She paused dramatically, affording me an uncomfortable and (since this was Rachel, after all) unusual moment of silence for conjecture. I pictured the parlor door shooting open to reveal Mr. Long and the eldest Goodrich girl in a passionate embrace, or Mr. Long on his knee proposing to a simpering Miss Goodrich, or, at the very least, Mr. Long standing by the pianoforte and dutifully turning the pages of sheet music for the accomplished Miss Goodrich to play.
Lord knew, ever since Mr. Long and I had shared that warm exchange in Betsy’s Bower on Lammas Day, the man hadn’t spared three whole minutes for me. Maybe Miss Goodrich was keeping him too busy. I focused on the apple in my hand. “So what did you see?”
“A harpsichord!”
“Really?” Relief made me smile. “Yet another fine instrument. Don’t tell my mother. She’s always comparing me to the oh-so-great Goodrich girls with their superior talents.”
Rachel shrugged. She was sitting on a low branch of the apple tree opposite the one in which I’d similarly perched. She crossed her legs at the ankles and confided, “No doubt the Goodrich girls have added harpsichord lessons to their schooling, for there was never a family more passionate about the science of music. But I couldn’t like the new songs they took turns strumming for us. Tame stuff. Perhaps I’m too simple to appreciate such sophisticated entertainment, but I’d take one of the old ballads any day.” And with this announcement she sang, in just about the loveliest voice I’d ever heard, “‘On Friday morning he did go, into the meadow and did mow. A round or two, then he did feel a poisonous serpent at his heel.’”
“‘Springfield Mountain.’ Very nice. I like that one. Start it again, and I’ll sing harmony.”
From beginning to end, we belted out the tale of the mower fatally bitten by a rattlesnake. Our voices blended beautifully, and we grinned through every tragic verse, each visibly pleased with the other’s skill.
“How do you sing harmony like that?” she exclaimed.
“I’m not sure, really. I just can hear it.” I happily swung my leg and took a bite out of the apple I still palmed. Around the mouthful I said, “Your voice is extraordinary. I’ve never heard the like. Do you happen to know ‘The Children in the Wood’?”
She answered by humming the opening refrain.
And before I knew it, we completely forgot our apple picking in the process of testing each other’s recollection of all the ditties we’d ever heard. With relish we hashed out grim songs of painful death, jealousy, violence, lost love, betrayed affections, and even a particular favorite of mine about the murder of illegitimate children. Then we decided to skip the hymns in favor of the seafaring songs we knew: tunes about floods, shipwrecks, and piracy.
When we exhausted our common ground, she taught me two ballads I’d never heard, one about domestic trickery, the other about a streak of impossibly good luck.
I returned the favor by teaching her a song I wasn’t supposed to know. “Luke sings it all the time,” I said. “It’s called ‘Corydon and Phyllis.’”
“Let’s hear it.”
“‘Ten thousand times he kissed her while sporting on the green, and as he fondly pressed her, her pretty leg was seen. And something else, and something else, what I do know but dare not tell.’”
She laughed. “How deliciously vulgar. Sing it again, so I can try it.”
Her enthusiasm prompted me to reveal my familiarity with a few more bawdy tunes, including “Old Maid’s Last Prayer” and “The Female Haymakers.”
We were still in our apple trees, sticky from chomping on fruit between songs and making up a naughty verse to add to the already obscene “The Farmer’s Lass,” when the sun sank in a pool of violet. Twilight stole into the orchard, and Gideon called for us from the direction of the house.
We reluctantly climbed down from our trees and found our baskets, suspiciously light given the number of hours we’d supposedly spent harvesting.
But I didn’t regret the day’s poor pickings. As we returned to the house, hauling our fruit, we shared a last duet, choosing “The Deceitful Young Man” as our encore.
It was a great song. Not the least bit missish.
*
According to Mama’s almanac, “The moon of September shortens the night. The moon of October is hunter’s delight.” We were in the thick of October, and it was a hunting period, literally and in more subtle ways.
Though the sorghum squeezing and cider milling filled a good portion of our time, the harvest rush had ended. Mama resumed our school lessons, and Papa and my brothers enjoyed a vacation from work with fishing and hunting. A spell of Indian summer cooperated with the men’s ambitions. They left early in the morning and stayed out until the late afternoon, when a strange blue haze filtered the sunshine and made a dream of the flaming foliage and flickering shadows. October drifted along as lazily as the leaves floated past us, and at the end of each day of sporting, the warm sham-summer wind carried cheerful whistles across the land and heralded Papa and the boys’ return. They arrived at the house looking relaxed and pleased, proudly bearing their day’s catches like scaly and furry trophies.
Perhaps his hunting successes emboldened Gideon. Or perhaps the three Weldses’ looming January departure gave him a sense of urgency. Regardless, my best brother set out to court Rachel, less bashfully than before and with more regularity.
There were many opportunities for him to do so. Rachel spent a great deal of time at our farm, largely by my request. We were getting along quite well, and I guiltily wondered how much of her previous chatter had been inspired by nerves, a jittery attempt to lighten the heavy mood my unfriendliness had perpetuated. She generously never mentioned my former coolness—not that we suddenly took to conversing like chums. Rather, ever since the two of us had discovered our mutual, if rather questionable, passion for tavern tunes, we simply sang.
These duets happened whenever work brought us together. We sliced apples for the splint drier and paddled the big pan of boiling sorghum syrup to the tempo of our songs.
At first, Gideon and the rest of the Winters listened in bemusement. In October, on the evening of my seventeenth birthday, when Rachel joined us for a special celebration, she and I entertained the gathering with exuberant singing. The next day, Mama, smiling through a wince, suggested we might try sounding a wee less cheerful while crooning about the gruesome murder of the innkeeper’s daughter at the hands of her jealous highwayman lover. But since Rachel and I assiduously avoided the tawdrier tunes when others were about, the family got reconciled to our little concerts and even began requesting ballads.
Sometimes Gideon would take advantage of a lull in our singing to sidle in, sharing with Rachel a towel full of the late raspberries he’d discovered in some woodland thicket or bringing her a pretty songbird feather.
He was less successful, however, when he brought the whole dead bird, and not even the assurance that he hadn’t actually killed the hummingbird convinced her to handle the ruby-throated creature.
One afternoon, after the men returned with their catch of fish for our supper, I listened in silent amusement as Gideon tried to enthrall Rachel with his clever rabbit trap, showing her the reed that held up the trick door, pointing out where the bait would hang, explaining how to trail the lure, then vividly describing the lightning speed with which the bent reed would trigger the shutting of the front. His voice practically vibrated with coaxing enthusiasm.
She was conspicuously unimpressed. After listening with a frown and gnawing on her plump lower lip, she murmured, “I can’t like the deceitfulness. It seems kinder, somehow, to just shoot the unfortunate thing.”
“A man needs more skill in snaring than he does shooting.”
“But then you leave the poor animal alive in its little coffin—for who knows how long—until you get around to finishing it off. That’s cruel.”
“It’s got plenty to eat while it’s stuck in there.”
“What if the sad animal left its young in a hole? They’d starve without her. You could be killing a mother rabbit and, as a result, her babies, too.”
I finished scraping the scales off a fish and shook my head. “Murderer.”