Matilda never had liked this snip of a girl that Bull done brung home. He was acting like nothing but an old fool! And she aggravated that little hussy every chance she got and had been ever since Bull come dragging her in somewhere around ten years before. She knew Bull wouldn’t do nothing about it. Did Matilda’s heart good to see the spoiled little prissy pants get so discombobulated.
Bull Howser did spoil Jewel. Matilda reckoned he felt like he had to if he was gonna keep her. The man was forty years older than her if he was a day. Made Matilda sick to see an old man like that panting after a woman that wasn’t much more than a girl, and was nothing but a young’un when he’d brought her there.
Bull had picked Jewel up and brought her home when he went down to West Virginia to dig some gas wells. He said at the time that she was eighteen, but Matilda could see that she couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen at the most. Bull was fifty-five and here he was hauling around a fifteen year old. But Bull wasn’t just hauling her. The damn fool had married her! The marriage license said she was eighteen and that wasn’t nothing but a downright made up lie. After one glance at the little girl that still had some growing to do, Matilda knew exactly why Bull had married that young’un. Jewel had the look of Clarice, Bull’s dead wife, and she knew he’d just found him a substitute. The man hadn’t even looked at another woman in the five years since Clarice died and here he’d done brought one home that looked about like the way Clarice used to look.
Matilda, who had no family of her own, kept house and cooked for Bull Howser and literally worshipped the ground he walked on. She’d worked for him almost ever since he’d married the real Mrs. Howser back some thirty years ago. She didn’t work for this little trollop, but Bull told her to be good to Jewel, so she tried because he’d told her to, but she’d only go so far to please her. She wasn’t in the market for raising no kid. And no matter what Bull said, that’s just exactly what the new Mrs. Howser was. Matilda thought about quitting her job many times after the young’un came, but she was attached to Bull, couldn’t bring herself to leave him, and where else could she get paid what she did and still do purty durned much as she pleased? Besides, she delighted in getting on Jewel’s nerves. Made her life worth living.
“I’m a bringin’ it, Miss Jewel! Jus’ give me a minute. This corn o’ mine is killin’ me this mornin’. I knowed it was gonna rain, sure as shootin’. That corn been hurtin’ since yestidy.” And it hadn’t rained a drop, although it had clouded up some.
Bull had told Matilda when he brought Jewel there that her parents were dead and that she had been living with two of her brothers. Thinking incest, as a lot of stories came out of West Virginia and a few other mountain states about that, her eyebrows shot up, and for the first time since she’d been there, Bull actually gave her a disapproving look. “No, it wasn’t like that, Tilda, and I can vouch for that.” And Matilda instantly apologized for even thinking it. She shoulda known that Bull wouldn’t marry no used woman. Jewel had come to him like Clarice had, untouched, but he’d known that before he married her. By the way she acted he could tell she didn’t know nothing about sex. Evidently because her brothers hadn’t told her nothing about it.
Bull couldn’t tell Matilda much about Jewel’s family because Bull didn’t know it all, only what he’d heard when he was down there drilling, and he really didn’t care enough to ask. He had married Jewel for one reason only. He liked to look at her and had to have her because, apart from her dark hair, she was almost the spitting image of Clarice. If they hadn’t lived so far apart, and them being so different, he might have thought they were related somehow.
Jewel’s oldest brother, Clive, was married, and the younger one, Clay, wasn’t, but was sparking some girl named Macie Larson who lived down in Big Bend. And from what Bull had heard, they’d be marrying soon because Macie had done gone and got herself in trouble so they had to get married. Bull didn’t know that Macie lost that young’un she was carrying. All he knew was that Clay owned fifty acres of land that Clive had given him when he turned eighteen. It was his share of the land their daddy had owned, but neither of them boys would sell Bull the mineral rights. He was still carrying a grudge about that because he knew there was gas under that land, but he couldn’t make them sell even though he’d tried every trick in the book. Jewel didn’t get no land or nothing because they figured that when she got married her husband would take care of her.
The oldest boy got the home place, of course, but Clay’s half wasn’t bad. Just needed a house on it and Clay was trying to hurry and build it so he could marry Macie and they could set up housekeeping. But before he had struck a tap on it, Jewel had done took off with Bull and they lived up around Chillicothe, Ohio somewhere.
When Clive and Clay found out their barely fifteen year old sister was gonna marry that old coot, Bull Howser, the fur flew. They’d had a couple of run-ins with him over him pestering them about buying the mineral rights to their property and they’d told him time and time again that they weren’t selling for nothing—-to just get out of their sight. Several of the other farms around them, especially out on Cutter’s Fork had sold him their rights, and he was already drilling on their land, tearing it up something awful. The only good thing that come out of Bull buying up them rights was that he brought in a grader and graded them a pretty good road from Big Bend over to Cutter’s Fork. It wasn’t paved, but it was better than what they’d had.
How Jewel ever got mixed up with Bull Howser, they never knew, but they’d seen him eyeballing her when he’d come around trying to get them to sell. And Jewel saw it, too, and would shyly grin at him like that old man was the same age she was and coulda been a suitor. She’d looked out the window and saw that big black Chrysler that Bull drove and wanted it so bad her heart hurt. They didn’t know that Jewel was so taken with that big black sedan that she’d sneak out of the house every chance she got to go be where he was at, flirting and acting like a starry eyed fool over him. He’d take her by the hand and show her what they were doing on the drilling operation and she’d just smile because she had no idea what he was talking about, using all them big words she’d never heard before. The men on his work crew thought it was funny, the way old Bull acted when Jewel was around. But hell, she never acted that way with them and they would have probably done the same things Bull did if she had. Jewel was a very pretty young girl, especially with those big clear blue eyes and those long dark lashes that curled up long and thick. Couldn’t hardly get your eyes away from hers to look at the rest of her, which wasn’t bad, neither. Put that ragged girl in some fancy clothes that fit her and she’d be downright beautiful.
And Bull could apparently see that. It wasn’t long before Bull was asking her if she wanted to go with him when he left. He’d done finished his job and the rest of it was up to his men. Jewel got all excited and couldn’t think about nothing else but leaving with Bull in that big black car. While being scared to death, she couldn’t help but think about all the things she’d see and the fact that she’d never been nowhere except to school and right around Big Bend. The school was in the bottom below Big Bend, and the church they went to wasn’t even all the way in town. It was on the road that led down to it, but before you got to it. Anything she’d seen outside of that secluded little world she lived in she’d seen in picture books at school. Jewel had no idea how big the state of West Virginia was much less the world.
Bull was no fool and was well aware that Jewel didn’t know nothing from nothing. She’d lived in that same house her whole life and hadn’t seen much. He told her all about his big house, and all the things he’d buy for her if she’d only come with him. She deserved better than being stuck back in these mountains with nothing but the clothes on her back. Why, if she went with him he’d see that she had the