“For your information, he’s the man I’m going to marry,” Helen said proudly. “I have made up my mind and no one is going to change it.”
“Who is he?” Carrie repeated.
Snatching the photo from Helen, Euphonia turned it over. “It says on the back that his name is Joshua Greene, and the children are named Tem and Dallas. What an odd name for a girl, or is the girl named Tem? Look, he misspells Tim.”
As the women passed the photo around, they looked at it. The little group was a handsome family, in spite of the children’s clothes, and the man was certainly handsome in a dark sort of way, but they had all seen better-looking men before. Not one of them could understand why Helen would hide the photo or why Carrie was looking as though she’d seen a ghost.
“I liked the man we saw last week better. What was his name? Logan something or something Logan, wasn’t it? He didn’t have two children already. If I were going to marry a man I’d never met, I’d want one without children so I could have my own.”
The other women nodded in agreement.
Helen snatched the photo away from the women. “I don’t care what you think. I’m going to marry him and that’s that. I like him.”
Euphonia, who had been reading Joshua Greene’s letter during this, began to laugh. “He won’t want you because he says he wants someone who knows how to work. He wants a woman with a great deal of farm experience, one who can run a farm if she has to, and he says he doesn’t mind a woman who is older than he is—he’s only twenty-eight—and he doesn’t mind a widow. He’ll even take on more children. What’s important to him is that she knows all there is to know about farming.” Smugly, she looked up at Helen. “You know so little about farming that you probably think the way to get milk is to pump the cow’s tail.”
Helen grabbed the letter away from her. “I don’t care what he says he wants. I know what he’s going to get.”
As Helen grabbed the letter, the photo fell from her hands to the floor and Carrie picked it up. Looking at it again, she decided that it was the eyes of the man that called to her. His eyes were filled with hurt and longing and need. They were the eyes of a man who was crying out for help. My help, she thought. He needs my help.
Standing, she tucked Choo-choo under her arm, smoothed her blue silk skirt, and handed the photo back to Helen. “You can’t marry him,” she said softly, “for I am going to marry him.”
There were a few seconds of stunned silence before the women began to laugh. “You?” they laughed. “What do you know about farming?”
Carrie was not laughing. “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know a great deal about that man. He needs me. Now,” she said regally, “if you’ll excuse me, I have some preparations to make.”
Chapter Two
Never before in her life had Carrie had to do anything in secret. She had never needed to hide anything from her family or friends, but now she had to work entirely in secret.
It had been easy to silence her friends. Since they had been children and had formed their circle of seven, Carrie had always been the leader of the group, with the others following Carrie into whatever she decided to do. They had sometimes been appalled or even afraid when one of Carrie’s crusades threatened to get them into trouble, but they had always been obedient to her wishes. Carrie’s oldest brother said that this was why Carrie had them for friends, because she could make them do what she wanted to do.
And now here was something that Carrie wanted more than she had ever wanted anything in her life before.
After that first day, the day Jamie came home, the day she first saw the man’s photograph, she was a woman obsessed. It had been rather easy to defeat Helen and “take” Joshua Greene away from her. Carrie felt a little bad about taking him away from her friend, but Helen had to understand that Josh—as Carrie was already calling him—belonged to Carrie. Josh was hers and hers alone.
That first day she left the old Johnson house, the photograph and letter in one hand, her dog in the other, she went to the old Montgomery boathouse that was rarely used any longer. She wanted to be alone to sit and think and look at the man and his children.
She seemed to have some sense left, for she repeatedly told herself that she was being ridiculous, that this man was no different from a hundred others who had sent in their pictures. She had seen them all, but none of the pictures had ever affected her. Not at all. She had never thought of leaving her home and her family to go out West to marry one of the men from the photographs. But this man was different; this family was different. This family was hers and they needed her.
She spent the day in the boathouse, sometimes sitting on a dusty old rug in a canoe, sometimes pacing, sometimes just staring at the photo. After pinning it to the wall, she looked at it and tried to analyze what it was that she liked about the man and his children. She tried to think in cold, hard terms, but try as she might, she couldn’t come up with any answers.
Twice she told herself that she should forget about the man, that maybe the look in his eyes was just a trick of the light. Maybe there was another reason for the sadness she thought she saw. Perhaps the children’s dog had died that morning, and that was why all of them looked so lost and alone.
At about four, when Choo-choo was getting restless and Carrie was beginning to feel her own hunger, one of the old men who worked in the chandlery came into the boathouse.
“Beggin’ your pardon, miss. Oh, it’s you, Miss Carrie.”
Carrie nodded to him then motioned for him to come to her. “Look at that picture,” she said, pointing to where she’d pinned the photo on the wall. “What do you see in that picture?”
The man studied the picture, squinting at it. Carrie took it down from the wall, so the old man could take it to the window to look at it in the light. She could see that he was taking her question very seriously. When he finally looked back at her, he said, “Handsome family.”
“Anything else?” she urged.
The man looked confused. “Not that I could see. They don’t look rich, but maybe they’ve fallen on hard times.”
Carrie frowned. “They don’t look, well…sad to you?”
The man looked surprised. “Sad? But all of them’s smilin’.”