Chapter 11
Outside, she found the sun, having spotlighted the shack and done its damage, had retreated behind a mass of black clouds.
The smoke from the chimney plumed, thinned, died; then out came Caroline and, behind her, Andy.
"Caroline drove over in Father's jeep," he informed her. "I had to hire a car to bring me half-way; walked the rest. I shall drive her home and return."
From the look of consternation in Caroline's glance, Sheila knew she had lost her aplomb. An older brother could be more devastating to one's morale than a superior officer.
She tried to give reassurance, but Caroline went hurrying down the steps. Andy followed, then turned back, and walked deliberately to Sheila, now coming down from her perch.
"Hmph," grunted a man with field glasses at his eyes, "look at the lug."
"Yeah," observed the other thoughtfully, "that's what you call bestowing a kiss. I never wasted any that way."
"Me neither. Hey, whatta you say we go down to the folks for dinner. I know where to pick up a haunch of venison. Stop on the way in and tell 'em. Ought to thaw by the time we get back."
"Yeah, I think it's safe. He's getting ready to leave now."
Andy was getting ready to leave, and Sheila was finding her heart being torn from its moorings. Something terrible had happened to Andy. He wasn't sure of himself anymore.
He looked down into her eyes and said huskily, "Sheila, Caroline says I'm not worthy of a girl like you."
And instead of helping the poor dear out, she perked up, delighted at Caroline's championship, to pipe, "She did?"
Then, before she could recover, he said contritely, "I'll buy you a new chair," and went away.
She hurried in to find the water in the teakettle lukewarm. She washed and combed her hair and put on the two-toned pullover she'd been saving for just such an occasion, then nearly smothered because she'd built up the fire to have coffee ready on his return.
That was the trouble with a shack that only opened its windows when struck by a windstorm.
She heard a jeep bleating below and rushed out to find the boys heading for town and asking her mother something. From the pantomime she could tell Mrs. Norris was trying to give them money and they were waving it away.
Sheila gave a horrified glance at the shack and the food shelf. What would she feed Andy?
All she'd planned for supper were some warmed-over beans and the last of the celery and an apple. There wasn't even time to cook poor man's fare. Or was there?
A shrill whistle from below, and she went to look down. She couldn't make out what her mother was saying. In another moment her father came from somewhere, nodded and started toward the steps.
"You're to bring your young man over to the cabin for supper," he shouted at her when half-way up.
Sheila saluted and turned back.
Because pity brings tenderness with it, Sheila greeted and treated Andy differently from city days, and he was completely bewildered.
This, he must keep reminding himself, was Sheila, his little Sheila who never questioned anything he said or did.
She even looked different, and he couldn't tell where the difference lay. In her clothes, in part, but the change was more than that. And he wasn't sure he approved. The brown and orange sweater brought out the copper tones in her dark hair and turned her eyes to butternut brown. But it was too expensive to be worn around a place like this.
Sheila, having moved the lounge chair outside, had moored Andy to a straight chair and gone about preparing the coffee started two hours earlier.
She pointed out that his father needed something he could prepare by the simple expedient of using can opener and frying pan.
"But, Sheila, that's why I'm so upset. He came up only to search for and file on a claim. You told me there were men here who could be hired to work it. And now-"
He waited while she poured the coffee. "Now he won't go back!"
Quickly Sheila turned to set down the coffeepot. What was the matter with her? She'd almost said, "Hurrah for him." Imagine preferring that old log cabin and canned goods to the thermostatically controlled heat of the Carter cottage and a freezer full of food.
Andy enumerated the reasons Mr. Carter should return home. First and most important, he'd lose his unemployment benefits. On the claim he had become self-employed.
"He has until next November to earn taxes, hasn't he?" she asked reasonably. "And your mother showed me how much food she has on hand. There are only the utilities to pay."
"But, Sheila, down there it's time to start a garden."
"My mother does all but the heavy spade work on ours," she offered.
"And there's the jeep. We have a family car."
Point by point he laid down his side of the case, summing it up in the final argument: "At the rate he's going; we won't be able to marry before we reach social security age, unless we move in with Mother. And you know about two women under one roof."
Sheila looked around her cabin with possessive eyes.
Later, she even conceded there were benefits to being poor. The Norris cabin was considerably larger than her own, but the table had limited seating space. It could handle five in a pinch, but six it refused without elbow knocking, especially when four of the six were large, husky men.
Sheila and her mother served.
Mrs. Norris whispered to Sheila in the lean-to where they'd gone to cut a second squash pie. "The minute Andy asked their advice about working his claim, he had them whipped."
"Why?" murmured Sheila, absently slipping a square of spice-dotted golden brown to a plate.
"You can't hate anyone to whom you've given money or advice which is accepted gratefully, because his acceptance proves your value to him."
Andy left early. He said it was because he didn't know the terrain and wanted to get back to the Carter cabin before dark. He was to write that having three male chaperones was too much competition for any man.
He and Caroline would leave at dawn the next morning, he to return to the southern city, she to return to her post.
