Wild Sweet Wilderness by Dorothy Garlock

Author:Dorothy Garlock [Garlock, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 1985-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was deepening dusk when Berry came out of the cabin and crossed the yard to her wagons. It would be strange, she thought, to sleep in the wagon without Rachel. It was something she would have to get used to doing. It had been a long time since she had been alone, and the emptiness of it pressed down upon her. Don’t look back, she cautioned herself, lest you stumble for naught. She couldn’t remember when she had first heard the familiar old saying. Perhaps it was something Rachel had said to her.

Fain and Rachel had gone into the big, new room. Fain had promised to put in a plank floor and build a big double bed. In the meanwhile they would sleep on pallets on the smooth dirt floor. When they had gone inside and dropped the hide flap that covered the door, it was like the final parting for Berry. Not that she wasn’t happy for Rachel, but . . . oh . . . there was a sick, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Berry sat down on the trunk and looked around her at the things she had known all her life: the pine chest, the spinning wheel, the barrel churn, and the tin chamber pot. She had come here to gain comfort from being among these familiar things.

“I want to talk to you, Berry.”

Simon! His voice was an impassioned whisper in her ears. The constant awareness of him was fire in her veins and energy in her fingers. All day she had worked furiously, danced furiously, to keep him from consuming her every thought. She saw his outline at the end of the wagon and stood slowly feeling puzzled and self-conscious. She looked into his face but could not speak.

“Come on down,” he said and reached for her. His head was bare and his hair looked wet, as if he had been in the pool again. His hands circled her waist and lifted her down. “Let’s walk out a ways.” It wasn’t a request, it was just simply—“let’s walk out a ways.” She felt dwarfed as she moved along beside him.

“We’ll walk down by the river. Soon the mosquitoes will take over and it’ll be misery to be near the river when there’s no breeze.”

Berry drew a deep breath and tried to calm the unease that had been fermenting in her breast. There was something sweetly fascinating in being beside him in the near darkness. Down the faint slope lay the shimmering river with its unbroken border of trees. The night sounds had commenced around them: the low swish of the river, the faint hoot of an owl, the scrappy twit of a bird.

He drew her to a downed tree trunk and they sat down. What did he bring her here to say? She turned away from him, letting her glance move over the great river with its acrid, muddy smell of decay, over the little islands that seem to float on the river, tapestried in the pale green of budding cottonwoods.

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