Chapter 4
Before she was ready, she heard boots on the steps outside the door. “David, this is my wife, Katie. Katie, David.” Rafe’s smile was broad and proud. David stood quietly next to his younger brother, nearly a head taller, lean and raw-boned. She could see his large, red knuckles on the rough hand he stretched out in welcome. Where Rafe was loud and excited, David was still and quiet.
“I hope the walk didn’t tire you out much.” David nodded once at her.
“It took longer than I thought, that’s for sure.” She glanced at Rafe and kept working at fthe fireplace. She’d found the plates and put them on the table with the forks and knives. “I’m trying to make corn cakes, but I keep burning them. I ain’t never cooked on a fire before.”
“Oh, Katie, it can’t be much different than a stove. Only a stove’s got a top on it and a fire don’t.” Rafe straddled a chair as he sat at the table.
David looked from one to the other. “I guess you would think it’s the same, Rafe, since you been eating at my house. Don’t let him fool you. He don’t cook at all, Katie.”
“Can you get us some water, Rafe? I can’t leave this right now, and that bucket’s too heavy anyhow when it’s got water in it. I could only get a half a bucket when I went before.”
David moved toward the fire. “I can show you how to set the skillet so you can get the heat right, if you want me to.”
Katie looked at him while she stirred the beans. “I’d like that, thank you.”
“First, you got the grate in the wrong place.” He used a poker to push it back into the mouth of the fireplace. “The fire goes under it, not on top. You want to set the grate further back so that you can put your dutch oven back there to bake and pull the embers out toward you so you can set your skillet down on them. See, the skillets’s got little feet on it to raise it up. That way it’s not directly on them. You got your bean pot on the crane right, though. Just push it further in to get all the heat.” He dusted his hands off and wiped them on his pant legs. “That dutch oven’s really heavy, especially when it’s full, so only use it when you have something to cook a long time, like a Sunday roast. That way the fire can burn down so it won’t be as dangerous when you go to get it out.”
“That’s the best cooking lesson I’ve ever had, I reckon.”
“I’m sure you'll be able to cook real good. You just got to learn how to use a fireplace to do it.”
Rafe walked in with a bucket of water in each hand. He looked from David to Katie and back again. “What y’all talking about?”
“David’s just telling me how to set up the fireplace to do my cooking in.” Katie smiled happily at Rafe, but her eyes lingered on David a second too long before she turned to pick up the corn cakes to place them on the table. Glaring at his brother, Rafe spoke to Katie.
“You should of asked me how to do that. I could of told you.”
“Let me get that bean pot for you.” David reached for a towel to wrap around the sloped, wire handle. He set the hot, cast-iron pot down on a metal trivet instead of the wood. “You don’t want to put the pot directly on the wood table, Katie. If it’s too hot, it’ll burn a ring in.” He pointed to the circles already on the surface. “I don’t reckon it’d make any difference anymore though.”
“You sure are acting smart, brother. I don’t remember you giving me any of these lessons when I moved in.” Rafe yanked a high-back chair with a woven seat over to the table.
“From the condition of this tabletop, I can see that I should have.” David grinned at his younger brother while he sat down. “Do you mind if I say grace?”
“You always do.”
“Lord, for this food we are about to receive, we give thanks.”
Rafe rested his elbows on the table. “I’m starved. We’ve had us a long day, hadn’t we girl? That bear this morning, then the walk.”
“Bear?” David glanced at the two of them. “You didn’t tell me about a bear.”
“Early this morning before daybreak we was sleeping away, then I hear something messing and snorting around. I opened up my eyes, and there was a big, black bear tearing through our sacks.” Rafe used his arms to show how big the bear was. “It was full-grown, too. And I bet it was hungry.”
“Didn’t you tie the bags up off the ground like I told you?”
“No, I should have, but we fell asleep early, and I never woke back up to do it.”
“Well, you through it, but you sure are lucky.”
“ Rafe covered me up so the bear couldn’t see me.” Katie was proud of her husband. “He like to have smothered me to death, but he took care of me.”
“I was afraid that bear was going to eat my backside though. Are we going to eat?” Katie got up to get the spoon to serve.
“I fried some fatback in the skillet so I’d have some grease for the corn cakes, then I used the pieces to go in the beans. I don’t know if these beans have had long enough to cook. It’s hard to know how hot things are hanging them over the fire this way.”
“I expect it’ll be fine.” David spooned beans onto his plate. The liquid was nearly all water, not the rich gravy that would develop when beans were cooked properly for several hours.