By special dispensation, Sheila was allowed to walk to the jeep with Andy, alone. As Andy had parked it as close as possible to the foot of the stairway around the cliff, they managed a few moments of privacy.
"Sheila," he grasped her forearms and held her off, facing him, "what are those men to you?"
"Well, one's my father and-"
"You know I don't mean that. They are not brothers or even cousins, yet they scowl at me until I'm afraid to look at you. I never felt less engaged."
"Oh, that's all right," Sheila brightened. "I mean about the scowling, not your feeling. Jed treats me as though I hadn't a brain in my head. He's used to girls making a fuss over him."
"And you don't. I was afraid of that, I mean his attraction for women. Caroline seems quite foolish about him. Dad says that's because he bawled her out, but I don't know. If she comes back, I want you to see they don't become too well acquainted."
Sheila frowned. She had the queerest feeling at the idea of Caroline mooning around Jed.
"There's not much danger," she sighed. "He and Danny will be going out to work before she returns, if she does."
"That takes a load off my mind. And I think I'd better get a ring up to you."
Sheila looked down at her ring finger. Suddenly she put her hand behind her. "Oh, don't, Andy, not now. I'd worry about wearing it, doing the kind of work I do."
After he left, she forgot to go to her folks' home but made her way slowly up the cliff, stopping at the flat rock to watch Andy riding the jeep up to the ridge.
Dear Andy, how tenderly he had kissed her.
The rocks being warm, she sat down on one to review the talk they'd had. Somehow she was finding a peculiar comfort in the fact that Andy too had parent problems.
She carried her thoughts on up the hill.
The men had talked at dinner. They had said if the new administration put through some specific housing bill, lumber would come out of its slump and there would be plenty of work for the men in the woods.
Sheila reduced this to personal economics. Her father would work; could work seven months if things opened up soon enough. If the woods were kept open, if the fire hazard didn't become too critical, he might work until November.
And this was only the first of March! How could she stand those months of loneliness? Jed and Danny might go off at any time now and return to jobs.
She had worked herself into a gloom as deep as the evening when Jed and Danny came up with a platter.
"Your mother said you forgot to bring up this meat. We all have more than we can use."
They said other things. Jed backed away from the folding lounge chair to straddle a straight one and look as gloomy as Sheila and the weather.
"We've been thinking," Danny interpreted the gloom. "Maybe this claim of yours wasn't such a bright idea. Like that Andy of yours said, you're used to people and being busy."
"I told him you'd have been with your folks, if he hadn't had this bright idea," Jed barked.
Well, that was true.
"So we're going after lumber tomorrow," Danny continued, "to throw up an extra room on their place."
"But, Danny, when are you going to work your claim?"
She looked around the shack and saw all of the work she had done: the shelves; the many curtains; the wood box that closed and made a solid, comfortable lounging seat beside the stove; even the collapsible chair that folded at the right time with the wrong people.
"This is the first thing I ever had that was all my own," she said.
"You've made a swell little place of it," Danny commented.
"Not bad," agreed Jed.
"But not without your help."
Jed stood up. "We'll throw up the room; then you can use it if you want to. If you don't, you'd better take up some hobby or you'll go stir-crazy. Your mother said you used to be good at painting."
Sheila's lips opened, then closed. Why go into the cost of oils and canvas board?
Reluctantly, Sheila watched them leave. She was down to seventeen dollars, and she knew her mother was going to need that. The few days' work her father had picked up had brought only temporary relief.
This whole idea of her father's had been ridiculous. She should have refused to join them. That would have saved Andy as well as herself. They'd have staked their claim closer to town and she would have sent them a little money each week.
They could have squeezed through until her father's unemployment benefits began coming again.
Sheila meant to be up in time to wave to Andy from the top of the steps, but she arose only in time to grab the glasses and see the Carters heading for town in a driving rain.
From where she stood, it looked as though they were wearing a tarpaulin with head holes cut in it.
Sheila had venison for breakfast for the simple reason that she was hungry. Her flour was getting low; she was out of shortening. The oatmeal had given out days ago. There were only beans or split peas, and those took too long to cook.
Oh, for Mrs. Carter's freezer and canning closet. When she and Andy were married, she'd see both were always well stocked.
Methodically she put the split peas to soak. She would use her last onion and her last can of Vienna sausages; then she must find some way to go to town even if she had to walk in with her shabby pack on her back.
By early afternoon Sheila had worked herself into a state. She was hungry again, decided the peas had soaked long enough and built up the fire. She used precious peanut oil for biscuit shortening, found a small jar of honey she'd overlooked, then sat at the window contemplating the thought of food.
A head appeared above the rim; then Andy's father stepped up, stood for a moment breathing heavily, stretched and turned toward the shack.
Sheila rushed to the door to meet him and saw the look of happiness on his face, the change in him in the short time he'd been in the hills.
"Here," he thrust a package at her, "Andy sent you a box of candy. I took the liberty of changing it for cheese. That boy is the most impractical person I've ever met."