Kansas Rose

Word count: 3980

At the field’s edge, Rose leaned hard against the harness and gave a low command to the weary horse. She stood for a moment, simply enjoying the sensation of standing still. Finally, she pushed back her bonnet and wiped a grimy sleeve over her dripping face. From the position of the sun, she guessed it was time to get back to the house for dinner. Sadie had promised fried chicken tonight.

Rose unhitched Dan from the plow and started back to the house.

“Sam!” she called. “Time to go!”

A small red-haired boy emerged from the thicket close at hand and ran to his mother.

“There you are,” she said wearily. “What’cha been up to?”

“There’s pirates in them woods, Mama!” Sam raised twinkling eyes.

“It’s ‘those woods’ and I sure hope you defeated those pirates. I would hate to come across one some day.” Rose looked down at her son with a smile.

“Yeah, I got ‘em all. They was pretty scared of me…and my sword.” He held up a long stick and swung it back and forth a few times to demonstrate how frightening he must have looked.

Rose reached out to tousle her son’s hair, but before she could reach him, he took off running toward the house.

“Hey!” she called after him, amused to see his little body working so hard.

Sam turned back for a moment.

“Peter’s home!” That was all the explanation needed. Sam’s big brother, Peter, was home from school and Sam couldn’t wait to tell him about the pirates.

Rose stabled Dan and fed the rest of the livestock. By the time she was finished with chores, she felt almost faint with hunger. Her appetite certainly had improved since taking over the farming responsibilities.

Rose’s sister, Sadie, met her with a smile at the door.

“I was just about to call you. Dinner’s on the table.”

“It smells wonderful. Let me wash up first.”

Despite her hunger, Rose couldn’t help lingering in the cool water of the basin for a moment longer than necessary. She wet the towel and smoothed it over her face and neck. Plowing was hot, sweaty work and her muscles were still not used to the intense physical labor that farming demanded. She was used to churning butter and scrubbing clothes by hand and caring for children, tiring jobs themselves. But plowing fields and caring for the livestock demanded more endurance and more sheer muscle than she had ever used before. With a deep sigh, Rose smoothed her hair and sat down for dinner.

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“Thanks for dinner, Aunt Sadie!” the boys called in unison. They were half-way out the door when their mother’s voice stopped them.

“What are you forgetting?”

Both boys stopped in their tracks and trudged back to plop into their places at the table.

“May we be excused, please?”

“Why, yes, you may,” Rose replied with a smile. The boys were out the door in a flash. They were building a secret fort in the barn loft and every spare moment of the day was dedicated to its construction.

Rose sat and watched her sons run across the barnyard and disappear into the barn.

“Rosie?” Sadie sat across from Rose and nervously played with her fork.

“Yes?”

“Rosie, I need to talk to you. It’s about George.” George Walker was the young man who had courted Sadie for nearly a year now. Ever since the local school teacher, Miss Sadie McGowan, had caught his eye, the two had been together at every dance and social gathering they could manage to attend. Rose thought she was prepared for what her sister would say next, but when the words were spoken, they still felt like a fist in her middle.

“George has asked me to marry him and I have said yes.” Sadie finally looked up to watch her sister’s reaction.

Rose pushed down the knot in her stomach and smiled.

“Oh, Sadie, I just knew it. You two will be so happy.” She held out her hands across the table and Sadie grabbed them in both of her own.

Sadie beamed, looking like the happy young bride she soon would be.

"Oh, Rosie, I’m so happy. I keep grinning like an idiot!” The sisters laughed together, then Sadie sobered. “I’m worried about you, though, with Pete laid up and all. I’ve been thinking about it and…”

Rose held up a hand and said,

"Just you stop right there, Mrs. Walker.” Sadie blushed at the sound of her future name. Rose went on, “Let me and Pete worry about what to do. We’re not your responsibility. You just worry about having everything ready for setting up housekeeping with your new husband. No, I mean it. I won’t listen to anything but wedding plans from you.” Rose smiled to soften her words.

The relief on Sadie’s face was unmistakable.

“Well, all right, Rosie. I hadn’t really come up with a solution anyway,” she confessed with a sheepish grin.

“It’s fine, Sadie. We’ll be fine.” Rose spoke the words with a conviction she did not feel. How could they be fine? How could they ever be fine with Pete lying in bed getting ready to die? Once again Rose pushed back the darkness which constantly threatened to overtake her mind and very soul. She would think about it all later.
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“Pete?” Rose gently shut the door behind her. They had placed Pete in the hired hand’s room, just off the kitchen, so that she or Sadie could easily hear if he needed anything. She crossed to the motionless form on the bed and sat in the chair beside it. She gazed again at the pain darkened eyes, the sallow skin, the prominent cheekbones, and stubbled chin. She reached out to hold the work-roughened hand which lay limp on the coverlet. This man, her husband, had been strong and whole just three weeks ago.

