Page 13 of Counting Backwards

After that day, I knew for certain that my feelings for Clarence were more than just friendly in spirit. I couldn’t say what he thoughtin return, except that everywhere I went on the farm, Clarence seemed to show up beside me.

On the fourth day after the Dobbses left, I was hauling a basket of turnips toward the root cellar, and then there was Clarence.

“Let me get that for you,” he said, lifting the heaping basket from my hands before I could answer. “Carrying for Carrie,” he said, laughing a little at his own joke. I grinned back at him and his foolishness. I stood at the top of the steps, trying to decide whether to follow him down to the cellar, but he made quick work of it. Wasn’t even a minute before he was on his way back up, his strong hands free again.

“See ya,” he said, winking at me before walking off toward the barn.

He showed up at lunchtime that day too, holding a big yellow flower. I couldn’t tell you what type of blossom it was, but I knew it was the kind that grew down by the little crick.

“I saw this and thought of you,” he said, pushing the flower gently into place behind my ear. It felt silly to me, wearing my dusty work dress, heading back to the coop to shovel dung while having a flower wedged into my hair. But I left it there just the same.

All the rest of that day, I found my eyes roaming across the property. I looked up toward the barn roof, where Clarence was working and hammering while Ralph stood on a ladder beside him. He didn’t look back my way, but I reckoned it was best he kept focused on his balance up there anyhow. As each hour passed, I wondered harder if maybe I’d imagined his interest in me, stocky and plain as I was.

But then he came looking for me again before supper. Not just that night, but every night that week. He’d show up at the back door, offering me that easy smile, his eyes never drifting from my face. As we sat on the back porch night by night, chewing our cornand greens, or anything else I scrounged from the larder, I could feel myself tumbling toward something.

One such night, he told me all about how he came to be here on the farm with us instead of back in Richmond, where his own family lived.

“My father’s not like Uncle John,” he said before biting into a piece of the sourdough loaf I’d sliced for us. “My old man’s always telling me I have to be this way or that. I was getting ready to just take myself on the road when we heard from Uncle John about him wanting my help.” He pushed his lips out like he was figuring about something. Then he looked over at me, a flush spreading on his face.

“I don’t mean to act sour. Just wondering where life’s going to take me next.”

“You could stay on here, couldn’t you?” I asked, maybe sounding too hopeful. “Mr. John’s always hiring one man or another. Why not you?”

Clarence put his dish on the little table between us and looked me square in the face, nodding as he did.

“Why not me.” He didn’t ask it, but said the words like he was stating his mind. He stared at me longer, and I wondered if I was meant to say something. I didn’t know what though, so I just sat quiet while heat rose in my cheeks. I reckon he noted my flush because his lips turned up in a big smile. Then he cleared his throat and turned his eyes back toward the train tracks.

After that night, I started to think that maybe Clarence’s arrival at the Grove Street farm was the beginning for me, the first step in my adult life. After he went back to the barn on those nights, I’d lie on my little cot in the alcove and think about what would happen when Mr. John and Mrs. Alice returned, when they saw their nephew’s good work on the farm and his growing interest in me.

One afternoon, after the Dobbses had been gone so long it felt like maybe they were never coming back, Clarence came to see me where I was hanging linens on the back line. It was late in the day, but I’d been so busy preparing pepper jams that I was only just finishing the laundry.

Clarence took up the last sheet in my basket and started pinning it to the line.

“How about you come on a walk with me to the creek?” he asked.

“Just let me set this back inside,” I said, my blood quickening at the invitation. I lifted the basket with one hand and untied my apron with the other.

Once I’d tidied up, we made our way down the hill, heading west toward the small crick and squinting our eyes against the glare of the sinking sun. Charlottesville was a place that seemed to fill with more buildings and concrete every day, the natural areas getting covered up one after another by the fuss and such of big-city life. Yet this particular area of forest where we were headed, with its trickling stream of water and its tangled thicket of trees, was still holding on.

“I heard from Uncle John today,” Clarence told me as we stepped over the fallen branches and the thick cover of leaves. “They’ll be back from Durham on Monday.”

The news hit me like a weight in my stomach, dropping like a stone.

When we reached the small stream of water, he took my hand in his. I’d never held hands with a boy before, and my palm started to sweat at the touch.

“Will you tell them you want to stay on?” I asked, unable to pretend that wasn’t the very question I thought about all the livelong day.

“I sure hope they’ll have me,” he said, stopping us in our tracks with a light yank and turning so his full body faced mine. Hepushed some of my hair away from my eye as he looked at me real intent, like I was all that mattered in the world.

I opened my mouth to answer, but before any words came out, he put his mouth on mine for a kiss. I gasped in surprise, but I kissed him back just the same. When he pushed his tongue between my lips, I think I jumped a little. I didn’t know anything about that kind of kissing, and I put my hand against his chest to push him back.

“Shh,” he told me. “I’ve wanted to do this since the first moment I saw you.”

I liked hearing that he felt the same about me as I did him, and I put my lips back to his, this time opening my mouth for him to teach me.

Soon he was lowering us to the ground.

“Wait, Clarence,” I said, “we can’t.” I was thinking about the dirt stains that would get on my dress if we did our kissing right there on the muddy forest floor.