"Esme, you can't do this," Agrippa said. "This is the worst time of the year. Where are we supposed to find food this late in the season?"
"And who'll put in the garden?" Adelaide asked. "It's nearly time to turn the ground, and we won't know how to do it without your help."
"Somehow you'll manage." Esme slipped beneath the covers next to her sisters.
"We can't manage," Agrippa complained. "I'm almost sure of it."
"Well, you'll have to see, won't you?" Esme said as she tried to stick her nose in the air haughtily, a gesture not easily accomplished when lying down.
"What on God's green earth can be so important for you to do that you can't be at the house anymore?"
"That's for me to know," Esme said and closed her eyes.
Adelaide was having none of it. She sat up in bed, her arms folded across her chest and her jaw stiffened in anger.
"'Fess up, Esme, or I'm going to Pa."
"Me, too!" Agrippa chimed in.
The standoff lasted at least a full minute.
"Oh, all right," Esme said, sitting up herself and pulling her nightgown high enough to sit cross-legged. "I won't be around here much for a while," Esme began hesitantly. "Because I'm going courting."
The twins sat silently, staring at their sister for a moment before looking at each other and bursting out laughing.
"Esme, Esme, we said you don't know much," Agrippa began.
"But we never thought it was this bad," Adelaide finished for her.
"What are you laughing at?" Esme demanded.
"You don't go courting," Adelaide told her as Agrippa covered her mouth, trying to hold in the laughter. "The man comes courting for you."
"Not if the man ain't interested," Esme told them. "He ain't about to come up here."
"If the man ain't interested," Adelaide tried to explain, "then there can't be any courting. You just have to find another man. One who takes a liking to you."
"I don't want another man," Esme said decisively. "I intend to marry Cleavis Rhy before the summer's out. And it don't matter to me if he likes me or not."
Chapter Three
The door slammed on a small outbuilding set far apart from the others on the land that belonged to Cleavis Rhy. Loaded up like a pack mule, Cleav came across the winter-shorn meadow carrying his supplies from the "meat house."
It was a beautiful day for March, and Cleav intended to spend the early afternoon tending the series of ponds and holding pools that were dug out of the low ground between the store and the river. The sun was shining brightly, warming the lingering winter chill out of the air. And the breeze that lifted and fluttered through his hair was just enough to stir, but not disturb, the last of winter's beauty.
Cleav was just glad that he wasn't downwind from what he carried.
The mesh sack of finely ground meat smelled to high heaven. This was Cleav's least favorite chore. The care and rearing of trout was a rewarding, but an occasionally smelly, occupation.
When he reached the ponds, he began distributing his fish food in a methodical manner. An adamant adherent of the scientific method, Cleav believed that order was essential for appropriate and documentable study.
Approaching the nursery pond, he unhooked the loop of rope that stretched across the pond from peg to peg. Carefully, holding the rope, he attached a meat bag and flicked at the rope until the sack had slipped to the knotted stop at midpoint. Then he lowered the rope end to the ground and reattached it to the peg. Already he could feel the steady jerk on the line that meant feeding time.
Cleav had always been fascinated with fish. When he was still in knee pants, he had raced away from school each day and hurried through his chores so he could go fishing.
Some might have described his childhood as ideal: He had plenty to eat, warm clothes, a clean bed, and that elusive of all human commodities, leisure. But young Cleavis Rhy filled his leisure not with daydreams of adventure on the high seas, or rough and tumble games of strength with his schoolmates, but with a quiet watch on the ways of nature.
Now, for a few moments every afternoon at feeding time, as his mother minded the store, Cleav continued this lazy pursuit. Stretching out on the grass beside the pond, his long legs casually crossed at the ankle, he propped himself on one elbow to view the show he knew was about to commence. The fingerlings, so called because of their size, circled excitedly around the mesh sack. They were young trout, alone and on their own in the world. Hungry by now, but fearful. The world was a dangerous place for a baby trout, and they approached their food cautiously.
