Page 9 of Mail Order Mercy

Dorothy narrowed her eyes. “You say that as if you don’t believe me.”

Ella picked up a stocking and turned it inside out. “I believe Albert loved Henry like a brother. I also believe a man can begin doing something for one reason and keep doing it for another.”

“Ella Sanders, do not go matchmaking in my grief,” Dorothy said.

Ella held up both hands. “I am not matchmaking. If I were matchmaking, there would be pie, and you would have no doubt of my intentions.”

Despite herself, Dorothy’s mouth twitched. “Why does everyone keep bringing pie into bargains I never agreed to?”

Dorothy’s first instinct was to protest. Albert was Henry’s friend. He came because he felt guilty. He brought milk because Clara had saved a biscuit and wood because Tommy had asked for it. There was nothing more to be made of it. There could not be.

“He is helping because he thinks he failed Henry,” Dorothy said.

Ella’s expression softened. “Maybe he did. Maybe a good man can fail and still decide to do better.”

Dorothy looked down at sleeping Grace and smoothed one finger over the baby’s cheek. She was not ready for Albert’s help to mean anything beyond help. If it meant more, then she would have to think of Albert as something besides the man who had carried Henry’s coffin. Her heart was too tired for that.

The accident at the mill happened late on Friday, when everyone was tired and thinking more about supper than the blade.

A board kicked back hard enough to knock a tool from Albert’s hand and split his palm open against a rough edge of metal. The cut was not wide enough to threaten his life, but it bled freely and left red drops scattered across the sawdust.

For one terrible moment, the mill yard became the day Henry died. Albert smelled fresh-cut wood and iron and blood. He heard men shouting. He saw Henry’s face pale beneath sawdust. He felt again the helplessness of standing there with two working hands and no way to put life back where it had gone.

Albert had thought he had put that day in a locked room inside himself. He worked longer hours, slept harder, talked less, and pretended the door would hold if no one touched it. But blood on sawdust had found the key. The memory had not weakened with time. It had only waited for him to stop running.

“Travis?” Everett’s voice cut through the memory. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Everett caught his arm. “It is a cut that is dripping on my floor.”

“Your floor has seen worse.”

Everett’s face tightened, and Albert regretted the words as soon as they were out. “Go get it tended,” Everett said. “That is an order, not advice.”

Albert wrapped his hand in a rag and shook his head. “It’s only a cut.”

He should have gone to his own cabin. He should have washed it there, bound it tight, and pretended the sight of blood had not pulled him backward six months. Instead, he found himself walking toward Dorothy’s cabin with his injured hand pressed to his chest.

Dorothy opened the door and took one look at his wrapped hand. “Albert.”

“It’s not bad,” he said.

“Men only say that when it is bad enough to need tending.” She stepped aside. “Come in.”

She set Grace in Clara’s arms, sent Tommy to sit on the pallet, and brought Albert to the small table. Her movements were quick and sure, the same way they had been when Tommy scraped his knee, or Clara woke feverish in the night. Albert sat because she pointed to the chair, and because obeying her seemed easier than speaking.

Dorothy unwrapped the rag and drew in one sharp breath. “You should have gone to Belle. She has better supplies.”

Albert looked at the basin, the cloth, and the firm set of her mouth. “Belle would fuss,” he said, “and you command.”

Albert nearly smiled, though his hand throbbed. Dorothy in command was easier to face than Dorothy frightened. He wondered how often since Henry’s death she had been forced to sound certain when she was not, to take charge because there was no one else to do it. The thought quieted him more effectively than her order.

“Then be still.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Albert obeyed, though the corner of his mouth twitched when she tightened the cloth.

Dorothy told herself her hands were steady because she had tended children through fevers and scraped knees, because a cut palm was nothing compared to what she had already survived. Yet her heart beat too fast as she wrapped the cloth around Albert’s hand. He had come to her. Not to Belle, not to his own empty cabin, but to her door with pain in his face and blood on his sleeve. She did not know why that mattered so much, only that it did.