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“Cookies,” Leah announced. “From the bakery downstairs.”
She watched Verena’s expression tighten.
“You mean that Chinaman is baking cookies?”
“Of course.” Leah folded her hands in her lap. “It is a bakery, after all.”
Verena grimaced. “Chinese cookies,” she snapped. “What next?”
“Oh, no,” Leah corrected. “Brown sugar cookies, I think. With raisins.”
The dressmaker’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t want any Chinese cookies, or Chinese anything else, in Smoke River. Do we, ladies?”
“No!” Darla declared.
“We won’t stand for it,” Verena said, her lips thinning. Something in the tone of her voice sent a chill up Leah’s spine.
Ellie, Jeanne Halliday and Leah sat frozen, without making a sound.
“I don’t care if they are Chinese cookies,” Noralee ventured in a small voice. “They smell good!”
“They are not ‘Chinese’ cookies, Noralee. Chinese cookies are very small and thin. These cookies are big.” Leah held up her thumb and forefinger, rounded into an arc.
“That,” Verena snapped, “is not the point.”
Jeanne abruptly folded up the knitting in her lap. “Alors, what is your point, Verena?”
“The point, Mrs. Halliday, is that we do not want any foreigners in our town.”
“But,” Jeanne pointed out with a half smile, “I come from France. Does that not make me a foreigner?”
Verena swallowed, clamped her teeth together and began splashing tea into the flowered china cups.
Darla rose to carry the tray. “Your skin is as white as mine, Jeanne. But Charlie What’s-his-name at the bakery definitely isn’t white.” Defiantly she stared at Leah.
Leah took a shaky breath. She was not afraid. What she felt was bone-deep fury. She had never known such anger, not even when the village boys in Luzhai had called her names and pelted her with fruit rinds.
It was not fair. Not fair to her Chinese uncle. Not fair to the Negro blacksmith at the livery stable or the Nez Perce hired man at the Hallidays’ ranch. Not fair to anyone who was different.
“Oh, I see,” she said into the sudden quiet. “Being an American means having white skin, is that it?”
“Yes!” Darla exclaimed.
“No,” Leah said, her voice quiet. “I am an American, and my skin is not white.” In fact, after a month of the summer sun, her usual creamy-golden skin had darkened in color. Now she was so sun-browned she looked more Indian than Chinese.
“Skin color, it makes the difference, does it?” Jeanne inquired, her eyebrows rising.
“That’s not what we learned in school,” Noralee said. “Is it, Miz Johnson?”
While Ellie responded to the girl’s question, Leah slipped out the door, down the stairs and into Uncle Charlie’s bakery.
“I would like some cookies, Uncle. A dozen of the ones you just baked and a dozen of the chewy kind with raisins.”
Upstairs in Verena’s apartment, Ellie was still talking when Leah stepped back inside and edged around to the tea tray. Hurriedly she arranged the cookies on a plate and passed it around the circle with unsteady hands.
She was shaking so hard she did not notice when Teddy barreled through the door.
“Leah.” He yanked hard on her sleeve. “Pa wants you. Hurry.”
Thad lay spread-eagled on the board sidewalk, and Leah bent over him, trying to control her racing heartbeat. Uncle Charlie sprawled beside him.
“Thad, what happened? What have you done?”
“He didn’t do nothin’,” Teddy volunteered. “Mr. Ness and the barber jumped on him and then that big guy, Ike somethin’, he joined in.”
Thad groaned and twisted his pounding head to look up at her. “That’s pretty much it.”
Her face tightened. “What started it?”
Thad drew in an uneven breath. “Ness was jawing at me about the drought, about what a fool I was to plant wheat in Oregon instead of barley or oats.”
There was more, about Leah and Uncle Charlie being “dirty Chinks,” but Thad wasn’t going to repeat it. Carl Ness sure rubbed him the wrong way. All summer long, every single time Thad entered the mercantile to select things on Leah’s shopping list, the mercantile owner gave him some cockamamie excuse for being fresh out of the items.
“The next thing I knew, Ness was trying to wrestle me out the front door, and Poletti, the barber next door, barrels out of his shop to help him. Oh, I almost forgot about Ike Bruhn, big strapping fella with a punch like a—”
“Sledgehammer,” Leah interjected through tight lips. “I can tell from the condition of your face. Oh, Thad…”
