Page 18 of My Heart Will Find You

Etta smiled. “The truth is, I had to get in and out of a wagon that was about four feet off the ground. Then he got mad at me for being sarcastic so he drove over all the holes, not to mention the piles of horse manure, and I got beaten up. By the wagon, not him. Although he was driving. Martha said he should learn how to drive, so maybe she was right.”

Henry stopped in the doorway. “Who is ‘he’?”

“Oh yeah. Him. My husband. Maxwell James Lawton.”

“The one who thinks you’re old.” That concept amused Henry.

“‘Old and plain.’ Cornelia called me that. She was Caroline, Ben’s wife.”

“MyBen?” Henry’s eyes twinkled. “My wife, my friends, and my daughter-in-law were there, but I wasn’t? I am wounded to my core.”

Etta laughed. “I really tried to control the dream, but I couldn’t. I even clicked my heels and made like Dorothy, but I stayed in old time Kansas right outside his sod house.”

“Sod house?” Like a true historian, Henry was in awe. “I want to hear every word of this dream. Every syllable. All of it.”

“Gladly,” Etta said. “Maybe telling it will get it out of my mind.”

Henry was right: Kansas beef cured a lot of problems. By the time she’d eaten a steak with eggs that came from Freddy’s chickens, she felt much better. Pretend wagon riding had made her ravenous.

Etta had never been a good storyteller as her family had told her many times and as evidenced by her first rendition of it. Henry, a pro, helped her organize it.

“Start at the beginning,” he said. “First day, first hour.”

“It was only one day. We went to the sod house where I met Alicia, I mean Alice, then I returned here.”

Henry gave her the look of a writer: impatience and a command ofdo it right. All he said was, “Chronological, please.”

When they got to the library, he took the couch while she sat on the leather chair. As Henry directed, she started at the beginning, going through the hours she was there. The wedding, the ride through town, who she saw. She told about Cornelia and how she used her little riding crop. Etta waited for him to comment. She was silently asking if this was like Caroline, but Henry said nothing. When she told about the trip to the sod house, he wanted lots of details. Finally, Etta came to the end, when she saw Alicia. “I mean Alice.”

Etta stood up. “She was so very alone in that glass house. My sister, Alicia, has a great brain. She’s good withpeople. She helps them and always has. But Alice was reduced to sitting alone, looking out at the world, all because of a limp. And her brother is ashamed of her. He may mean well, but he locks her up like she’s a precious gem.”

Henry put down his pen. “You keep mentioning ‘he,’ as inhedid this and that, but you haven’t really told me about him.”

Etta shrugged. “He was all right. Until I made him angry, he was kind and generous. He was certainly lovely to look at.”

“But...?”

“He sees me as a worthless old woman. It’s a wonder he didn’t ask me if I did windows. And he imprisoned his sister.”

“I thought you said he expected her to have children. That implies that she’d get a husband. It doesn’t sound like she was imprisoned.”

Etta sat back down. “Maybe not. I only saw her for minutes. OnlydreamedI saw her, that is. Anyway, he has a beautiful, bad-tempered, entitled girlfriend who still wants him. And he probably desires her. If it weren’t for her father, I’m sure he would have married her and happily lost both his ears.”

“What about his ears?”

She told him of seeing the badly repaired earlobe. “I said he should have gone to Martha.” Etta told him his quip that Martha would have pulled the lobe off.

Henry nodded. “In that era, that’s probably exactly what would have happened. He seems to have known her well.” He closed his notebook. “I think I’d like to do some research now.”

Etta thought he was dismissing her, but she very much wanted to look through some of his thousands of books. And check out the internet. If Garrett, Kansas, really existed, maybe there was some history somewhere.

Not that it matters, she told herself,but still...“Do you mind if I join you?”

“I’d be honored,” he said. “Do you type? Maybe you could transcribe my notes. I’ve been told that my handwriting is legible.”

She took the notebook he held out. “Very legible. And yes, I can type rather well.” She grimaced. “Yet another ability that is useless in the nineteenth century.”

“You can cook. They had lots of beef and beans back then.”

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