Free The Last Letter by Kathleen Shoop Page B

near it.”
    Tommy shook his head and Jeanie smoothed his hair back again. She didn’t want Tommy involved in the removal of snakes. Not because he would be frightened or any less capable than Jeanie herself, but Tommy moved like a tornado—plowing over this, plundering that, interested in the inner-workings of everything, so much so he preferred the insides of everything out.
    James shared Tommy’s curiosity for everything, but Jeanie couldn’t risk either one being bitten. Even in a land where children had adult responsibilities at times, Jeanie had to protect her boys. Not that she wanted to do this duty herself. But she had as much to learn as the children about being self-sufficient. Lack of money and service people taught you that lesson fairly quick.
    “You can both watch from across the way. Thank goodness Katherine’s with your father. Be ready to move out of the way. This isn’t a game.”
    “We have rattlesnake antidote, right? We wouldn’t light out for the prairie without that, would we?”
    Jeanie stopped and sealed that thought in her mind. Be sure to find rattlesnake antidote. Where? Who knew? She wanted to be back in her family home, safe from beasts, feeling cool breezes lift errant hairs off her neck, while she wrote at her fine mahogany desk, hearing the children’s voices lift and fade through the open windows.
    “We’ll get some Tommy. We definitely will.”
    Jeanie stalked the door, taking a few practice swings with the hoe, cursing their situation, and her always missing-when-needed husband. Jeanie shivered despite the heat and wanted to run from the dugout and allow her nearly-a-man son James to stab and kill the rattlers, but she couldn’t do that. Two weeks before she would have paid the help to do such things, but now, it was she who had to grow up and take control of their life whether she wanted to or not.
    She took a deep breath and crept into the hovel, ears straining for the tell-tale rattle. Like a trained snakes-woman, if there were such a thing, Jeanie gritted her teeth and goaded the pair of snakes into a corner, then stabbed at them with cold, silent calculation Jeanie imagined only a person possessing great hate and a black, shallow soul could deliver. Somehow demure, ladylike Jeanie found that place inside her and made the most of it for the sake of her family.
    Once the snakes were dead and their exposed innards shoveled out with the tainted dirt that had been sullied under the carcasses, Jeanie came to the conclusion that laying a rug on the dirt might not be ideal. If they were going to slay intruders on a regular basis, it wouldn’t be long before a thick rug held the smells of death, defining the space as even more hellish than she cared to imagine.
    Jeanie and the boys draped the ceiling with the spare wagon sheet, staking it into the dirt with a mallet and dowels that had been tucked into the floorboards of the wagon. Once that was finished, she commenced breathing again and for the first time in hours she remembered she was pregnant. A spark of fear that all this activity would surely end in another miscarriage was replaced with a calm grounded in the thought that the other miscarriages had come while she’d been ordered to bed. If this child was meant to be, he’d come amidst the birth of their new life and be the stronger for it.

     
    A person didn’t require a genius IQ to discern that the Arthurs would not be able to entertain their neighbors within the confines of their dugout. Jeanie knew—okay she was attempting to convince herself—it wouldn’t take much for her to organize a system that would allow her to graciously accept guests, even the unexpected ones, but with that day being their first, she had nothing to offer the impending influx of visitors. Unless they each desired an embroidered handkerchief —not only did she have a store of them in one of the trunks, but she could stitch a spare design inside a few minutes.
    She rotated around the