She remembered suddenly the first time she ever saw him laugh, head thrown back in pure enjoyment of the moment. He loved to laugh. He was always teasing her, telling the most outlandish tales to anyone who would listen, or tossing one of the boys in the air just to hear him squeal with laughter.

And then the accident had ended the laughter; all of the laughter in the world as far as Rose could tell.

“Pete?” She squeezed his hand. “Pete, it’s Rose.”

Pete gradually opened his eyes and took a moment to focus on Rose’s face.

“Rosie. I was dreaming. About the first time we met. Remember? The town Christmas party?”

“No, Pete, honey, it was the church picnic, remember?”

His gaze turned confused and vague again. Rose wondered if she should have gone along with his ramblings.

"Oh,” he mumbled. “Oh, yes.”

Rose couldn’t be sure if he really remembered or not, so she changed the subject.

“Pete, I have good news. Sadie and George are getting married. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Pete smiled, and the fog seemed to clear.

“Well, now, that is good news.”

“They’ll be married in June, after school’s out.”

After a pause, Pete said,

“Rosie, there’s something I want you to do for me before I…before I die.”

“Don’t talk like that, Pete.” Rose’s voice was soft and pleading.

“Rosie girl, there’s no use pretending otherwise. It’s gonna happen and you need to be ready.”

Rose concentrated on swallowing against the lump in her throat. She had not cried yet and was not about to cry now. It might be impossible to stop the weeping once it began.

“Rosie, I need you to write to my brother and ask him to come. No, better send a telegram; a letter might take too long.”

“Brother!” she said in surprise. Then softening her tone, she said, “Pete, you don’t have a brother, remember?”

“Yes,” Pete said in a firmer voice, “I have a brother. I never mentioned it because we quarreled and parted ways long before I met you. I never expected to hear from him again and I certainly never thought I’d want to contact him again.”

A coughing fit interrupted Pete’s speech.

The doctor said his lungs would gradually fill with fluid until he finally suffocated. With little or no feeling from the neck down, there was little to be done, except to slow the progress as much as possible.

When he had caught his breath again, Pete went on.

“He was in the army during the war. If you send a telegram to the war department, they’ll know where to find him.”

Rose looked at her husband in silence for a long moment. When she did speak, the objections came out of her mouth as quickly as they popped into her head.

“He’s probably got a family of his own now and couldn’t come even if he wanted to. What was the quarrel about? He wouldn’t want anything to do with us…Does he know anything about farming? He’d come in here and try to sell the place…I won’t ever sell, Pete, you know that. We worked too hard to make a go of this place. The war department is terrible at keeping track of people…it could be years before they could track him down…”

Pete closed his eyes and Rose shut her mouth at the pained look on his face. Silence fell on the little room. Rose allowed her head to droop onto the counterpane.

When Pete finally spoke, Rose lifted her head.

"What we quarreled about isn’t important. He’s family and he will come to help. He’ll come even if he has to leave a wife and children behind. He may not stay, but he’ll come long enough to see that you and the boys are taken care of. He’ll do what I can’t do for you any more.” Pete’s voice broke with emotion.

The lump in Rose’s throat rose and her stomach lurched at the sorrow in her beloved’s voice.

“All right, Pete. I’ll do it. I’ll send a telegram to the war department next time I’m in town.”

Pete shook his head.

"No, tomorrow. Go tomorrow.”

“But the plowing…all right.”

Pete closed his eyes then and breathed a sigh, as if a burden was lifted. Rose kissed the pale hand she held in her own brown one and left her husband to rest.

The weeks passed. Pete got weaker and still no word came from his brother. At times, Rose wondered if Pete only hung on because he was so desperate to see his brother before he died.

“If that’s the case,” she thought, “I hope he never comes.”

One evening, three weeks after Rose had sent the telegram, she was sitting beside Pete again, talking to him about all of the trivial events of the day she thought might entertain him. The lamp burned low as she told him about the boys, Sadie’s wedding plans, and whatever town gossip Sadie had brought home with her. Rose never mentioned what she had been doing on the farm, which fields plowed or planted, which animals sick or troublesome, because she knew it upset him to think of all of the work falling to her.

