Read Online The Unplowed Sky by Jeanne Williams - Free Book Online Page A

as much pain as he had caused her—though he’d had Felicity and Jackie for consolation.
    Why did people who loved each other still hurt each other so much? And how much more terrible when there seemed to be no love—when a mother left a child who had come into the world completely helpless and depending on her. After that, how could either Jackie or Meg really trust anyone?
    When the last sandwich and crumb of gingerbread were gone and the coffeepot was empty, the threshers rose and stretched, slouched their hats lower, tied bandannas over mouths and noses, and those who wore them pulled on their leather gloves. Baldy Tennant spread coal in the firebox of the engine, and Rory soon had the engine billowing steam.
    â€œCan I go see the engine, Hallie?” begged her little brother. Awed by the rough-and-tumble jokes of the crew, he had sat very quietly beside Laird, who had lain down by Garth with his long muzzle resting his daintily crossed paws.
    â€œNot now.” The puffing engine, the long belt stretched to the separator, and the separator itself looked exceedingly dangerous to Hallie. She placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Jackie, don’t you ever, ever come around the machines unless I’m with you!”
    Jackie looked so crestfallen that Garth, to Hallie’s amazement, smiled at him. “Reckon I can show you how the separator works some morning while Rory’s getting up steam.”
    He frowned at Hallie’s boater. She had saved for weeks to buy it and thought it quite becoming. “That’s a useless hat if I ever saw one.”
    â€œThanks for your kind opinion!” Why was he so rude, and why should she care? Hallie turned her back on him and began collecting cups.
    They were scarcely back at the shack when the Brocketts’ flivver churned up. Sophie was plump but slim-waisted. Her ruffled pink sunbonnet, tied in a flirty bow under her chin, shielded a rosily fair complexion.
    She examined Hallie with Delft blue eyes as Shaft introduced them. Sophie gave her uptilted nose a further lift. “If you needed a helper, Mr. Hurok, I wish you’d have hired me. You know I can stand up to the work.”
    â€œHallie’s doing fine.”
    Sophie gave a scornful laugh. “Ma says you just hired her this morning! How do you know she’ll last?”
    Hallie came to Shaft’s rescue. “Mr. Hurok felt sorry for me and my little brother, Miss Brockett. We don’t have a home, and I was out of a job.” She looked the other woman in the eyes. Those eyes had a curious hardness that made Hallie well believe she’d have no qualms at wringing a chicken’s neck. Disturbed by that opaque expressionless stare, Hallie finished more emphatically than she had intended. “I’ll do my best to make Mr. Hurok glad he hired me.”
    â€œMmmph!” Sophie flounced around and began lifting food out of the backseat. Shaft put four big green watermelons in a tub of water beneath the shack and carved what looked like a twelve-pound roast off the beef which had come in a hundred-pound flour sack insulated inside two damp gunnysacks. He put the roast in the oven and hung the rest of the bagged beef from a limb of the tree. Hallie draped a wet towel over the crock of butter and set it in a kettle of water, trying to ignore the dishpan of plucked, headless chickens. She transferred the wet newspaper-wrapped eggs from Sophie’s basket to a large crock that she placed in the coolest corner and put a wet towel over that, too. The MacReynoldses had an icebox and the Raford kitchen was equipped with a sparkling Frigidaire, but Shaft had explained that, except when the threshers were close enough to town to buy ice, they had to keep perishables cool as best they might.
    â€œHere’s the beans.” Sophie almost threw the sack at Hallie. “Told ma she ought to charge for them and the melons, too, but she just said she couldn’t