In Need of a Good Wife by Kelly O'Connor McNees Page B

easily while she untied the corset and stepped out of the plain cotton shift. She was naked except for the gold locket she always wore. He had asked her once what was inside but she would only shake her head. Her outline in the dim light made his heat rise; when she pressed her hand into his lap he moaned softly. Mariah giggled and shoved him down on the bed.
    Randall wasn’t fool enough to think he loved her, or, even more naïve, that she loved him, but he didn’t mind that she was kind to him in addition to everything else he paid her for. After she had worn him out they lay in the bed together. She rested her cheek on his chest and he wondered whether she did this with everyone, afterward; he pushed the thought away. He had been in a dark mood all day, he realized. Randall visited Mariah because it made him feel good. He didn’t want it to become one more thing that depressed him.
    “Are you ill, sweet love?” she whispered. “You’re awfully quiet.”
    Randall shook his head, pulled her closer. “I’m fine. I’m better now.” He glanced lazily around the room. A painting of two lovers on a riverbank hung on one wall. In the corner opposite the stove was Mariah’s armoire, stuffed with dresses and bonnets far too fine for any social event in this town. He knew very little about her, only that she was twenty years old and from Detroit. She meant to go to California someday. She didn’t put milk in her tea. Randall felt the old nagging questions bubbling up. How had he come to be here, in this town? What had he really done with all his useless years?
    Mariah stood up and gathered her garments from the floor. She padded over to the armoire and hung them up, then took a dressing gown from the hook and shrugged into it, tying it at the waist. When she padded back to the bed, her footsteps silent, Randall bolted upright.
    He pointed at the floor. “You got a carpet!”
    Mariah seemed pleased that he had noticed. “It was a gift.”
    Randall laughed and stood up. He threw on his clothes, his mood brightening. “I’ve got to go, Mariah.”
    She giggled. “Well, what’s gotten into you?”
    “Until next time, my dear.”
    She waved from the bed as Randall slipped out the door. He buttoned his coat as he rushed down the hallway, then fumbled to get his snowshoes back on outside. In the barn, the puzzle of the broom sat in pieces, waiting to be solved. And now it could be of use.
     
    It was late in the season for butchering, but Dodge County had just passed through one of the warmest falls on record, and it made little sense to slaughter a cow until it was good and cold.
    At least that was what Daniel Gibson told himself, but the truth was that he simply hadn’t done it yet. Daniel kept wondering if he was lazy. It seemed a strange question to ask himself since, if he really was lazy, wouldn’t he also be the sort of man to make excuses about it, to deny that the fundamental problem resided in his own disposition? On the other hand, Daniel really didn’t believe laziness was the problem. It wasn’t that he felt unwilling to do the work; he simply felt frozen, as inert as that cow would be a few minutes after he slit its throat. Wyndham Ross asked him about it again after Sunday service—when should he bring over his cow?—and again Daniel muttered a litany of excuses to keep the farmer at bay. His son Dag had been sick, and this being the first winter his wife was gone, Daniel had his hands full. There was a leak in his soddy’s roof that needed repair. He had sent his knives to Omaha for sharpening.
    “All right, then,” Ross said. “But I really can’t wait too much longer.”
    He was right, of course. Nobody else had asked Daniel about beef this year, but there were plenty of pigs to deal with, salt pork and sausage to make, hams to smoke out behind the shop. Any misfortune could befall a town—drought, plague, war—but hunger never deserted a human being until his life was over. They always