A Bride For The Asking -- (on hold)

Chapter 2--Want Ad # 3

“You’re smoking that smelly thing in here again, aren’t you, Woodrow?”  Pearl accused. 

“Dad blamed it, Pearl,”  Woodrow got ready to defend himself, puffing defiantly on his pipe.   “It’s cold out there on the porch.”

Pearl knew just how to rile a man, Woodrow allowed.  And, here he was, stuck as a bear with his paw in a trap with that woman.  Damn blizzards, anyhow, Woodrow gritted, thinking longingly of his own quiet cabin across the valley. 

He hunched closer to the fire and tried to blow the lungful of pipe smoke he’d inhaled towards the fireplace, hoping the draft would carry it up the chimney.  With a heavy sigh, he watched the sinuous gray ribbon drift lazily over his shoulder, twisting and turning like a living thing, before it stealthily snaked its way through the air to its own route of escape--the kitchen window--where Pearl stood, back rigid and offended, drying dishes.

Woodrow knew the moment the tell-tale ribbon of smoke reached Pearl’s turned-up, prissy nose.  With a creak of whalebone she turned and shot Woodrow a glance that should have turned him, as well as his offensive pipe, to stone.

“You think I can’t smell that over here?”  Pearl demanded.  “I told you not to smoke in here!  It is offensive to decent folk trying to breathe clean air,” she finished self-righteously.

“And I told you it’s too cold out there to smoke.”  Woodrow snapped.  “The air’s so cold out there it froze the hair in my nose, so’s I couldn’t breathe.”

Turning back to the sink, her corset gave another squeaking protest of overburdened whalebone from someplace under her black dress. Woodrow didn‘t even want to think about where such a tortured sound could have come from. He eyed Pearl slapping the air with her dish towel to straighten it, before draping it over the edge of the sink.

“It’s puffing on that vile pipe, more like, than God’s good, clean air, that stopped your breathing,” Pearl shot back over her shoulder disdainfully, smoothing the last wrinkles out of her dishtowel with hands that threatened the continued existence of the fabric beneath them.

Woodrow only had to be around Pearl for a while to remember why he had never married.  With her high-falutin,’ Southern ways and staunch Baptist background, she had been looking down her long, thin nose at Woodrow since the day she had married his brother, Ennis, twenty-odd years ago. 

You‘d never know it to look at her now, but Pearl had been a beauty back then, Woodrow mused, staring into the fire.   With pansy brown eyes, willow slim figure, and soft southern drawl, she had been a sight to behold back in those days. As soon as Ennis had laid eyes on her he was a goner, and wouldn’t nothing do but he had to have her to wife as soon as was decent after John, her first husband, died. Pearl, alone in the world with a two year old boy to raise, was happy to put Ennis out of his misery. 

Ennis, for some reason Woodrow couldn’t figure, had accepted the new ruler of his house with the long-suffering patience that he had accepted most things in their rough existence.  Woodrow was never sure, because he’d never had the courage to ask, but he suspected Ennis was fond of the autocrat that ruled his house with the authority of an army general.

The object of Woodrow’s musings sat slumped in his cow-hide rocker. His gouty foot was propped on Pearl’s needlepoint-covered footstool and stretched out towards the warmth of the hearth.  He whittled at a little wooden horse he was making for Jewel, his and Pearl’s tiny daughter, asleep now on the settee, one cherubically-chubby arm out-stretched.  Jewel was the apple of Ennis’s eye.  He spent most winter days whittling her little toys to play with, as he was now.

***

His hoary eyebrows scrunched in concentration, Ennis tuned-out the exchange between Pearl and Woodrow for the most part.  The grousing between his wife and brother had been going on for years, and seldom came to blows, although it did sound like Pearl was getting her a head of steam up.  Woody’s pipe had been a bone of contention between them for years.  Pearl considered it a personal failure that she could never reform her wayward brother in law of the filthy habit.