Ruthie danced up from washing up in the creek, her face and hands still dripping. “We’re having ven’son stew, mister.” She blotted her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her dress.
“Smells good,” Mr. Carver said. “I’ve been eating hardtack for so long I forgot how good real food smells.”
“What’s hardtack?” Ruthie asked.
“Kind of a thick dry cracker.”
“What’s it taste like? Is it good?”
“Not too good. It tastes a little like sawdust, I guess. Mostly you just roll it around in your mouth until it softens up, then you swallow it quick.”
Jenna ladled the thick stew onto the plates. “Pass the biscuits around, please, Tess.” She tipped her head toward Mr. Carver.
To Jenna’s embarrassment, Tess pointedly bypassed him and instead scooped biscuits from the crockery bowl onto her sisters’ plates.
“Tess.” Jenna kept her voice calm but inside she was seething. “If you would honor your father’s memory, you will behave as he would want you to. And now, because he is gone, you will behave as I want you to.”
Mr. Carver solved the problem by standing up and reaching a long tanned arm for the bowl. Then he settled back on the ground, dropped the biscuit into his stew and mashed it up with his spoon. Jenna hid a grin. Tess’s rudeness didn’t seem to matter one whit.
She set a bucket of water onto the coals to heat for washing dishes and ate her supper in silence. When she had downed her last bite, she licked the spoon, laid it on the tin plate and handed it to Mary Grace.
“Would you rather wash the dishes tonight or roll out the bedding in the wagon?”
“Dishes,” she said with a grimace. “Let Tess make up the beds.”
Jenna nodded. Tired as she was, she tried to smile at the girl. “Ruthie, your cheeks are sunburned. I’ll put some ointment on before bedtime.”
“Where’s Mister gonna sleep, Jenna?”
Ruthie’s question stopped her cold on the way to the wagon for the medicine kit. Yes, where would he sleep? Up until tonight, she and Mathias had slept together under the wagon, but now what?
Out of the corner of her eye she caught Mr. Carver studying her. Would he sleep in their camp? Under the wagon, where she slept? Absolutely not. She must speak to the wagon master right away.
“Girls, I’m going over to talk to Sam Lincoln.” She pressed the bottle of ointment into Ruthie’s small hand and untied her apron.
“Can I come with you?” Ruthie begged. “Missus Emma gives me cookies.”
“Not this time, honey. I have some...business to discuss with Mr. Lincoln. You stay in camp and help Tess make up the beds.”
Mr. Carver rose and stood looking at her, his hands on his slim, jean-clad hips. The back of her neck grew hot, so she turned away from him and marched out of camp.
“Mister?” Ruthie gazed up at Lee with a question in her sky-colored gaze. “How come nobody likes you?”
Son of a gun. Even a child sensed the resentment against him. It wasn’t just the Borland family; everyone in the entire emigrant train had avoided him since the day he joined them at Fort Kearney. The thick hatred in the air because of his Confederate service followed him everywhere, and now, after killing Mathias Borland for stealing his horse, the heavy fog of dislike felt suffocating.
He knelt down to Ruthie’s level. “There’s lots of reasons they don’t like me, I guess. For one, I’m a Southerner. A Confederate.”
“What’s a ’Federate? Is it bad?”
Lee exhaled and thought how best to answer her. “A Confederate is someone who thought it was worth a fight to keep their way of life. I’m from Virginia, and that’s a Confederate state. Or it was, anyway.”
“Did you fight?”
“Yes, I did.” He’d fought alongside Bobby Lee, not because he thought slavery was right, but because he loved the South and his heritage. General Lee had felt the same.
“Did you win?”
“Nobody wins in a war, Ruthie. It’s a bloody, senseless way to solve a disagreement. The North won. That’s your side. But soldiers I commanded probably killed some of their kin, and that’s why nobody on this train likes me much.”
“Did you ask ’em to kill those people?”
Lee shut his eyes briefly. “Yes, I did. That’s what soldiers do, and I was a soldier. Was your daddy a soldier?”
“Nope. Papa didn’t like fighting. He was a...” Her voice faltered. “A...”
“A Quaker, maybe?”
“Nope. Tess says he didn’t want to go off to war an’ leave us.”
Lee sensed there was more to it than that. There was something odd about this family, and he sensed it was more than just the loss of their father. The girls resented Jenna, that much was clear. Maybe because she was going to bear a child? Or maybe because Jenna had replaced the girls’ real mother.
What little he’d seen of Mathias Borland made him wonder why Jenna had married the man. What was she, twenty-three? Twenty-four? She was too pretty not to have had other offers, plenty of them. Why would she choose a blustering loudmouth like Borland? Unless she was pregnant and he had been her only option.
Ruthie held up a dark bottle of something. “Would you put this on my face? It’s stuff Jenna made to help my sunburn.”
“Wouldn’t you rather wait for Jenna? Or maybe get one of your sisters to do it?”
“Nope. Mary Grace pinches, and Tess pulls my hair.”
Lee accepted the bottle and peered at the hand-lettered label. Aloe ointment. He uncorked it, took a sniff and wrinkled his nose. “Smells like turpentine.” He tipped it over and let the thick liquid ooze out onto his forefinger.
“What’s turp’tine?”
“Smelly stuff. Turpentine is what they use to clean things that are oily.”
Ruthie tipped her face back and closed her eyes. “I’m ready for the bad smell, mister. Do it now.”
He had to laugh. His sister, Serena, had gotten sunburned once. Hattie had doctored her with baking soda, and that night she had sneaked into his room and asked him to wash it off because it smelled funny.
He tilted Ruthie’s chin up with one finger and smeared a thin film of the ointment over her nose and cheeks.
“What’s your real name, mister?”
“My name is Robert E. Lee Carver. Why don’t you call me Lee? It’s shorter than ‘mister.’”
Being named after General Lee was probably one more reason why people on the train disliked him. Long before he became a general, Bobby Lee had been a close friend of his father’s.
He recorked the medicine bottle and stood up. “Show me where Jenna keeps this and I’ll put it away.”
“In the med’cine box. Inside the wagon.”
Lee frowned. “Then you’d better do it. Your sisters don’t like me being anywhere near your wagon.”
“What’s your horse’s name? Is it a boy horse or a girl horse?”
“His name is Devil. He’s a boy horse. They’re called stallions.”
“He’s real pretty.”
He watched the girl clamber up into the wagon and disappear through the bonnet, then started off to check on Sue and Sunflower grazing in the roped-off