The Pastures of Beyond Read Online Free PDF Page B

lost me as she moved and sat up, looking at me. Calmly, she reached for her robe and pulled it on. Unruffled, she called to me as I tried to back my horse through the willows.
    â€œCome back,” she said. “I’m Margaret Biddle. Your uncle told me you’d be here.”
    She was a little China doll of a woman. When she stood up, her hair dangled below her waist. She had blue eyes that seemed to pierce my shyness and lack of experience. Her skin was wrinkled ivory, but there was a suppleness to her leap down from the rocks that made me misjudge her age by twenty years.
    I could hear cowboys whooping and laughing over by the barn, and I wanted to run for it, but she made me tie Yellowstone to the fence and come in for lunch. It was to be my first of many awful meals. In the kitchen, a roaring fire burned in the stove and the heat blistered the painted wall behind. She opened a can of vegetable soup, slopped it into a pot, placed it on the cherry-red stove, then proceeded to forget it as she showed me how to make sandwiches. The butter and jam had to be spread just so, right to the edges of the bread, and by the time she had stood over me until I got it right, the soup had boiled dry and the kitchen was full of acrid smoke.
    She added water in a cloud of steam and we ate the soup anyway, along with the sandwiches, which tasted no better than other sandwiches despite her lecture on how to make them. Clearly, she had had servants all her life or she would have starved.
    I kept eyeing Yellowstone out the front window, wishing I could steal away and hide in the pine woods, but by now she considered me her personal servant, and after I had carried in a body ache of suitcases from her car, she issued me a little apron and made me sweep the house, hang curtains, mop the floors, then carry out rugs to beat for dust on the front rail fence. Yellowstone snorted at my activity, and I think the horse was laughing at me. It was dark before I finally slipped away and led him back to the corrals.
    My uncle arrived late and wasn’t at all glad to see Margaret. I felt better when I saw him take the batteries out of his earphones and lay them on the table for her to see. I was about to cut steaks for supper off the hindquarter of beef in the cooler when she came storming in and said that the meat hadn’t hung long enough yet, and it was her policy to eat the cheap cuts first and save the steaks. The meat was already covered with green mold, and I wondered just how long she planned to wait before it was ready to cook.
    She burned another can of soup and offered some to my uncle, but he said, “I’d rather starve!” and took off for town in his Chrysler. I hid out upstairs in my little bed until I heard her snoring in her corner bedroom, then crept downstairs and fried myself a big steak.
    The next day, Buck sent a cook out from town. She was a big Irish lady with arms like tree trunks, who started immediately to make apple and cherry pies until a delicious fragrance filled the house. She gave me a piece, and, starved for someone to talk to, I regaled her with stories. I had consumed one whole pie when Mrs. Biddle came in from riding her horse and started treating the Irish lady like a servant. I could feel the tension building and stood powerless when the cook seized a butcher knife, ran Mrs. Biddle out of the room, and told her to stay the hell out of the kitchen. The cook stayed on another two hours until the old lady started talking to her through the dining room door, telling her what was wrong with the pies. That evening Ernie Morgan took the cook back to town, and I was treated to another meal of burned soup. But the pies I stole after bedtime were delicious.
    Granted, Mrs. Biddle did have a hold on me. I was deathly afraid she would have me sent back to Michigan if I didn’t humor her. When I put my first apron in the stove, she produced another frilly one and made me wear it. I hated dusting, but came