Gold miners -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Short stories; Western stories
She knew only the songs that had been popular a good while
ago--“Daisy”, “Two Little Girls in Blue”, “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and one
or two more of the same sort. These, to her, were “music”--all there
was of it. She sang:
“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.
I’m half crazy, just for the love of you . . .”
and felt a load slipping from her heart as the snow slips from the
summit of Gray Dome Mountain when warm weather comes.
“Gosh!” Jim murmured. “You ain’t sung that sence--”
He let the sentence die. His eyes smiled above his grizzling brown
mustache and beard. She wanted to put down the banjo and go to him and
touch his hand. But she went on singing, pleased that she remembered
the tune so well, that her voice rang out so clear and true, and Jim
came and sat close beside her.
A strange, deliciously sweet odor crept in under the smells of growing
things and wet earth out there on the dripping mountainside. She felt
just then that Jim was as steadfast and as sure to stand by as the huge
silver spruce that the cabin was built against. She let her cheek rest
on the shoulder of his coat.
“It won’t be a stylish marriage,
For I can’t afford a carriage . . .”
The odor came more strongly. It was like orange flowers. She smiled at
the sentimental notion. Orange flowers on the side of Gray Dome--
“But you’d look sweet--upon the seat
Of a bicycle built--”
The odor came from Jim’s coat.
It said suddenly, “Lorraine Schoonmaker,” as plainly as Jim’s lips
could have said it. To smell it was to see the girl standing behind the
counter in the Gray Dome Dry Goods Company’s store. Probably there was
no one in town who would have failed to connect her with that perfume.
A knife seemed to unfold inside of Rosie. It cut her song off in the
middle of the line and brought her upright in her chair with a gasp.
“What’s the matter?” Jim said, startled.
She got to her feet. She almost came straight out with it. That would
have been like her. It was what she wanted to do. But for the first
time in many years she was afraid. She stared at Jim with deep
revulsion. Suddenly he was part of an elemental horror that she had
climbed out of long ago and that now was closing around her again.
“I--I hadn’t ought to’ve sung that,” she said thickly. “It--makes me
think too much of the old days,” and went stumbling off to the bedroom.
He followed her and stood around, saying things to comfort her, and
finally she pretended that her mood had passed. But when she lay still
at last by his side and thought about Lorraine Schoonmaker, hard lines
pulled at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there for fifteen
years. Long after all traces of it had vanished, she fancied that the
air was faintly touched with the perfume of orange flowers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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