Joshua T. Greene
After reading the letter, Carrie picked up the list of chores, her mouth dropping open when she saw that the list was at least a foot long. Five women in six weeks couldn’t complete all the things that Josh had given her to do.
She sat back in the chair, her eyes narrowed at the list in one hand and the letter in the other. “You will allow me to be the mother of your children, will you?” she said to the air. “Not your wife, but somebody’s mother.” Tossing the papers aside, she scratched Choo-choo’s head. “Rumpelstiltskin. That’s what this is like. King Joshua gives me a list of chores just as the king in the fairy tale gave the young woman a roomful of straw to spin into gold. If she performed that impossible task, then she got to marry the king. In this case I get to mother the king’s children.”
She looked about the room. Impossible to believe, but it looked even more barren and hopeless in the daylight than it had the previous evening. “I wonder what they had for breakfast? Peas?” Carrie gave a delicate shudder, then stood and put Choo-choo to the floor. “Shall we go find our own Rumpelstiltskin?” she said to the dog. “Someone to help us perform the tasks the king has set before us?”
An hour later when Mrs. Carrie Greene née Montgomery rode into the town of Eternity on Josh Greene’s old swayback workhorse wearing the finest riding habit that had ever been seen west of the Mississippi, the town came to a virtual standstill. Every person in sight stopped what he or she was doing and looked at this vision of loveliness. Her habit was dark red, trimmed in black velvet, and she wore the sauciest little veiled hat perched over one eye that anyone had ever seen.
“Good morning,” Carrie said to each person she passed. “Good morning.”
People stared and nodded at this fashion plate vision of loveliness, too dumbfounded to move or reply.
Carrie stopped the horse—if the poor thing could be called that—in front of the mercantile store, where the owner had paused in sweeping the front porch to gape at her. Nodding to him, she said, “Good morning,” then went inside the cool, dark store.
When the store owner had recovered himself, he leaned his broom against the wall, smoothed his apron front, and went into the store.
Carrie had seated herself on a chair near the empty wood stove and was removing her riding gloves.
“What can I do for you, Miss, ah…”
“Mrs. Greene,” she said confidently. “Mrs. Joshua Greene.”
“I didn’t know Josh got married. Hiram didn’t tell me anything about it.”
That was the second time Carrie had heard mention of Hiram, and she had no idea who he was, but she wasn’t going to let this man know that. “It was rather sudden,” she said demurely, trying to make it seem as though she and Josh hadn’t been able to help themselves, that their marriage had been a love match.
“I understand,” the store owner said. “Now, what may I do for you?”
By this time a quarter of the townspeople had decided that they had to buy something at the mercantile store and so had slipped through the door as quietly as possible. They were lining up against the wall opposite Carrie, standing quietly, looking at her as they would have a circus performer.
“I should like to make a few purchases,” Carrie said.
Carrie knew that Josh thought she had no talents because she didn’t know how to wash dishes or open cans, but there was a talent that Carrie had in abundance and that was: She knew how to buy things. That statement might cause laughter in some people, but the ability to use money properly is an underestimated talent. Some people with great wealth squander their money on bad investments; they hire incompetent people; if they buy art, they buy fakes.
But Carrie knew how to handle money. She knew how to get ten cents out of every nickel. There was a joke in her hometown that it was better to work for any Montgomery other than Carrie, for she’d get twice as much work out of you for half as much money. Carrie had a way of looking at people with her big blue eyes that made them fall over themselves to do what she wanted.
“I wonder if someone in this lovely town could help me,” she said innocently. “My husband has asked me to do a few things for him, and I really don’t know how to get started.”
When she held up the list of tasks Josh had written out for her, the store owner looked at it, then gave a long, low whistle and passed the list to the man behind him, who passed it to the person beside him.
“Why, you poor thing,” one woman said upon reading the list. “What in the world was Josh thinkin’ of?”
Carrie sighed. “I am a brand-new wife and have no idea how to do anything. I don’t even know how to open a can.”
“I’d like to show her how to open a can,” one man mumbled, but his wife poked him in the ribs.
“I may not be able to actually do the things my husband wants, but I thought perhaps I could get someone to help me.”
They were willing to give lots of sympathy, but no one rushed forward to volunteer to repair the roof on that shack of Josh’s. Compassion was one thing but sweat was another.
Carrie removed the fat purse from her wrist. “My father gave me a bit of money before I left home so I wondered if I could hire some people to help me.” She opened the drawstring and poured several coins into her pretty little palm. “Does it matter that the only coins I have are gold?”
After the initial intake of breath, all hell broke loose as people began shoving, kicking, and shouting as they offered Carrie their services to do anything that she wanted them to do. They were her slaves—or perhaps highly paid employees would be more accurate.
Standing up, Carrie went to work. She was a sweet-voiced drill sergeant, but a drill sergeant nonetheless. First, she hired half a dozen women to clean that pigsty Josh called a house, then she bargained with two other women to take Josh’s chipped and cracked dirty dishes away in trade for three rose bushes that grew in front of their own houses. Planting was part of the trade.
She bought home-canned goods from nearly every woman in town (all of whom were in the store by now), and she purchased produce from gardens. For the future, she arranged with a woman named Mrs. Emmerling to cook meals and deliver them to Josh’s house every other day, paying for a month in advance.