Rafe reached for the plate of corn cakes. As he lifted one, then another, he could see the bottoms was burnt black. “Are they all burned, Katie? Did you think you could hide the burnt part?” He threw two corn cakes onto his plate.
“I did the best I could. I told you I ain’t never cooked in a fireplace before.” Katy wiped her face with a towel to take the sweat off. She was thirsty. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbows and her hair was pinned up off of her neck.
David bit into a forkful of beans. They were still crunchy, but he chewed them quietly. Rafe took a mouthful, chewed and spit them back out onto his plate. “These ain’t hardly hot. I thought you said you knew how to cook.”
Katie kept her eyes focused on her plate with her hands flat on either side of her plate. She knew it wasn’t good. How could it be? Only three hours since she got here and she’s cooking beans in an iron pot in a fireplace. She wondered what Rafe thought she could do with no groceries in the house.
"I can’t eat this.” Rafe threw his fork into his plate. Katie startled at the sound. “What have we got left over from yesterday. Anything?”
“Only what the bear didn’t eat. A slice of cake I was saving and a ham biscuit.”
David swallowed his mouthful of beans with a big gulp of water. “I reckon I have some canned peaches y’all might enjoy. I’ll just run over and get them.”
Before David got out the door good, Rafe lit into Katie. “Is this the best you can do?
“We just got here. How am I supposed to fix anything when they ain’t nothing to fix? You got a garden somewhere? I can’t just walk in and cook nothing and make it something. I got to have time, too. Time to figure out where stuff is and how to use this fireplace. .” As she talked, Katie got angry. She’d cried enough on the second day she was married. She was angry now. “This ain’t what you promised me. You promised me a good house. You promised a farm. This ain’t no farm. This is a piece of land and a broken-down shack. I got a mind to head back home right now.” She jerked her arm out and pointed to the door. “What do you think my daddy’d say if he knew what you brung me to?”
Rafe turned on his heel. He slammed the door open banging it against the wall and marched away through the field away from his new wife even though his legs trembled from tiredness.
In the house, Katie flopped onto a hard chair and stared at the doorway with her stomach churning. Tiredness settled into her spine. She was so tired, it was hard to breathe.
“Katie?” She heard David on the porch. “Here’s the peaches. Where’s Rafe?”
“He took off.”
“I’ll go find him in a bit.” He stood next to the table where he’d set the peaches and fiddled with the clasp on the canning jar. “Katie, Rafe’s got some growing up to do. You both do. Y’all got to figure out how to grow up and be married at the same time. He didn’t get things ready for you too well. Tomorrow we can go into town and get some supplies from the store to get you set up. Did he show you the garden??”
She rubbed her dripping nose with her wrist. “No, I didn’t even know there was one.”
“That boy." He shook his head.v"You got a big garden up the hill. We got corn coming up already. And we put in potatoes right before he went down to get you. Did you bring any seeds with you?
“My daddy sent me with a sackful of seeds. All sorts.”
“Good. We’ll get you a real good garden, then. You scrape these beans back into the pot. If you’ll push the arm of that crane over the fire, it’ll cook all night, then in the morning, you’ll have some fine beans for breakfast. You got any salt?”
“There’s a little over there in the trunk.”
“Good. Throw a pinch of salt in. That’ll help the flavor.” He tapped the table with his knuckles. “I’ll get on then. I’ll send Rafe back over when I find him.”
Katie watched him walk away from the house swinging his bent arms in time to his jog. David made her husband seem like a boy, but back home, Rafe had seemed a man next to the boys at the mill and in her church. Rafe came in broad-shouldered and swaggering, showing up in town on market days and Sunday mornings. When he noticed her one Saturday morning in town, she’d been thrilled by his attention. Then, Sundays he turned up at church service smiling at her from across the aisle. Then, they were walking home, too close for comfort for Katie's mog. “Marry in haste; repent in leisure,” her mother’d told her more than once; but she didn’t listen. All she saw was blue eyes that stared into hers and wavy blond hair that curled around the back of his ears. She saw strong forearms that looked like they could lift her up without him breathing hard. She thought he was beautiful, and she didn’t care what her mother said about cooking and keeping house because she wasn’t thinking about anything but him. Besides this was only two days. Only two days into marriage. Surely things would get better. She could learn to fix what he liked and keep the house the way he wanted. He was only being mean because he was tired from all that walking. And he was hungry. She should have planned better and saved some of the food instead of them eating it while they walked. She moved around the place fixing the beans to cook all night, laying the tin with the cake on the table and wrapping the plate holding the last biscuit with a flour sack. He could eat that when he got back. Then he’d feel better. Mama always said that food in his stomach makes a happy man.