Six Months She Served His Family Without Pay — The Day She Stopped, the Cowboy Came Running

Chapter 2

She started with the kitchen, because a kitchen was where everything began, and if the beginning was rotten, then everything that followed leaned.

The iron pots had months of burnt crust scorched into their surfaces, black and brittle and familiar. She scoured them with a mixture of sand and lye until the metal rang clean and bright when she tapped it with her knuckle, then rinsed them twice and stood them on the shelf to dry in a row. She found the stovepipe had pulled loose from its fitting along the upper seam and was bleeding a thin thread of smoke into the room whenever the draft shifted — that explained why her eyes had burned in the mornings, and why the far wall had acquired a yellowing film in the weeks before her arrival. She reset the joint, packed the gap with clay from the creek bank, and let it cure overnight before she would allow herself to light the stove again.

The flour barrel was full of weevils — she had lifted the lid, and the small brown bodies had scattered over the surface of the flour like a living soil, and she had closed the lid and stood very still for a moment. Then she had carried the barrel to the yard, emptied it onto the grass where the chickens could earn their keep, scrubbed the barrel with boiling water and soda until the wood came clean, stood it in the sun to dry, and refilled it with clean flour purchased on Gideon’s account from Ridley’s store in town, five miles down the valley road.