He would be even more upset if he knew of the stock she was forced to sell. Their farm had just begun to be prosperous in the last year or two, and only after several years of back-breaking work from both Pete and Rose. They had carved this farm out of bare earth and were rightly proud of what they had accomplished. But the building required a lot of credit. As long as Pete was as strong and as capable as he had always been, their creditors had every confidence in Pete’s ability to pay them back. Now that everyone in town knew Pete was laid up and about to die, Rose could no longer get the credit she needed to buy seed or supplies. In fact, a few of their creditors had begun to grumble about demanding payment immediately, before Pete died and Rose was forced to sell out and leave with all of their debts unpaid. So, Rose sold what stock she could, though they had little to begin with. She kept only Dan and Daisy, their work horses, a couple of milk cows and the chickens. Thankfully, the sow birthed a healthy litter that spring and the profit from the sale of the piglets helped. Rose was not about to burden her husband with those concerns, not when she was watching him fade away before her eyes. Every day he was a little thinner, a little paler. His breathing was more and more labored, and he had long coughing fits which left him shaken and gasping for breath.

As Rose rattled on about something Sam had said at the dinner table, Pete interrupted.

“Rosie, tell me what’s going on with the farm. You never talk about it, so I know there’s something wrong.”

Rose looked at him in surprise. Her mind scrambled to decide what she could say to satisfy him, but not worry him.

“Well, nothing’s wrong, Pete. I just didn’t want to worry you with such things.” Rose tried to convince him with her smile that all was well. “The sow had a nice, big litter – eight healthy, fat ones – and I sold them for a nice price. The chickens are laying so much we can barely keep up.” Rose gave a breathless laugh, hoping he wouldn’t ask any more.

From the look on his face, she knew he wasn’t fooled, but he didn’t say anything more about the farm. To Rose’s chagrin, he turned his attention to her.

“You look tired, Rosie. You’re doing too much. Did you hire the Smith boy like I told you to?”

“No,” she admitted. There was no money to pay the lad. “I’ll…uh…I’ll ask his father the first chance I get.”

Pete shook his head slightly and spoke caressingly,

“You’re a terrible liar, Rosie. Jack will be here soon and it’ll be all right.”

Jack. The long lost brother. The brother who might, for all they knew, be dead. Or who might still hold a grudge after all of these years and refuse to come. Or who might not be the man Pete remembered. Many men had been altered by the war; who was to say Jack Harrison was not in some veterans’ hospital, permanently disabled by physical or mental wounds? Rose could think of any number of reasons why the man might never come, and why, even if he did come, it might be better if he did not. But she voiced none of these. She patted Pete’s hand and smiled reassuringly at him.

Pete was looking at her in a tender way she had not seen for a long time.

“What is it?” she asked quietly.

“Put my hand on your cheek.”

Rose took Pete’s wasted hand in both of her own and cradled it gently against her cheek. She knew he could not really feel anything with that hand, but they were both remembering the way he used to hold her face in the candlelight and kiss her.

“Let down your hair, Rosie girl,” Pete whispered.

This had been another ritual of theirs, this lingering and savoring of time, time to love one another in all the ways there were to love.

Rose laid Pete’s hand back on the coverlet, then reached up to slowly unpin her hair. She unwound the long braid and gradually pulled it out, until her hair hung loose down to her waist. She had once despised her red hair, the cause of many childhood tortures, but Pete had loved her hair from the first. Many times, he had tried to convince her that he finally decided to marry her because he couldn’t think of any other way to get to run his fingers through her hair. He had come up with many ways to describe it: “spun gold” being the most outrageous. Pete said it was the crown to her beauty. Rose knew her hair was plain red and that she was no beauty, but she came to love her red hair, if only for her husband’s sake.

The shadow of a smile touched Pete’s lips.

“Spun gold,” he whispered.

Rose smiled through the haze of tears in her eyes.

“You say the most ridiculous things,” she whispered in return, just like she always did. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him. How much she missed his presence at the dinner table and in every moment of her life. How much she missed his teasing and his loving. How much she missed even the long days of hard work they had shared, made precious now because they had been together. But she couldn’t say anything. Even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to say all that her heart wanted to say.

Pete seemed to understand, though.

“I know,” he whispered. “I feel the same.”

Suddenly, Rose heard the door knob rattle behind her. She quickly grabbed her handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes. She did not want the boys to see her tears; it might frighten them. She stood up from her chair and whirled to face the door.

Instead of her sons, though, there was a stranger framed in the doorway. His features were shadowed and unrecognizable to Rose. All she could see was that he was tall and powerfully built, but he might be anybody. How had he gotten into the house so quietly?

Rose gave a frightened start, but then Pete spoke.

“Jack!”

Jack stepped into the room. He wore a crisp, blue army uniform, with gold stripes on the sleeves, and a cavalry sword at his side. He had removed his black hat and was holding it in white-gloved hands.

