Page 54 of Always to Remember
Ten
SITTING ON THE PORCH SWING,MEG WATCHED CLOUDS DRIFTacross the moon as her thoughts slowly wandered to Clay.
With his gaze always riveted on the granite stone that was slowly materializing into three distinct shapes, he worked from dawn until dusk with the steady determination of a man who wanted to rid himself of a despised burden. His rare smiles and occasional teasing no longer surfaced. He seldom stopped chiseling to rest, and when he did, he walked out of the shed.
Meg suspected he dunked his head in a bucket of water drawn from the well because he always returned with water dripping from his hair and his shirt collar soaked as though it alone had stood in a storm.
Each day, he acknowledged her presence with a “Morning” when she walked into the shed. At the end of the day, he stepped off the stool, walked to his low table, set his tools down, stared out the window, and spoke to her once more. “I’m done for the day.”
Meg loathed the days that dragged by more than she hated the days when she’d waited in dread for news of Kirk. She felt as though she resided in a prison, a prison that she herself had built, using hatred for bricks and revenge for mortar. She had wanted to punish Clay, but she too ended up suffering.
She didn’t want to sit in that shed where silent voices loomed and the steady clinking of hammer to chisel echoed, but she couldn’t stay away.
Every day, his hands revealed more of the shadows. The muscles along his neck, back, and arms strained with his efforts. Then they gradually relaxed, and he touched the stone as though to apologize for his harsh treatment and to promise it would all be worth it.
He hit the stone with enough force to send the sound of a crack ricocheting around the shed. Then he glided his palm over the granite creating a rasping whisper.
The whisper stayed with her long after she left the shed. It haunted her dreams, along with the memory of his hands creating mesmerizing shapes from simple stone.
Sometimes, she felt an apology rise in her throat, and she’d clamp her lips to keep them from filling the shed with remorse and regret. She wasn’t the one who had hurt him. It was his cowardice and his failure to recognize it that caused his pain. He thought she should stand by his side even though he had been unwilling to stand beside Kirk.
She’d laugh at the irony if it didn’t hurt so badly.
She watched a silhouette move through the night.
“What are you doing out here, Meg?” Daniel asked as he stepped onto the porch.
“Just thinking. Where have you been?”
Shrugging, he combed his fingers through his dark hair and dropped to the porch, pressing his back against a beam. “Me and Sam Johnson had some talking to do. Where’s Pa?”
“He fell asleep in the chair.”
“I reckon that’s better than the barn.”
“I suppose.” She sighed. “I guess we all grieve in our own way.”
“I want to do more than grieve, Meg. I want to do something for my brothers. I should have gone with them. I could have been their drummer boy.”
“Drummer boys died, too, Daniel. Then who’d help build the Wrights a barn tomorrow?”
He gave her a wry smile in the darkness. “You think Stick would approve of Caroline marrying John?”
Everyone called Caroline’s first husband Stick because he’d been so tall and thin. They teased him about it, claiming that as long as he marched into battle sideways, the bullets would whiz right past him. But the bullets hadn’t missed him.
John Wright had spent two years in a Union prison. In a tattered gray uniform, he had been heading home to a little fork in the road west of Cedar Grove. Weary from his journey, he stopped beneath the shade of a tree on Caroline’s property. He never reached the fork in the road.
He had married Caroline two weeks ago, and now the community had a reason to celebrate and a barn to raise.
Meg held fond recollections of Stick, memories she’d never shared with Kirk. “Yes, I think he would have approved.”
Shortly after dawn swept the dew from the ground, Meg arrived at the Wright homestead with her father and brother. Helen Barton, who took charge of anything that needed to be taken charge of, assigned Meg the momentous chore of keeping the children away from the desserts.
Having risen long before dawn to make many of the pies and cobblers that now adorned the table, Meg should have welcomed a task that required nothing more of her than to wave tiny, dirty fingers away from cakes and cookies.
Instead, she discovered that the chore left her hands with little to do and her mind with less than that. She tried to enjoy the gentle breeze wafting among the trees surrounding Caroline’s house, but then she would find herself imagining that same breeze blowing through three large windows of a shed. She wondered if it had stirred Clay’s hair before it traveled to work her own strands free from their netting.
She’d captured her hair in a delicate chignon instead of wrapping it into a tight bun. She wasn’t accustomed to the weight of her hair brushing along her neck and shoulders.
