Flirtation Walk Read online

  “I’ll get you some candy when I go to the store next. I promise.” I hadn’t been there yet and hadn’t planned on going anytime soon, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “Now!”

  “I can’t very well go to the store right now, can I? And leave you here undressed? I hardly think your mother would approve.”

  “I want candy!” Her little fists were clenched into tiny balls, and that plump little chin of hers was unwavering.

  “I will get you candy, I just can’t do it right now. But when I do go, what shall I get you? A peppermint stick?”

  “A Gibraltar.”

  “Fine. I’ll get you a Gibraltar.”

  “Lemon.”

  I turned her round and tied the back of her pinafore.

  “Now!”

  “I’m quite certain getting dressed includes shoes.”

  She picked them up and tried to shove them onto her feet.

  “And stockings.”

  Eventually the child was dressed, hands and face washed, and I’d only had to promise her two more pieces of candy.

  I picked up the brush, which she must have taken for a device of torture, for she burst into tears. “There now. What’s to become of those candies if you cry at the slightest provocation?”

  “More.”

  “More what?”

  “Candy.”

  I promised her what I had to, and in the end, she appeared downstairs with her pinafore neatly tied and her hair drawn back from her face and bound with a ribbon.

  My aunt greeted her with a smile.

  Her eyes turned stormy and she seized my hand. “I want candy.”

  My aunt’s brow rose. “I’m sure we’d all like candy, but we’ve none here, and even if we did have some, I wouldn’t give it to a sulky girl like you.”

  Her mouth dropped open, her eyes screwed shut, and she let out an ear-splitting wail. “Lucinda said she’d give me candy! I want my candy!”

  I felt my cheeks flame. “I don’t know that I said that exactly . . .”

  My aunt kneeled to draw Ella into her arms. “Hush now.”

  “I want my candy! She promised! She said if I got dressed—”

  “She promised you candy for getting dressed?”

  Snuffling, Ella nodded.

  My aunt eyed me over the top of Ella’s head. “But you ought to have done that because you were supposed to, not because you were offered candy.”

  “But she said! And she promised me candy last time too.”

  “Last time?”

  “When you told me to stop pestering Bobby.”

  Would the child not stop talking?

  “Do you get candy for everything you’re supposed to do?”

  “No.”

  A look very much like relief crossed my aunt’s face.

  “Sometimes we get other things.”

  “Things like . . . ?”

  “She promised me ribbons.”

  That was true. I had.

  “Or a story when I’m supposed to be sleeping.”

  After kissing the girl on the cheek, my aunt rose. “I want you to do all those things not because of candy or some other promise of reward, but because you know that those are the right things to do. Sometimes there isn’t anyone to see the choices we make. I want to know that in those cases, you can be counted on to do what’s right.”

  “I’m not getting candy?”

  “You’re not getting candy. Or anything else. Now. Off you go to help Milly out back.”

  As the little girl tramped down the hall, my aunt looked pointedly at me. “Sit with me for a moment.”

  I took a seat on the sofa while my aunt sat in a chair.

  “I’m a bit concerned.”

  “By what?”

  “The children adore you, there’s no doubt about that, but I see you appealing to their baser nature.”

  “They’ve been perfectly behaved, haven’t they?” Or nearly so.

  “Yes . . . but you’ve been manipulating them to achieve that behavior, haven’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t call it manipulating.”

  Her brow rose. “What would you call it?”

  “Persuading. People will do almost anything if you can convince them it’s in their own best interest.”

  “That sounds very much like your father speaking.”

  Was it such a very bad thing to believe? “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but . . . you could convince someone to do almost anything that way.”

  I had. I could convince someone to do just about anything for me.

  “Both right and wrong.”

  “I’ve only ever asked them to do things you’ve wanted them to do.”

  “But at some point, they’ll have to do those things not because it’s in their best interest but because it’s in your best interest. Or mine. Or their father’s. If you teach them to act selfishly, they always will. If you reward them with gain at another’s expense, they will think that’s the only way to ever obtain anything.”

  Wasn’t it?

  “Life is about caring for others, not taking things from them.”

  My life wasn’t. It never had been. “But . . . they’ve been doing all the things you’ve been asking them to do.”

  “They have been, yes, but I didn’t want them done like that.”

  “I don’t understand. If I’m not to make them mind that way . . . what other way is there?”

  “They’re to mind because it’s the right thing to do. They’re to help you because they’ve been asked to. They’re to put others needs first because they ought to care for others as well as themselves.”

  “I . . . I wasn’t . . . That is . . . no one ever taught me any of those things.”

  She came off her chair to sit beside me on the sofa and to lay a hand on my cheek. “That’s no surprise, considering who raised you. And I don’t want you to consider that I think any less of you because of what you were taught. I just don’t want you to pass those things on to my children.”

