Chapter Four
By the time Carrie was seated atop Josh’s old buckboard, she was beginning to wish that she had never seen his photograph. He was so angry at her that he wouldn’t look at her or speak to her. He yelled at the horses and snapped the reins as though the horses were the cause of his problems, and they rode off into the setting sun, Carrie’s baggage wagon following them.
“I really didn’t mean—” Carrie began, but Josh cut her off.
“Don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I need to think what to do about this.”
“You could let me prove myself,” she said under her breath.
When Josh heard what she’d said, he gave her a sideways look of such contempt that Carrie tightened her lips, refusing to say another word to him.
After a long ride over a dusty, rutted road, they turned down a weed-infested road that was hardly more than a path and slowly made their way into the tall trees. After some minutes the trees cleared away, and Carrie could see the house.
Never in her life had she seen such a forlorn, unhappy-looking place as that dilapidated little house. She had seen poverty in Warbrooke; some of her Taggert cousins were poor, but their houses didn’t have the miserable, sad, forlorn look about them that this place did.
All the ground in front of the house and surrounding the little shed behind the house was bare of grass and plants, and the cheerless house itself had no glass in the windows, just oiled paper. There was light coming from inside the house, but not much, and there was no smoke coming from the ragged-topped chimney.
The house itself was nothing but a box, with a door and a window on each side. Another perfectly square, perfectly boring box was attached to the back of the house, and she wondered if it was a bedroom.
Turning, she looked at Josh in the moonlight, her face showing her disbelief at what she was seeing. For the life of her she could not picture this man living in a place like this.
With a set-jawed straight-ahead stare, he refused to meet her glance, but she knew he was aware that she was staring at him. “You see now why I wanted someone who knew how to work. Could you, Miss Rich Princess, live in that?”
Carrie thought it was odd that
he could see how appalling the place was yet he hadn’t done anything about it. Her Taggert cousins lived in semisqualor, but they all seemed to love the mess. When they visited her house, they were uncomfortable and couldn’t wait to leave.
Angrily, as though the house and everything about it was somehow her fault, he halted the wagon in front of the house and got down. When she was closer to the place, Carrie could see that the house was even worse than it had looked from a distance. The missing roof shingles made her wonder if the house leaked. The front door was hanging by one hinge, giving the place a drunken appearance. Since there was no porch on the house, there was what looked to be a permanent mud puddle in front of the door.
With what seemed to be a permanent mood on his part, Josh angrily came to her side of the wagon and lifted her down. But there was no lingering of his hands on her waist this time. In fact, he didn’t so much as look at her as he left her standing while he went to the baggage wagon.
After one more look at the house, she turned to the baggage wagon and asked the driver to hand her the two small carpet bags that were loaded on the front of the wagon. One was full of her night things and the other contained her gifts for the children.
“Are the children inside?” she asked Josh.
“Inside waiting in the cold and the dark, and I’m sure they’re hungry.” The anger and bitterness in his voice made it sound as though the condition of the place was Carrie’s fault.
She didn’t say any more to him, but turned and went toward the house. It wasn’t easy trying to balance the two bags and Choo-choo at the same time, but Josh made no effort to help her. He was giving orders to the baggage wagon driver about where to unload Carrie’s trunks, and he let everyone within hearing distance know what he thought of all her baggage. The broken hinge of the front door made it nearly impossible to open, and when she did get the thing open, the frame nearly hit her in the face. It was a struggle, but she managed to get it open enough to go inside the little house.
If she thought the house was bad outside, she wasn’t prepared for the inside. Grim, she thought. A bleak, unhappy, colorless place that was guaranteed to make its inhabitants wretched. The walls were of bare planks darkened with soot from many fires. In the middle of the room was a dirty, round table with four mismatched chairs, one of which was leaning to one side from a leg that was too short.
In the corner of the single room was a cabinet that seemed to be the kitchen of the house, for the top of the cabinet was piled high with chipped dishes that hadn’t been washed in so long that they were dusty as well as encrusted with dried food.
As Carrie stood with her back to the broken door and looked about the dreadful place, at first she didn’t see the children. They were standing in the shadows of the doorway to what Carrie assumed was the bedroom, standing quietly, watching, waiting to see what was going to happen.
They were beautiful children, even more beautiful than their photograph showed. The boy looked as though he might grow to be more handsome than his father, and it was obvious that the girl would someday blossom into splendor.
In spite of their good looks, the children looked as unhappy as the house did. Neither of them had combed their hair in days, maybe months, and, although they were fairly clean, their clothes were dirty and torn and had that faded look that only hundreds of washings could give to cloth.
As Carrie stood looking at them, she knew that she had been right: This family needed her.
“Hello,” Carrie said as cheerfully as she could manage. “I’m your new mother.”
The children looked at each other then back at Carrie, their eyes wide in wonder.
Carrie went to the table and set her bags on it, noting that the table was greasy and needed a good cleaning. Sniffing around her legs, Choo-choo pulled to be free, and when she unsnapped his leash, he went immediately to the children, both of whom looked down at the animal in astonishment. Neither of them made any move to touch the little dog.
Opening the first case, Carrie withdrew a porcelain-headed doll, an exquisite creature, made in France and dressed by hand all in silk. “This is for you,” she said to the girl, then waited for a seemingly endless moment until the child came forward to take the gift. She looked as though she were afraid to touch the elegant doll.