Immediately, Rose could see the resemblance between this man and the man her husband had been. A stranger might not have seen the similarities immediately, but Rose, so familiar with Pete’s face, knew as soon as she saw Jack that they were brothers.

Jack stood and looked solemnly at his brother.

“Pete.”

“Jack, I’d like you to meet my wife, Rose.” Pete spoke warmly, as though it had not been more than ten years since they had seen each other, then glanced up at Rose, standing beside him. “Rosie, this is Jack. I told you he’d come.”

Rose smiled at Pete and then reached out to shake Jack’s hand.

“Welcome. I wasn’t sure you had gotten my telegram.”

“Yes, ma’am. I left as soon as I got it.” He looked directly into her eyes, without a trace of a smile.

His air of clean authority and stiff formality made Rose suddenly aware of her unbound hair and dirty work dress. She looked down in confusion to where her handkerchief was crumpled in her raw, work-roughened hands. She felt slightly ashamed, as though she had been caught in a flagrant act of unladylike behavior.

Immediately, though, she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. She had been doing what was best for her husband and sons. She would not allow this stranger to make her feel ashamed for doing what had been necessary for survival.

She did, however, want to get out of the room as soon as possible.

“You two must have a lot to talk about. I’ll leave you alone.”

Before she closed the door, Rose turned and spoke to her brother-in-law.

“He tires quickly. Please don’t wear him out.”

Jack nodded and Rose shut the door.


Sadie watched as Rose paced from the window to the door and back again. Since leaving Pete’s room, Rose had cleaned up and coiled her hair on top of her head again, but the creases of worry in her face were deeper than ever.

“Rose, please sit down. You’re wearing a path in the floor.” Sadie smiled, but received no answer.

Rose whirled as the bedroom door opened. Jack stepped into the circle of lamplight around the table.

“Pete is asking for you,” he said quietly. His posture was still correct and military, but he looked pale and shaken.

When Rose did not answer immediately, Sadie stood and asked,

“May I get you something to eat? You must have had a long journey.”

“No.” Jack paused. “No, thank you. I must see to my horse.” He had been in such a hurry to see his brother that he had simply left the tired horse at the hitching post as soon as he rode up.

When he had gone out, Rose moved slowly to the door of Pete’s room. A sick feeling of dread had descended on her and she was reluctant to turn the knob. Somehow she knew that things would never be the same once she opened that door. Perhaps if she never opened it, nothing bad would happen. Perhaps, in a moment, she would wake and find that this had all been a nightmare. Silly. Foolish. She scolded herself. Do what must be done.

“Pete?” she called softly as she tiptoed to the bed. He had already talked quite a bit that evening, perhaps he had fallen asleep in exhaustion. But, no, his eyes fluttered open.

“Rose.” His voice was weaker than ever. Rose had to bend close to hear him speak.

“I’m here, Pete. Just go to sleep now. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“No. Now, Rosie.” He closed his eyes and seemed to gather his strength.

Rose sat on the chair beside him and waited.

“Rose,” he began, “you know that I love you and little Pete and Sam, so whatever I do is only for your good. Just listen,” he said quickly before she could say anything. “Jack is a good man; he’ll take care of you. I never told you what we fought about, but I can tell you that it was entirely my fault. Jack has never been anything but honest and truthful and generous. Rosie, when I’m gone, I want you to marry him.”

Rose made a choking sound, but, at a warning glance, managed to keep from speaking.

“I’ve already spoken to him and he’s willing. He’ll keep the farm and make it run. He’ll be a good father to the boys, and a good husband to you. He’ll love you if you let him. Rosie girl, don’t cry.”

Tears streamed down Rose’s face. She could no longer keep them back. How could he expect her to take another man as her husband when the only man she would ever love, could ever love, was right there in front of her? How could he do this to her now?

“Pete, please, don’t do this.” She choked on the words and sobbed.

Tears ran down the sides of Pete’s face and soaked into the pillow.

“It’ll be okay, Rosie, you’ll see. I promise. It’s all for the best. Jack needs you as much as you need him.”

She tried to speak through her tears, but Rose could only shake her head.

“Hush,” Pete comforted. “Come and lie beside me one more time, Rosie girl.”

Rose wiped her face with her handkerchief, then slipped onto the bed beside her husband. She turned on her side and snuggled her head against his shoulder. She could feel the fragile frame of his withered body; where once he had been all muscle and sinew, he was merely bone and skin. She took his cold hand in her own small hands and held tight, clinging to what she could of the man she loved.

“Promise me,” Pete whispered.

She could no longer deny him anything. She spoke the words which would bind her forever.

“I promise.”

When Sadie came into the room in the morning, she found Rose asleep, curled up beside Pete. Some time in the night, Pete had died.