  “But . . . I still don’t understand. They’ve done all the right things.”

  “But it’s all been for the wrong reasons.”

  “The result was the same, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe for you, but not for the children. They were serving for a reward, not out of kindness or compassion.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Her jaw dropped.

  Clearly I’d said the wrong thing.

  “What did that man do to you? How is it that you could grow up in this day and age and never know anything about selflessness or responsibility? Did he use you in those schemes of his?”

  “He didn’t—”

  She cocked a brow.

  “Perhaps I helped. Some.”

  She was looking at me with such compassion, with such pity, that I felt quite naked. As if she could see right inside me.

  “Dear child, he wronged you. And quite grievously.”

  “He always said . . . he said when we took things from others that they deserved it. That if they were smarter, they wouldn’t let us. It was as if we were teaching them a lesson. He said that if they could be talked out of their money that they didn’t deserve to have it.”

  “Sweet child, none of us deserve anything.” She searched my eyes. “But he didn’t tell you that, did he?”

  He hadn’t.

  “Everything we get, we get from God. And not because we’ve earned it, but because He loves us. And those things He withholds, He withholds out of love as well.”

  “But we never took anything from anyone who couldn’t afford it. And really, we didn’t take those things for nothing. He said we were giving them what they were looking for.”

  “And what was that?”

  “In exchange for their money, we were giving them hope.”

  “Hope? Perhaps. For a moment. But wouldn’t you say that in the end, it was a false hope?”

  It was. It had been. There was no getting around that.
“He said . . . he said you didn’t approve of him.”

  “We didn’t. The question is, do you?”

  Did I?

  What my father had done always seemed quite reasonable to me. And he had provided for both of us, hadn’t he? Of course . . . we did have to run away from a town once in a while. And we did tend to avoid lawmen. But they just hadn’t understood things the way we had.

  It seemed so odd that my aunt saw things differently. But the way she explained it also seemed quite reasonable. Only it made me ashamed of all the things I’d said and done. All those people I’d convinced to do things that were for my benefit instead of for their own.

  Was I truly that selfish?

  Perhaps I was, but was there any harm in it? I was alone in the world. If I didn’t take care of myself, who would? For the moment, I relied upon my aunt and uncle. If they insisted upon selflessness and morality and kind generosity, then I would do so . . . but would that not be considered selfish as well? Since I would be doing those things in order to earn my room and board?

  I couldn’t quite see that all this talk about selflessness led anywhere but to self serving. If my father and I had been more honest about our motives, was that truly all bad?

  20

  Seth

  Deke tried to push me out of the room on Tuesday morning. “Come on, come on, come on. Don’t you hear that drum?”

  “There’s a scuff on my shoes. I just have to—” I grabbed up a rag and prepared to spit on the toe of my shoe.

  But Deacon stepped down on my shoe with his heel and twisted his foot.

  I bit back an ungentlemanly response. “Would you mind telling me why you did that?”

  “Because it will be good for a demerit. At least one.”

  Maybe. And now it would take me a good hour to layer the shoe black on thick enough to cover up the mark his heel had made. But I couldn’t do anything about it right then. I risked being late.

  That’s about how the rest of the day went: expecting the best but getting the worst. It’s true that I needed to use these first weeks of the semester to set an expectation for my failure, but old habits died hard. In fencing exercises, the only course Dandy and I shared, I didn’t dare meet the instructor’s eye for fear Dandy would accuse me of trying too hard. But that didn’t stop me from being called to demonstrate. Keeping in mind Deke’s warning, I tried my best not to be too quick or too good. In fact, I was hoping to delay my demonstration long enough to be saved by the bugle’s call to dinner.

  I’d never been good at feigning anything, though.

  The professor finally called a halt to my fumblings and ordered me to stop. “I see you practiced quite hard for this, Mr. Westcott.” Sarcasm was a weapon he yielded with great facility.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Dandy kicked out at my ankle. “Ouch!”

  “What’s that, Mr. Westcott?”

  “I, uh. I . . . yawned.”

  “You yawned?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He glanced about as if unsure whether I was making a joke. “In the future, could you do so a bit more quietly?”

  It didn’t take long for word of the incident to make its way through the mess hall at dinner that afternoon. Deacon was thoroughly disgusted. “Could you yawn a bit more quietly? A bit more quietly!” He tormented the plebes for a few minutes and then turned his attention back to my failings. “If that had been me, I’d have been reported.”

  He smashed his rice into his boiled potatoes and attached a lump of it to some stringy roast beef. “You, sir, are going to have to work on your answers! And you’re going to have to study quite a bit less than you did last year if our plan is going to work.”

  “I already told you—I can’t not study. I won’t. Least not in rhetoric or civil engineering. I will not just sit in class and twiddle my thumbs. I want to learn something while I’m here. Anyone who doesn’t is just wasting the opportunity.”

