I’ll have to build up the fire a bit before you can cook anything much,” he told her and she stepped back, giving him room.
“I can do it, John, if you have chores to tend to. I know how to make a fire.”
He grinned up at her, as he crouched before the wood box. “I’m sure you do, but for tonight you don’t have to. Bill gave me the day off, and the men don’t expect to see me till morning.”
In less than ten minutes, he had a fire worthy of its name glowing in the depths of the stove, and she was busily turning bacon and thinking of what next she could do to make a meal.
“There’s beans and such in the cupboard beside the sink,” he told her. “Berta works in the big house and she brought out a supply of canned good for you to use. She heard from Bill that you’d be here, and she said she’d leave some stuff for you in that white cabinet.”
He opened the doors and revealed rows of home-canned produce on the three shelves, both pints and quarts, all of them full of colorful vegetables and fruits.
“My word,” Katie murmured. “I never saw so much good food in one place.”
“Didn’t the Schraders have a kitchen garden?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. But we had to sell a good bit of it to make money. Mr. Schrader took it to town to sell at the general store, and we canned the leftovers. I made applesauce from the windfalls, and he picked the good apples to sell. He didn’t believe in wasting the best of the crops on his family.”