  “But what good is rhetoric going to do when you’re out in the middle of . . . of Kansas dodging arrows?”

  “Learning is never wasted. And how do you know you’ll never have a use for it? How can you know what lies ahead? How can any of us?”

  “What lies ahead of us is what the army says lies ahead of us. And that, sir, is that.”

  “I’m not not studying. And if you want me to help all of you out in subjects like tactics and civil engineering, then I have to.”

  Deke bolted down the rest of his meal. “Fine. Study all you want. Just don’t use any of it in your recitations or examinations. How’s that for a compromise?”

  I had no intention of changing my habits, so I studied that night the way I’d studied the past three years at the academy. Cadets were expected to come to class ready to recite, prepared to discuss the assigned materials. I figured the trick of it would be not to remember, in the morning, all the studying I’d done the night before. Not that I would forget. I just wouldn’t be able to . . . I let my head drop into my hands. Who was I kidding?

  I was a failure at failing.

  Dandy and Otter appeared promptly at nine thirty when our half hour of recreation began. They took cigars from Deke’s floorboard hiding place and lit them once the door was shut. I crossed to the window and wrestled it open. “It smells like a saloon in here.”

  Deacon took in a hardy whiff of the air. “Smells like heaven to me.” He sat down in my chair and put his feet up on my table.

  I took my pillow from the bed, lifted his feet, and stuck it beneath them. I’d spent a whole lot of time polishing that table, and I wasn’t willing to have it all go to waste.

  With a long look at me, he kicked the pillow away, took his cigar, and ground the butt into the tabletop.

  “What did you go and do that for?”

  “It’s an experiment.”

  “Experiment!”

  “If I did that, I’d probably get three demerits for it.”

  Dandy was already disagreeing. “You’d get two.”

  A rather long discussion ensued, but ultimately, they agreed that Deacon could have expected either two or three demerits for defacing government property.

  I protested. “There’s nothing experimental about that. An experiment requires answering a question you don’t know the answer to.”

  “Exactly.” He took the cigar from his lips and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “You’re the experiment. You’ve never been given a demerit during room inspection. Are you going to be given three, same as I would be, or are they going to give you less? That’s the question. And we’re going to do this experiment in order to find the answer.”

  The answer was two. I received two demerits for the offense of defacing government property even though I happened to own that particular table. My account with the treasurer had been docked in payment for it.

  Deacon and the fellows kept tutoring me on what it took to be an Immortal. On Thursday night before lights-out, Deacon took my coat from its peg. He shook it out and then pulled it on and carefully buttoned it up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You are going to owe me so many favors by the time we graduate . . .” He poured some water from the pitcher into the bowl and cupped his hands in it. Lifting them out, he clapped them against the body of the coat. Then he did it again, releasing a dribble of water onto each sleeve. After that, he rubbed the water in.

  “You are going to stink to high heaven of wet wool.”

  He crawled into bed and pulled his blanket up to his chin. “I know it. See what a good friend I am? I’ve got to start thinking on how you can repay me.” He crossed his arms behind his head.

  “Why are you wearing my coat to bed?”

  “I noticed that none of that dust I stomped into it last week is still there. What’d you do to get it all out?”

  “I beat it on the windowsill. And I brushed at it.” It had taken the better part of an hour.

  “Well, all that hard work is going to be for no use because I’m going to sl
eep in it. And in the morning, because of this water? All the wrinkles will be nice and set. See if they aren’t.” He closed his eyes.

  “You can’t sleep in my coat.”

  “Well I’m not going to sleep in mine!”

  “Don’t do that, Deke.”

  “Why. You want to?”

  “No. I just—”

  “Then go to sleep.”

  21

  Lucinda

  I woke the next Monday morning with the worst of knots in my stomach. Today I would, once again, be holding a class for my finishing school students. On the whole, they were very nice girls. Except for Milly. And it’s not just that she wasn’t nice. She was also devious.

  The weather was fine that afternoon, so I brought chairs out into the orchard behind the house and placed them beneath an apple tree.

  When class commenced, Milly sprawled in her chair, tossed her braid behind her shoulder, and began plucking at the ragged edges of her fingernails. “I don’t know why Mama thinks I need a finishing school.”

  Several of the girls twittered.

  I wished I had a ruler and a desk to rap it on. “Every lady ought to go to a finishing school. I went.”

  She eyed me with a skeptical tilt to her brow. “Are you finished, then?” There was laughter in her eyes and a challenge in her words.

  “Am I . . . ?” People out west were generally quite impressed when I told them about school.

  She grinned. “That’s what I’ve always wondered. When you finish finishing school what exactly have you finished?”

  “Well, I suppose . . . I’ve finished . . . learning how to be a lady.” Or I would have, if I had ever graduated from one.

  “So what, exactly, do you need to know to be a lady?”